The Mountain

quote for the day

2005-12-21T14:36:00.000-08:00

"It is part of the pathology of U.S. power today that the evident need for a constitutional check on the world's most powerful state - a constraint the United States would welcome if it were true to its political heritage - is now seen to stem from spiteful anti-Americanism."

-from Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, "The Sources of American Legitimacy", Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004

i'm probably on somebody's list other than Santa's now...

2005-12-21T08:38:00.000-08:00

saw this wonderful editorial in my hometown newspaper today. it's quite amazing that this editorial-page editor survives in a redder-than-red hick town like mine, actually; "ballsy" is definitely the appropriate descriptor for Mr. Borden.

but i thought his words deserved support, hence the following letter in response.

To the Editor:

I applaud Robert Borden's thoughtful and courageous editorial ("It's amazing what we will overlook", December 21). The very fact that this country is now engaged in a bitter political and legal dispute over the Bush Administration's cavalier, frightening approach to intelligence gathering is a heartening sign. In fact, it gives me hope that, despite this administration's attempts to deprive the United States of America of its greatness and its exceptional role in the evolution of human freedom, such a loss has yet to occur.

Only the people of a free nation, one dedicated to liberty and equality and the maximizing of every one of its citizens' individual potential, would object to Bush's actions. Despotisms, by their very nature, adopt any means to justify their desired ends. Functioning democracies, on the other hand, correctly reject such behavior by their leaders. Responsible people in this democracy, precisely because it is now endangered, are finally fighting back against that craven, fear-driven mentality.

One of the fundamental aims of terrorism, as scholarly observers have known for decades, is to provoke targeted governments into extreme and repressive responses that, in turn, alienate the targets' citizens and allies. By that measure, the September 11 attackers have – so far – tragically succeeded. But we, as freedom-loving Americans, still possess the power to deny them final victory. That – not embracing intrusive, clandestine measures that potentially threaten our privacy and our freedom – is what the real "war on terror" is all about. Contrary to Bush's fear-mongering and opportunistic assertions, it is his domestic opponents—not his supporters—who are now patriotically waging that war on behalf of all Americans.

"The Constitution is not a suicide pact." That phrase, frequently on right-wingers' lips these days, has a certain resonance. But it falls short of another time-honored American motto: "Live free or die."

i know Borden's going to get hammered by the local Bush-worshipping goobers; we'll see if my little contribution stimulates any additional conversation. ;-)

funny, all this time i thought Wells lived a long time ago...

2005-08-30T12:01:00.000-07:00

But in these plethoric times when there is too much coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor's eye, there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before these time the bulk of the people did not overeat themselves, because they couldn't, whether they wanted to or not, and all but a very few were kept "fit" by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost anyone can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and elemental necessities the sweat of your deathbed.

- H. G. Wells

eloquence, defined

2005-08-05T06:22:00.000-07:00

beautiful writing about that which is inexpressibly, and inescapably, ugly.

too bad that--as usual--those who most need to read it are the ones least likely to do so. that reality is, in fact, precisely what enables the bloodthirsty mountebank about whom Doctorow writes here.

An Essay by E.L. Doctorow

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. He is generally considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the residentially conferred National Humanities Medal.

Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931. After graduating with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army. Doctorow was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Irvine.

=================================================

I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.

On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear. But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it!

You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life…'' They come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission – accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it.

So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

This president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing — to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children.

He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead; he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills — it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

E.L. Doctorow

read this, and remember...

2005-06-20T13:28:00.000-07:00

...remember when our leaders sounded like this a lot more often. it may be hard to remember something that distant in the past, of course.

i have to agree with The New Republic: this is the best case i've seen made for liberalism in quite some time. it's made without excessive sentimentality or divisive polemic (of the type which, i must admit, i myself indulge in entirely too much of the time) or typical woolly-headed utopian rhetoric. it's as practical as a box of carpentry nails.

and the best thing about it is that Obama's not just asking us to remember the past - he's challenging us to forge a future, TOGETHER.

i may be biased, but i think this message leaves Shrub's myopic 'ownership society' hogwash in the dust. though TNR may also be right in their contention that the same thing might have to be said over and over and over to get through all the doctrinaire static in the air right now.

see if you agree.

Commencement Address by Senator Barack Obama
Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois
June 4, 2005

Good morning President Taylor, Board of Trustees, faculty, parents, family, friends, the community of Galesburg, the class of 1955—which I understand was out partying last night, and yet still showed up here on time—and most of all, the Class of 2005. Congratulations on your graduation, and thank you for the honor of allowing me to be a part of it. Thank you also, Mr. President, for this honorary degree. It was only a couple of years ago that I stopped paying my student loans in law school. Had I known it was this easy, I would have run for the United States Senate earlier.

You know, it has been about six months now since you sent me to Washington as your United States Senator. I recognize that not all of you voted for me, so for those of you muttering under your breath "I didn't send you anywhere," that's ok too. Maybe we'll hold—what do you call it—a little Pumphandle after the ceremony. Change your mind for next time.

It has been a fascinating journey thus far. Each time I walk onto the Senate floor, I'm reminded of the history, for good and for ill, that has been made there. But there have been a few surreal moments. For example, I remember the day before I was sworn in, myself and my staff, we decided to hold a press conference in our office. Now, keep in mind that I am ranked 99th in seniority. I was proud that I wasn't ranked dead last until I found out that it's just because Illinois is bigger than Colorado. So I'm 99th in seniority, and all the reporters are crammed into the tiny transition office that I have, which is right next to the janitor's closet in the basement of the Dirksen Office Building. It's my first day in the building, I have not taken a single vote, I have not introduced one bill, had not even sat down in my desk, and this very earnest reporter raises his hand and says:

"Senator Obama, what is your place in history?"

I did what you just did, which is laugh out loud. I said, place in history? I thought he was kidding! At that point, I wasn't even sure the other Senators would save a place for me at the cool kids' table.

But as I was thinking about the words to share with this class, about what's next, about what's possible, and what opportunities lay ahead, I actually think it's not a bad question for you, the class of 2005, to ask yourselves:

"What will be your place in history?"

In other eras, across distant lands, this question could be answered with relative ease and certainty. As a servant in Rome, you knew you'd spend your life forced to build somebody else's Empire. As a peasant in 11th Century China, you knew that no matter how hard you worked, the local warlord might come and take everything you had—and you also knew that famine might come knocking at the door. As a subject of King George, you knew that your freedom of worship and your freedom to speak and to build your own life would be ultimately limited by the throne.

And then America happened.

A place where destiny was not a destination, but a journey to be shared and shaped and remade by people who had the gall, the temerity to believe that, against all odds, they could form "a more perfect union" on this new frontier.

And as people around the world began to hear the tale of the lowly colonists who overthrew an empire for the sake of an idea, they started to come. Across oceans and the ages, they settled in Boston and Charleston, Chicago and St. Louis, Kalamazoo and Galesburg, to try and build their own American Dream. This collective dream moved forward imperfectly—it was scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression. And yet, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, people kept dreaming, and building, and working, and marching, and petitioning their government, until they made America a land where the question of our place in history is not answered for us. It's answered by us.

Have we failed at times? Absolutely. Will you occasionally fail when you embark on your own American journey? You surely will. But the test is not perfection.

The true test of the American ideal is whether we're able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life's big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams.

We have faced this choice before.

At the end of the Civil War, when farmers and their families began moving into the cities to work in the big factories that were sprouting up all across America, we had to decide: Do we do nothing and allow captains of industry and robber barons to run roughshod over the economy and workers by competing to see who can pay the lowest wages at the worst working conditions? Or do we try to make the system work by setting up basic rules for the market, instituting the first public schools, busting up monopolies, letting workers organize into unions?

We chose to act, and we rose together.

When the irrational exuberance of the Roaring Twenties came crashing down with the stock market, we had to decide: do we follow the call of leaders who would do nothing, or the call of a leader who, perhaps because of his physical paralysis, refused to accept political paralysis?

We chose to act—regulating the market, putting people back to work, expanding bargaining rights to include health care and a secure retirement–and together we rose.

When World War II required the most massive homefront mobilization in history and we needed every single American to lend a hand, we had to decide: Do we listen to skeptics who told us it wasn't possible to produce that many tanks and planes? Or, did we build Roosevelt's Arsenal for Democracy and grow our economy even further by providing our returning heroes with a chance to go to college and own their own home?

Again, we chose to act, and again, we rose together.

Today, at the beginning of this young century, we have to decide again. But this time, it is your turn to choose.

Here in Galesburg, you know what this new challenge is. You've seen it.

All of you, in your first year in college, saw what happened at 9/11. It's already been noted, the degree to which your lives will be intertwined with the war on terrorism that currently is taking place. But what you've also seen, perhaps not as spectacularly, is the fact that when you drive by the old Maytag plant around lunchtime, no one walks out anymore. I saw it during the campaign when I met union guys who worked at the plant for 20, 30 years and now wonder what they're gonna do at the age of 55 without a pension or health care; when I met the man who's son needed a new liver but because he'd been laid off, didn't know if he could afford to provide his child the care that he needed.

It's as if someone changed the rules in the middle of the game and no one bothered to tell these folks. And, in reality, the rules have changed.

It started with technology and automation that rendered entire occupations obsolete—when was the last time anybody here stood in line for the bank teller instead of going to the ATM, or talked to a switchboard operator? Then it continued when companies like Maytag were able to pick up and move their factories to some under developed country where workers were a lot cheaper than they are in the United States.

As Tom Friedman points out in his new book, The World Is Flat, over the last decade or so these forces—technology and globalization—have combined like never before. So that while most of us have been paying attention to how much easier technology has made our own lives—sending e-mails back and forth on our blackberries, surfing the Web on our cell phones, instant messaging with friends across the world—a quiet revolution has been breaking down barriers and connecting the world's economies. Now business not only has the ability to move jobs wherever there's a factory, but wherever there's an internet connection.

Countries like India and China realized this. They understand that they no longer need to be just a source of cheap labor or cheap exports. They can compete with us on a global scale. The one resource they needed were skilled, educated workers. So they started schooling their kids earlier, longer, with a greater emphasis on math and science and technology, until their most talented students realized they don't have to come to America to have a decent life—they can stay right where they are.

The result? China is graduating four times the number of engineers that the United States is graduating. Not only are those Maytag employees competing with Chinese and Indian and Indonesian and Mexican workers, you are too. Today, accounting firms are e-mailing your tax returns to workers in India who will figure them out and send them back to you as fast as any worker in Illinois or Indiana could.

When you lose your luggage in Boston at an airport, tracking it down may involve a call to an agent in Bangalore, who will find it by making a phone call to Baltimore. Even the Associated Press has outsourced some of their jobs to writers all over the world who can send in a story at a click of a mouse.

As Prime Minister Tony Blair has said, in this new economy, "Talent is the 21st century wealth." If you've got the skills, you've got the education, and you have the opportunity to upgrade and improve both, you'll be able to compete and win anywhere. If not, the fall will be further and harder than it ever was before.

So what do we do about this? How does America find its way in this new, global economy? What will our place in history be?

Like so much of the American story, once again, we face a choice. Once again, there are those who believe that there isn't much we can do about this as a nation. That the best idea is to give everyone one big refund on their government—divvy it up by individual portions, in the form of tax breaks, hand it out, and encourage everyone to use their share to go buy their own health care, their own retirement plan, their own child care, their own education, and so on.

In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it—Social Darwinism—every man or woman for him or herself. It's a tempting idea, because it doesn't require much thought or ingenuity. It allows us to say that those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford—tough luck. It allows us to say to the Maytag workers who have lost their job—life isn't fair. It let's us say to the child who was born into poverty—pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it is especially tempting because each of us believes we will always be the winner in life's lottery, that we're the one who will be the next Donald Trump, or at least we won't be the chump who Donald Trump tells: "You're fired!"

But there is a problem. It won't work. It ignores our history. It ignores the fact that it's been government research and investment that made the railways possible and the internet possible. It's been the creation of a massive middle class, through decent wages and benefits and public schools that allowed us all to prosper. Our economic dependence depended on individual initiative. It depended on a belief in the free market; but it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, the idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we're all in it together and everybody's got a shot at opportunity. That's what's produced our unrivaled political stability.

And so if we do nothing in the face of globalization, more people will continue to lose their health care. Fewer kids will be able to afford the diploma you're about to receive.

More companies like United Airlines won't be able to provide pensions for their employees. And those Maytag workers will be joined in the unemployment line by any worker whose skills can be bought and sold on the global market.

So today I'm here to tell you what most of you already know. This is not us—the option that I just mentioned. Doing nothing. It's not how our story ends—not in this country. America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes.

It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before.

So let's dream. Instead of doing nothing or simply defending 20th century solutions, let's imagine together what we could do to give every American a fighting chance in the 21st century.

What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in the new economy? If we made sure that college was affordable for everyone who wanted to go? If we walked up to those Maytag workers and we said "Your old job is not coming back, but a new job will be there because we're going to seriously retrain you and there's life-long education that's waiting for you"—the sorts of opportunities that Knox has created with the Strong Futures scholarship program.

What if no matter where you worked or how many times you switched jobs, you had health care and a pension that stayed with you always, so you all had the flexibility to move to a better job or start a new business? What if instead of cutting budgets for research and development and science, we fueled the genius and the innovation that will lead to the new jobs and new industries of the future?

Right now, all across America, there are amazing discoveries being made. If we supported these discoveries on a national level, if we committed ourselves to investing in these possibilities, just imagine what it could do for a town like Galesburg. Ten or twenty years down the road, that old Maytag plant could re-open its doors as an Ethanol refinery that turned corn into fuel. Down the street, a biotechnology research lab could open up on the cusp of discovering a cure for cancer. And across the way, a new auto company could be busy churning out electric cars. The new jobs created would be filled by American workers trained with new skills and a world-class education.

All of that is possible, but none of it will come easy. Every one of us is going to have to work more, read more, train more, think more. We will have to slough off some bad habits—like driving gas guzzlers that weaken our economy and feed our enemies abroad. Our children will have to turn off the TV set once in a while and put away the video games and start hitting the books. We'll have to reform institutions, like our public schools, that were designed for an earlier time. Republicans will have to recognize our collective responsibilities, even as Democrats recognize that we have to do more than just defend old programs.

It won't be easy, but it can be done. It can be our future. We have the talent and the resources and brainpower. But now we need the political will. We need a national commitment.

And we need each of you.

Now, no one can force you to meet these challenges. If you want, it will be pretty easy for you to leave here today and not give another thought to towns like Galesburg and the challenges they face. There is no community service requirement in the real world; no one is forcing you to care. You can take your diploma, walk off this stage, and go chasing after the big house, and the nice suits, and all the other things that our money culture says that you should want, that you should aspire to, that you can buy.

But I hope you don't walk away from the challenge. Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. You need to take up the challenges that we face as a nation and make them your own. Not because you have a debt to those who helped you get here, although you do have that debt. Not because you have an obligation to those who are less fortunate than you, although I do think you do have that obligation. It's primarily because you have an obligation to yourself. Because individual salvation has always depended on collective salvation. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.

And I know that all of you are wondering how you'll do this, the challenges seem so big. They seem so difficult for one person to make a difference.

But we know it can be done. Because where you're sitting, in this very place, in this town, it's happened before.

Nearly two centuries ago, before civil rights, before voting rights, before Abraham Lincoln, before the Civil War, before all of that, America was stained by the sin of slavery. In the sweltering heat of southern plantations, men and women who looked like me could not escape the life of pain and servitude in which they were sold. And yet, year after year, as this moral cancer ate away at the American ideals of liberty and equality, the nation was silent.

But its people didn't stay silent for long.

One by one, abolitionists emerged to tell their fellow Americans that this would not be our place in history—that this was not the America that had captured the imagination of the world.

This resistance that they met was fierce, and some paid with their lives. But they would not be deterred, and they soon spread out across the country to fight for their cause. One man from New York went west, all the way to the prairies of Illinois to start a colony.

And here in Galesburg, freedom found a home.

Here in Galesburg, the main depot for the Underground Railroad in Illinois, escaped slaves could roam freely on the streets and take shelter in people's homes. And when their masters or the police would come for them, the people of this town would help them escape north, some literally carrying them in their arms to freedom.

Think about the risks that involved. If they were caught abetting a fugitive, you could've been jailed or lynched. It would have been simple for these townspeople to turn the other way; to go live their lives in a private peace.

And yet, they didn't do that. Why?

Because they knew that we were all Americans; that we were all brothers and sisters; the same reason that a century later, young men and women your age would take Freedom Rides down south, to work for the Civil Rights movement. The same reason that black women would walk instead of ride a bus after a long day of doing somebody else's laundry and cleaning somebody else's kitchen. Because they were marching for freedom.

Today, on this day of possibility, we stand in the shadow of a lanky, raw-boned man with little formal education who once took the stage at Old Main and told the nation that if anyone did not believe the American principles of freedom and equality, that those principles were timeless and all-inclusive, they should go rip that page out of the Declaration of Independence.

My hope for all of you is that as you leave here today, you decide to keep these principles alive in your own life and in the life of this country. You will be tested. You won't always succeed. But know that you have it within your power to try. That generations who have come before you faced these same fears and uncertainties in their own time. And that through our collective labor, and through God's providence, and our willingness to shoulder each other's burdens, America will continue on its precious journey towards that distant horizon, and a better day.

Thank you so much class of 2005, and congratulations on your graduation. Thank you.

i'm likin' it

2005-04-15T11:31:00.000-07:00

just go there. oh, and here too.

DIY legal help

2005-04-01T11:05:00.000-08:00

i think the following should DEFINITELY be put out there in PDF form as yet another helpful option for 'do-it-yourself' legal action in This Day And Age.

Living Will is the Best Revenge
By ROBERT FRIEDMAN
Published March 27, 2005

Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here's what mine says:

* In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me.

* I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.

* I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable vigil at my bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.

* I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.

* I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.

* I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.

* I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.

* I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the Florida Legislature to ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a forum for weeks of politically calculated bloviation.

* I want total strangers - oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz friars and all other hangers-on - to start calling me "Bobby," as if they had known me since childhood.

* I'm not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be nice if Congress passed a "Bobby's Law" that applied only to me and ignored the medical needs of tens of millions of other Americans without adequate health coverage.

* Even if the "Bobby's Law" idea doesn't work out, I want Congress - especially all those self-described conservatives who claim to believe in "less government and more freedom" - to trample on the decisions of doctors, judges and other experts who actually know something about my case.

And I want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate that gives them another excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the economy.

* In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case as an opportunity to divert the country's attention from the mounting political and legal troubles stemming from his slimy misbehavior.

* And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his Harvard medical degree by misrepresenting the details of my case in ways that might give a boost to his 2008 presidential campaign.

* I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition on the basis of a snippet of dated and demeaning videotape that should have remained private.

* Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent vegetative state, I'd want President Bush - the same guy who publicly mocked Karla Faye Tucker when signing off on her death warrant as governor of Texas - to claim he was intervening in my case because it is "always best to err on the side of life."

* I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at the last moment to take responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad could ever happen to anyone under DCF's care.

* And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human being on the face of the Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned directives to be disregarded if the governor happens to disagree with them. If he says he knows what's best for me, I won't be in any position to argue.

Robert Friedman is editor of Perspective. He can be reached at friedman@sptimes.com

nope--STILL a "government of laws, not of men"

2005-03-24T10:12:00.000-08:00

"CNN Breaking News -- U.S. Supreme Court refuses to intervene in Terri Schiavo case. Lower court decision to remove feeding tube stands."

looks like poor Ms. Schiavo is going to be moving on to the next part of her adventure at last... in which i wish her well, of course.

the amazing thing is that the Right is already starting the next phase of spin here. they're now hammering on about how "the liberals" have hijacked the judiciary in this country, so it's That Much More Important now to scrap the Senate filibuster rules so they can get some "decent" judges in there.

of course--in addition to continuing their efforts to milk the tragedy of a dying woman for political gain--these twits are conveniently ignoring the FACT that, of the now 22 judges who have at some point ruled in the present case, the majority of them are Republican appointees--either Dubya's, his dad's or Reagan's (or the Republican administration in Florida, in the case of the state judges). but hey, why let the truth get in the way of a good morality fable, right?

(and isn't it amazing, btw, how we nefarious out-of-power liberals can continue to control things? how do we do it? mirrors?)

fucking hypocrites, charlatans, pusbags. i wish there was a sudden "epidemic" of acute coronary infarctions in Washington--so Shrub, DeLay, Frist, Hastert and the rest of 'em could go off and be with Sonny Jesus (which--to hear them talk--should please them, after all). "ditto" with shitheel radio schlock jocks Limbaugh, Hannity, Liddy, Dr. Laura et al. one "rapture" for all of you--coming right up!!!

and then we hellbound humanist commie faggot/dyke terrorist liberals could have some peace and quiet around here for a change.

throwing down on WM

2005-03-11T08:27:00.000-08:00

this 'modest proposal' actually makes all kinds of sense. complicated? maybe. equitable? absolutely. a kind of "reverse means testing" for discounts... it's a great idea!

notice how the writer takes apart WM's classic 'don't blame us for finding a successful biz model' defense... and also shows how we ALL pay the price for their soulless, predatory behavior.

of course, since this all DOES make eminent sense and would help the Little Guy, it stands not a chance in the world of actually happening. the state leges and Congress ("Mostly White or Wanna-Be White Male Millionaires Working for YOU!") will all go on punishing the consumers - and voters - while giving their fellow tycoons every break possible.

once more: democracy? what's *that*?

Tackling the Tyranny of Wal-Mart
March 9, 2005
By Joel S. Hirschhorn

For its cancerous growth, Wal-Mart has exploited cheap foreign and domestic labor and is now a metaphor for the export of American jobs and prosperity to other nations. Some say Americans have a love-hate relationship with Wal-Mart. Maybe - but the more you know, the more you hate. Some bargains are not what they seem to be.

No other company has faced so much passionate grassroots opposition to its expansion across America. It has been painted as evil incarnate for its destruction of open space, exploitation of workers here and abroad, destruction of domestic manufacturing and its jobs, and ruination of small town America and small, locally owned businesses. Its huge imports have exported our prosperity and given China and other nations some control over our future. Its focus on providing low prices has shaped Wal-Mart's defense: we just give consumers what they want, don't blame us for being better at offering low prices than everyone else.

The logical way to challenge this defense is to invoke what economists call externalization of costs. Wal-Mart shifts health care and other costs to all taxpayers, who subsidize Wal-Mart and its customers, yet receive no benefits. Call it the Wal-Mart tax.

Consider these examples: in Iowa, for example, 845 Wal-Mart workers or members of their families are on Medicaid. In Connecticut, 1,028 Wal-Mart employees are in the state's medical care assistance program, or 11.3 percent of its workers in the state. In Alabama, Wal-Mart employees had 3,864 children on Medicaid. In Georgia, Wal-Mart employees had 10,261 children receiving state medical care assistance. In Tennessee, Wal-Mart had 9,617 employees receiving state health care assistance, nearly 25 percent of the company's entire workforce in the state. Both state and federal taxpayer money is being spent to assist Wal-Mart employees and their families.

Yet it is inconceivable that Wal-Mart can be legally prohibited from continuing its practices. Nor can imports be directly prohibited because of international trade agreements. It is on the consumer demand side that some solution is possible.

Consider this thought experiment. Competitors to Wal-Mart buy products made in the U.S., and give their employees decent wages and good enough benefits to keep them from needing government assistance. American manufacturers also offer good jobs with decent wages and benefits. Competitors offer the same type products, but at higher prices.

Then, consider offsetting Wal-Mart's unfair low cost, low price advantage by taxing sales at Wal-Mart by the cost differential to level the retail playing field. The "offset sales tax" can be split between local and state governments to supplement various social service programs, pay for infrastructure costs, such as more roads and
police, required for stores, and assist start-up costs for new decent-wage retail and manufacturing enterprises.

For millions of low income Americans, their survival need for low Wal-Mart prices cannot be ignored. So the social equity question becomes: How to help those Americans who truly require and depend on Wal-Mart's low prices? Only those consumers, not the ones who like those low prices, but can afford higher, unsubsidized prices.

Local or state government can provide to those requesting and qualifying for it a special offset sales tax exemption identification card. Low income individuals or families would present some type of evidence of their status. By using the tax exemption cards at checkout they would still take advantage of the low prices, while others would not. To determine the tax, government authorities could estimate from current databases what fraction of customers would likely qualify, including those receiving Medicaid, food stamps, welfare, unemployment insurance, or supplemental social security benefits. A great many Wal-Mart employees would qualify.

Wal-Mart's unfair competitive advantage would diminish. Over time, those low income people currently in desperate need of low Wal-Mart prices would find more employment opportunities as competitors and their domestic suppliers expanded their operations.

Naturally, it sounds complicated, but this approach does not impose legal restrictions on Wal-Mart, yet serves the greater public interest by not causing taxpayers in general to pay the price for Wal-Mart's low prices. Other retailers would also be put in the same category, based on a determination of their dependence on imports and whether their wage/benefit structure places burdens on government programs.

Special sales taxes have always been used, such as luxury and cigarette sales taxes. The "offset sales tax" would be applied to overall sales, not specific products, and not just Wal-Mart. Interestingly, a bill to levy a special sales tax on Wal-Mart and
similar chains has recently been introduced in Montana, exactly for the purpose of offsetting welfare costs for low-paid employees.

Connecticut's House Majority Leader Christopher Donovan said: "Here is the richest retail company in the world, and we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing their [medical] coverage. I think people aren't aware of the extent that we're subsidizing the biggest, richest, most powerful companies. Wal-Mart shoppers need to know there's an extra cost of doing business."

Most Americans know that something needs to be done about the Wal-Martization of our nation and the exporting of our prosperity that is destroying our middle class. Wal-Mart has wiped out the heart and soul of U.S. manufacturing, which in turn has steadily destroyed good jobs here. Nothing illegal, but not patriotic. Not when you understand that what Wal-Mart has itself done, and compelled other retailers to do, has created more demand for its low priced goods by creating more low income Americans. Call it the Wal-Mart squeeze.

Wal-Mart is pouring money into political pockets to protect itself from government action, which Americans must demand. It is not effective to fight Wal-Mart one store expansion at a time, because many more new stores are built than are blocked. Wal-Mart's prosperity is not America's prosperity. Neither is China's prosperity. What's good for Wal-Mart is not good for America, and we do not have to say "in the long run," because the long run has already come.

Joel S. Hirschhorn was formerly with the National Governors
Association; his current book is Sprawl Kills – How Blandburbs Steal
Your Time, Health and Money. He can be reached through
www.sprawlkills.com.

may as well be hung for a sheep

2005-03-09T16:13:00.000-08:00

i found something truly rare just now in the chatter-sphere: a fond tribute to Dan Rather.

and i concur with much of it. yes, yes, i already know all the arguments -- especially the Right's eternal anti-Rather hysteria, which the guy did little to counteract over the years since he really HAS been an elitist, a stealthy defender of the old liberal consensus that today's extreme rightists so gleefully mock (and on the grave of which they now dance such a brainless jig).

i don't care. given where the country's been heading the last few years, i'm proud to say i'm an elitist in precisely the same way. most people in this country nowadays DON'T know what's best for the country or understand its original vision, DON'T have all the facts, and DON'T possess the tools needed to analyze those facts effectively. if they did, they wouldn't vote the way they do. Q.E.D. (or, in the case of another group of equally clueless citizens, they would vote.)

the 'old media' had its faults, but it DID - at its best - try to provide the average citizen with that vision, those facts and those tools. Of course, one was responsible for discerning any difference between the factual content it provided and the likely bias inherent in any subgroup of professionals... but the assumption was that responsible, reasonably intelligent *adults* could do that. (jeez, guess that was a mistake).

today's balkanized, niche-marketed, plethoric world of infotainment offers no clear signposts at all... except to those whose minds are already set in stone. (yes, i include leftist viewpoints in that characterization, as well as those on the right). it's just a great big cafeteria-style opinion diner. An ideology outlet mall. contending cultural boutiques. a forest where the tallest oaks' tops are sawn off, to soothe the maples' egos.

you pick the imagery. after all, one viewpoint is just as good as another. nobody can see a Bigger Picture than anybody else. to say otherwise, that's... elitist.

right?

so have a good retirement, Dan. stupid election-year story gaffe or not, you're still more than what today's willfully dumb, short-attention-span audience deserves.

Oh, For Cryin' In the Buttermilk
By Eugene Robinson
The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 8, 2005; Page A15

"We used to say that if a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a handgun."

Um, who exactly was it who used to say that? Leaving aside the question of what on earth it means, which would confound a tag team of Stephen Hawking and Immanuel Kant, did any human being ever utter that sentence before Dan Rather did on election night?

Rather hangs up his spurs tomorrow, ending his marathon 24-year run as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." It will be an unhappy day, not only for connoisseurs of the lapidary truths known as "Ratherisms" but also for the rest of us who depend on television news. To steal a quotation from Rather himself, our "moon has just moved behind a cloud."

Perhaps only at CBS News could the scaling back of a 73-year-old man's workload (Rather isn't even retiring; he'll continue as a correspondent for "60 Minutes II") be considered premature. Mike Wallace, Andy Rooney and "60 Minutes" creator Don Hewitt are all in their eighties. Among the generation that rose to prominence during
the golden years, the era when CBS was the "Tiffany network," Rather is practically The Kid. He's covered every big story since the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Surely he's earned an occasional day off.

But, of course, it is premature because of the way he's going out, amid controversy that's "hotter than the Devil's anvil." The now-familiar tale lends itself to borrowed Ratherisms: He broadcast a critical story on President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service, irate bloggers "beat him like a rented mule," the sourcing for the story turned out to be "thin as turnip soup," the documents underlying the piece were as authentic as "a Times Square Rolex," a blue-ribbon investigative panel tore through the story "like a tornado through a trailer park," and Rather found himself at the point where "he's got his back to the wall, his shirttails on fire and the bill collector's at the door."

Rather made things worse by standing by the story long after it had begun to crumble. He should have followed his own advice: "Don't taunt the alligator until after you've crossed the creek." The story in question was an incompetent piece of journalism, no doubt about it. But I, for one, am genuinely sorry to see Big Dan go.

Not just because I'll miss the Rather-isms and his "Gunga Dan" theatricality, and not just because his edginess made for compelling television -- the "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" sense that just about anything could happen to this man, and that it might well happen on the air. His colleagues in the uber-anchor triumvirate never gave off any of that dangerous vibe. You get the sense that the worst thing that could happen to Peter Jennings would be that the sommelier brought him an unsatisfactory bottle of wine; and as for Tom Brokaw, well, you doubted he ever had a bad day in his life.

I'll miss Rather because, sitting in that anchor chair, he was a living link to the era when the network news departments mattered -- when they tried their best each day to cover the news of the past 24 hours and still had the resources to do what was, in retrospect, a damn good job at it.

CBS, NBC and ABC used to have bureaus around the world. Now they'll still send correspondents to a big story such as Iraq or the tsunami, but a lot of their foreign reports consist of footage shot by local crews in Caracas or Bombay and narrated by a correspondent in New York or London who hasn't set foot within an ocean's breadth of the actual event being covered. The networks used to try to cover big stories even if they were complicated and not particularly television-friendly -- even if they didn't come with pictures. Now they still do "issue" pieces, but their estimation of the public's attention span has so declined that they oversimplify the issues to the point where the viewer learns nothing new.

Much of their former terrain has been ceded to the cable networks, which are increasingly focused on delivering analysis rather than news. By "analysis" I mean shouting. Newspapers are still around, at least most of them, but many are concentrating on survival and not much more. The Internet, with its openly partisan bloggers, at least provides access to documents, transcripts, video footage -- the raw material for news stories, which people have to assemble for themselves. The amount of information at our fingertips has increased exponentially, yet I wonder if the nation is really better informed.

Maybe it is. But Dan Rather is a tough, experienced reporter who has always done his best to speak truth to power, and I'll miss him. I'll watch him sign off tomorrow night, and it'll be sadder than a three-legged dog at an ice-skating rink on prom night in Abilene with. . .

Help me out here, Dan.

oh yeah, here's a real shocker (snoooore...)

2005-02-25T08:20:00.000-08:00

this news - from Jehovah-fearing Texas A&M, no less! - will be a total shock (to the pinched, pathetic promoters of the religious right's policy of sexual repression, that is... and nobody else).

oh, yes. how absolutely astonishing (yawn). think that maybe the ninnies and killjoys infesting the fed'ral gub'mint will admit they're wrong now, and stop advocating a policy of ignorance, frustration and self-delusion?

neither do i. (if they ain't gettin' any, ain't nobody gettin' any... that's the real story here, of course.)

Teen Sex Increased After Abstinence Program
Texas study finds little impact on sexual behavior

MSNBC/Reuters
Feb. 1, 2005

HOUSTON - Abstinence-only sex education programs, a major plank in President George W. Bush's education plan, have had no impact on teenagers' behavior in his home state of Texas, according to a new study.

Despite taking courses emphasizing abstinence-only themes, teenagers in 29 high schools became increasingly sexually active, mirroring the overall state trends, according to the study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University.

"We didn't see any strong indications that these programs were having an impact in the direction desired," said Dr. Buzz Pruitt, who directed the study.

The study was delivered to the Texas Department of State Health Services, which commissioned it.

The federal government is expected to spend about $130 million to fund programs advocating abstinence in 2005, despite a lack of evidence that they work, Pruitt said.

"The jury is still out, but most of what we've discovered shows there's no evidence the large amount of money spent is having an effect," he said.

'More concerned about politics than kids'

The study showed about 23 percent of ninth-grade girls, typically 13 to 14 years old, had sex before receiving abstinence education. After taking the course, 29 percent of the girls in the same group said they had had sex.

Boys in the tenth grade, about 14 to 15 years old, showed a more marked increase, from 24 percent to 39 percent, after receiving abstinence education.

Abstinence-only programs, which have sprouted up in schools across the nation, cannot offer information about birth control and must promote the social and health benefits of abstaining from sex.

Pruitt said he hoped the study would bring about changes in the content of abstinence-promoting programs.

"These programs seem to be much more concerned about politics than kids, and we need to get over that," he said.

One program technique has been to try to bolster students' self-esteem, based on the theory that self-confident teenagers would not have sex. Those programs, which sometimes do not even mention sex, have shown no effect, Pruitt said.

Other programs that focus on the social norms and expectations appear to be more successful, he said.

Copyright 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.

just go there, folks

2005-02-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

the mighty David Brin hits a (neoconservatives = Islamofascists) home run here.

"What appears stunning to me is how few have pointed out the deep commonalities between American neoconservatism, Islamic fundamentalism, and every other prescriptive dogma that wracked and afflicted the Twentieth Century. The one common theme uniting all of these ideology-based systems is a burning contempt for the secular, pragmatic, accountable and tolerant legacy of the Enlightenment. Especially its promotion of skepticism toward the subjective, self important mind games that allow each of us to play tricks upon ourselves."

damn. so right. so important. and so completely beyond the mountebanks in power...

oh yes. definitely yes

2005-02-02T07:41:00.000-08:00

lest anyone be caught up in this week's cynical, Rove-orchestrated histrionics about the wondermous "birth of democracy" in a certain soot-blackened Mesopotamian basket case of a country... the Divine Mr. M. is here to burst the 'Pubs' stupid bubble.

of course, as usual, the people who need to face these facts the most never will - they're too busy idolizing the morally toxic, murdering cipher in the oval office who's taking up space that should properly be occupied by an actual leader. (haven't had one of those there since January 20, 2001).

Come See Our Brutal Democracy
Freedom rings in Iraq! Bush was right all along! America wins! Or, you know, not

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, February 2, 2005

Ah, the violent march of democracy.

Beautiful thing, really, seeing repressed and weary Iraqis vote for the first time, and dance in the bloody bombed-out streets, and avoid the suicide bombers and of course not be able to travel between provinces or drive anywhere in their locked-down nation and by the way watch out for the snipers on the roofs.

It really is amazing, watching the deeply flawed system of democracy take hold in a raw and decimated nation like a thorny weed cracking through shattered concrete. All people deserve to be free and now Iraqis have a tiny bloody taste of it and this is always, always a good thing. I am not kidding.

So, should we be proud? Is Bush's thuggish and illegal pre-emptive attack strategy justified? Are Iraq's first-ever elections a defining moment in American political history? Are we all righteous and good and holy, despite all the dead bodies and the hatred?

Well, sort of. But then again, not really. Should Bush get some credit for all the cheering Iraqis who are now breathing sort of free? Well, no. Not even close.

While it's always heartwarming to see a brutalized and disheartened people flex their newfound freedom for the first time, the costs of this teetering, fragile, force-fed, implode-at-any-moment democracy are nauseating and appalling. You already know the numbers: $300 billion, over 1,400 dead U.S. soldiers and over 10,000 permanently wounded and countless thousands of dead innocent Iraqi civilians -- and many, many more to come.

But let us not forget the biggest disclaimer of all: Not a single one of BushCo's alleged reasons for dragging our fractured and bankrupt nation into one of the most brutal wars since Vietnam has actually proved valid or justifiable. The disgusting array of WMD/nuclear/biotoxin lies and deceptions are not suddenly erased because we set up some polling places.

How quickly we forget: A democratic Iraq was NEVER the reason Bush forced us into this war. Iraq's fledgling democracy is a pleasant side effect, an bonus PR move, a heartwarming and patriotic patina of bogus humanitarianism BushCo is now trying to slather over one of the most disastrous and inept military efforts in recent history. It makes for terrific photo-ops. It makes for miserable and debilitating foreign policy.

Look. Democracy is good. Treasonous BushCo dishonesty and misprision and an outright ignorance regarding exit strategies and the true costs of war, are not. Republicans and Bush apologists are quick to ignore, in this momentary orgy of political spin and PR, how not a single one of the problems Iraq faced before the elections have been solved. The brutal insurgent violence is only increasing. U.S. soldiers are dying in record numbers. Iraq is a violent mess. And Bush just asked for $80 billion more from the broke U.S. economy to fund the occupation, with no end in sight.

Let's just say it outright: The ends do not justify the means. A barely democratic Iraq is fine and good, but you well know that if Bush had mumbled to the nation three years and $300 billion ago that we were going to start bombing this piss-poor country back to the stone age and gut the U.S. economy and put thousands of American soldiers and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis in death's way to deliver it, all while sending the nastiest possible message to the world and actually increasing the threat of terrorism while turning our backs on every major U.S. ally, I doubt many Americans would have giddily waved the flag of support (except maybe Ann Coulter, who apparently loves anything involving guns and dead foreigners).

Let's put it another way: Here is your choice, America: $300 billion and massive international disrespect and a huge pile of dead American soldiers in an effort to force a fragile democracy onto a torn and fractured Iraq by ousting their useless dictator who was, let us repeat, no threat to us, or to anyone, and who was, in fact, our ally, until he dared to threaten our oil.

Or: $300 billion to assist struggling nations and battle AIDS and protect the planet, to evolve our international relationships and set up treaties and unifying alliances and maybe even have a little left over to help fix our own schools, maybe help all those destitute American city upgrade their hospitals and fix their homeless problems and even maybe launch a national health care plan, spend that money on trying to solve a huge host of social ills plaguing this crumbling beautiful egomaniacal empire we call home.

Which do you choose? What cost democracy? Where do you draw your lines?

Bush does not get credit for Iraq's fleeting glimpse of democracy for the exact same reason you don't give the tsunami credit for cleansing the streets of Indonesia. His motives were never, repeat never, to bring democracy to Iraq. His motives were to oust a pipsqueak dictator who threatened our access to 10 percent of the world's oil. It was about power, and regional control, and ego, and petroleum. Period.

Does this matter anymore? Iraq gets a glimmer of democratic hope and all lies and broken international laws and oily policy shifts are forgiven? Hardly.

Because if this is our new agenda, if we are suddenly the Hammer of Democracy who slams our political system onto every country we feel deserves it and damn the fiscal, emotional, spiritual, and human costs, well, let's get to it, already.

Let's right now start preparing for U.S. forces to march into that pesky repressive China. Let us look forward to BushCo declaring war on Iran, and then North Korea, and then huge parts of non-democratic Africa. Any day now, yes? How about Egypt? And Pakistan? And Jordan? Dictatorships and monarchies and repressive, anti-democratic oligarchies, all. Man, we'll be at war until 2045! Whee!

What about poor, beautiful Nepal, where the king just shut down the government and closed all the airports and severed communication with the rest of the world, and over 10,000 people have died in rebel fighting and the military is patrolling the streets and citizens are terrified and repressed and democracy is dying on the vine? Shouldn't we be marching in there next week, Georgie? Saddle up, cowpokes!

Oh wait. Won't happen. Reason: Not convenient. Not strategically lucrative. No oil reserves. No real power gain, except for maybe Iran, which is why BushCo is already busy working with Israel to map out bombing strategies.

In fact, to prove we don't really give a crap for the lovely "march of democracy" Republicans so love to gloat over, let's note right here how the U.S. regularly gives billions in aid to those very same repressive, dictator-friendly burgs of Egypt and Jordan and Pakistan. Ah, flagrant hypocrisy, thy name is Bush.

Look. Does America have a responsibility to the world to promote peace and democratic ideals in the world whenever possible? Hell yes. Does the world's richest and most gluttonous superpower have an obligation to intervene when absolutely necessary and help repressed peoples taste freedom and emerge from the shadow of evil dictators? You're damn right.

But not this way. Not at this cost. Not via a staggering and soul-mauling string of lies and misprision and a brutish foreign policies that only alienate and aggravate and inflame. Not through torture tactics and economic plundering and fear stratagems designed to keep the exhausted American populace from asking too many questions about this administration's real motives.

And not by way of a thuggish pre-emptive attack-first policy that goes against everything America has stood for (i.e.; defense, containment, peace) for the past 100 years.

Meanwhile, in related news, an international team of scientists and researchers announced that the world has roughly ten years before the effects of global warming become permanent and irreversible. Before the Gulf Stream is permanently weakened and massive ice shelves melt and the world is plunged more deeply in danger than we could ever imagine.

You really want to protect democracy, Dubya? Ensure its survival? You really want to have a lasting legacy, one not tainted with blood and war and humiliating claims of "mission accomplished?" Here's a tiny reminder: that $80 bil you just asked for to kill more Iraqis is 17 times higher than the EPA's entire budget. Maybe, just maybe, something is just a little off in our nation's priorities? Just, you know, a thought. Go democracy!

aux barricades, encore

2005-02-01T14:05:00.000-08:00

once more, with feeling: Dubya Bush, Karl Rove, Grover Norquist and their fellow 'Pub conspirators attempting to revoke the New Deal and destroy this country's social safety net are callous, mean-spirited, contemptible sons of bitches. and an appropriate response to them would involve tumbrels, torches, Madame Defarge... and that other "Madame" (the one with the wooden frame, angled blade and two-part headstock).

period.

no apologies here whatsoever for over-the-top rhetoric: It's a response to below-the-belt policy. when a center-right / moderate guy like Raspberry reports this kind of thing, you can be sure the report is not hyperbole.

Cutting Out the Poor

By William Raspberry
The Washington Post
Monday, January 31, 2005; Page A21

I've lived long enough to understand that the differences among Americans are often greatly exaggerated -- that deep down we are a lot more alike than we are different.

This truth extends to politics no less than to matters of race and class and geography. If you think of American politics as a dial, even during our fiercest debates, the needle swings in relatively small arcs -- from a bit right of the midpoint to a bit left of it, and back again. No matter how alarmed we may get over some particular setback, it's usually true that the sky really isn't falling.

Well something is coming down.

I've been talking to Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who is thoughtful, liberal, incredibly decent -- and alarmed over the national budget President Bush will shortly propose.

"For virtually all of my adulthood," he said, "America has had a bipartisan agreement that we ought to provide some basic framework of programs and policies that provide a safety net, not just for the poor but for a large portion of the American people who need help to manage.

"There've been exceptions -- the first Reagan term with David Stockman, the brief ascendancy of Newt Gingrich -- but while we've argued about the specifics, the basic framework has been there.

"With this budget, the basic framework is being dismantled."

Before you dismiss it as partisan hyperbole, hear Edelman's specifics: The basic structure of Social Security is under attack (on the grounds that the program is in crisis, though most respected economists say it isn't). Pell Grants for college tuition are on the cutting block. So are Section 8 housing vouchers (which started under Richard Nixon) and food stamps. Programs that have offered some protection for people in the lower third of the economy are under threat of evisceration.

And the rationale for the attack is a budgetary crisis created by the gift of $1.8 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.

Edelman thinks the needle has jumped off the dial altogether, that the people in philosophical power are determined to abrogate the contract many of us still take for granted. Nor does he believe that it is a matter of fiscal necessity. An unnecessary tax break (abetted by an optional war) created the crisis, and now the crisis justifies a radical reordering of the American system. As Edelman and Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center for Community Change (CCC), put it in a recent joint statement:

"The federal budget is not just an accounting tool. It is a statement about our priorities and our values as a nation. But because of decisions this president made to benefit an elite few -- at the expense of the rest of us -- we're now facing a set of budget choices that are unsupportable, immoral and dangerous."

The CCC, on whose board Edelman sits, has formed a coalition of more than 100 low-income groups in 15 states to resist not just the individual program cuts but also the philosophy underlying the cuts.

Resistance won't be easy, since so many middle Americans see their interests as nearer those of the rich than of the poor. Besides, the cuts will certainly be marketed -- perhaps successfully -- as simple practical necessity. I mean, if there's a fiscal crisis in these parlous times, you surely wouldn't want to cut defense -- or veterans, or highways, or police. Hmm, looks like those programs for poor folks are about the only option.

It is important, says Edelman (who quit the Clinton administration in a protest against the push to radically downsize public assistance), not to look at this budget program by program but at the thoroughgoing reordering of the government's role. He sees it as a major advance of the goal articulated by the influential conservative Grover Norquist of shrinking government "to the size where you could drown it in a bathtub."

"We're talking about tens of billions of dollars in cuts, including many programs that, like nutrition, are in-kind income for people," Edelman said. "We're talking about a severe blow for millions of Americans who are working as hard as they possibly can but still need some help."

Well, why don't we just wait and see if things turn out as badly as some of us fear? And if they do, then let the government reenact some of the old social programs.

The lovely thing -- at least from the Norquist view -- is that there won't be much the radically downsized government could do about it. That darned fiscal crisis, you know.

2005-01-26T08:29:00.000-08:00

as a Salon premium subscriber, i just received the 'zine's "best of 2004" year-end wrap-up. this article, written the day before the disaster of November 2, is now obviously dated by that event. however, Kamiya's points remain as true now as they ever were.

of special importance is his unfashionable but absolutely crucial mention of the "third rail" in American foreign policymaking - US-Israel relations. this country can keep denying it until doomsday (and maybe hasten that day in the process; fundamentalists of all stripes truly hope for that, i'm sure), but the fact is as rock-solid now as it has been for my entire adult life: The irrational, unconditional US tilt toward Israel - as THE keystone of this nation's Middle East policy - is THE fatal flaw in everything America tries to do in the region. it's why the US will never succeed in doing anything in the Middle East but making more enemies, sharpening long-simmering conflicts to the point of war, and pasting a gigantic target on its own head for further terrorist atrocities. it's the equivalent of trying to win a footrace by starting a lap behind everybody else. it's obscenely, infinitely stupid.

and now we have a guarantee of four more years of precisely that foreign-policy stupidity... bipartisan stupidity over the years to be sure, but never more aggressively advanced than in the last four.

American Nightmare

Bush's presidency has been a historic disaster. There's still time to
rectify his Iraq blunder -- but first, he has to go.

By Gary Kamiya

Nov. 1, 2004 - "The pure products of America go crazy," wrote William Carlos Williams. The words could serve as a motto for the age of Bush. In years to come historians will likely judge the Bush presidency one of the worst in the history of the republic -- an amalgam of arrogance, radicalism and folly so egregious it's almost laughable. Abandoning common sense in foreign affairs, weakening the rule of law, handing the nation's wealth over to the super-rich, and squandering the friendship and sympathy of the world in rigid pursuit of a chimerical dream of a world that cannot threaten us, the Bush presidency has betrayed the nation's deepest principles, both liberal and conservative.

Alarmed and outraged, half of a bitterly divided nation protested, but it did so alone. Cowed by 9/11 and intimidated by a right-wing media machine that wielded the flag like a spear, Congress and the media, the institutions that should have checked Bush's mad rush to war, abandoned their posts until it was too late. From its dubious
beginning to its fear-mongering, vote-suppressing end (one hopes), the Bush era has been a perfect storm in which all the worst aspects of our national temper -- insularity, empty swagger and ignorance -- have come together.

Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the whole sorry chapter has been the collapse of national memory and accountability. One outrage follows the next with dreamlike regularity, lies about aluminum tubes to 9/11 revelations to Ahmed Chalabi to Joseph Wilson to cooked intel to Abu Ghraib to illegal detentions to lost explosives, and nothing ever happens, no one is ever punished, everything is for the best in the best of all possible six-gun-brandishing worlds. In an age of reality-TV war, where nothing is asked of Americans except that they rage and fear on color-coded command, the death of responsibility offers a happy ending to all -- except for those killed in Iraq.

Yes, everything changed after Sept. 11: The country lost its mind. Heretical as it is to say, the terror attacks proved that it is possible to overreact -- more specifically, to react foolishly -- to an attack that left 3,000 dead. Bush launched America upon a rash and pointless war that is likely to go down in history as one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. The war achieved exactly what it was designed to prevent: It has strengthened radical Islam and increased the number of terrorists. The explosives debacle at Al-Qaqaa perfectly encapsulates this bitter irony: We invaded Iraq to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of terrorists, but the invasion put those weapons in their hands. In Greek tragedy, this is a classic punishment for hubris. In "The Twilight Zone," it's a favorite plot twist. The Bush presidency has been a tale out of Aeschylus, adapted by Rod Serling.

When Bush invaded Afghanistan, the world approved. That failed state, run by a brutal theocracy that harbored al-Qaida, was a legitimate state target in the so-called war on terror. But when Bush expanded that "war" to include Iraq, he proved himself to be not a warrior but a crusader -- a zealot who dragged the nation on a weird, obsessive
quest that combined political calculation, nationalist fervor and anti-Arab ideology. With tawdry mendacity, that crusade (Bush actually called it that before advisors pointed out that the word could have negative associations in the Middle East) was sold to the American people as a preemptive act of self-defense, as Congress rolled over and the media credulously passed on lies and half-truths from "senior government officials." The administration and its mouthpieces in the media shamelessly exploited the fear, patriotism and anger stirred by the 9/11 terror attacks to stifle serious debate about the war, painting opponents as Neville Chamberlains who lacked the backbone to fight "evil."

Launched against a regime that posed no more threat than a host of others around the world, the Iraq war represented a radically lower standard for what constitutes a just war. As Eugenia C. Kiesling, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy, has written, "The Iraq war ... was caused largely by the U.S. demand for unrealistically absolute security. Not since the Romans has any polity justified preventive wars on the grounds that no military threat be permitted to exist." It was a gratuitous war, a strategic aggression whose grandiose goals -- democratizing the Middle East, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, defeating "terrorism" -- were bizarrely disconnected from reality.

The results of that bungled war have been catastrophic. Yes, we removed a loathsome dictator, a feat worthy of celebration, but the mountain of Iraqi bodies we are piling up in the process is growing so high -- a reliable study claims 100,000 civilians have been killed in the war -- and the future of that tortured land so dark, that it is no longer clear whether the invasion will ultimately be morally
justifiable. (In the context of a war now justified as a liberation, the administration's refusal to count civilian Iraqi casualties is disgraceful.) Even if Iraq staggers its way through and manages to establish some form of democratic governance, the United States will not be seen as a liberator. Too much Iraqi blood has been shed. In any case, assessing the morality of this war requires looking beyond the fate of the Iraqis -- a fact overlooked by the liberal hawks, intoxicated by the rare sensation of playing John Wayne in a fight with the bad guys. A nation's first responsibility is to its own citizens.

The price for saving Iraq -- if in fact we end up saving it and not destroying it -- has been to greatly strengthen radical Islam around the world, end the lives of more than a thousand Americans, and make America, and the rest of the world, less safe. That is not a price worth paying. And what of Bush's Utopian dream of transforming the Middle East? Making war, it turns out, is a highly problematic way of bringing heaven to earth.

The Iraq blunder has endangered America not just because we have exponentially multiplied the number of Muslims and Arabs willing to take up the sword of jihad against us -- and given them a convenient failed state to work with -- but also because we have weakened our standing in the world. By declaring ourselves exempt from irritating encumbrances like the United Nations and the Geneva Convention, Bush has essentially embraced the law of the jungle. Might makes right: If the U.S. government says someone is an "enemy combatant," whether or not there is any evidence to support that claim, then he is one, and he has no rights. If the secretary of defense and the administration's
top legal advisors decide it's acceptable to use torture to break "terrorists," we will. (If they turn out not to be terrorists, but common criminals or innocent civilians, too bad for them.) The widespread torture of Iraqi prisoners and the suspension of due process at Guantánamo are dual blots on our national honor that may
take generations to remove.

Of all the shameful episodes that have marked the "war on terror," one of the worst -- and least protested -- has been the administration's tacit admission that they had no case, and never had a case, against most of the Guantánamo detainees. Once the Supreme Court ruled against the administration's claim that it had the right to do whatever it wanted with the detainees, it quietly folded its hand and began preparing to release them. Thus ended the Salem witch trials, not with a bang but a whimper.

From its insistence on cutting taxes for the rich in the middle of a war to its ugly environmental record to its hostility to science to its corruption of the intelligence community to its stealth assault on abortion rights, the Bush presidency has been an unmitigated disaster. But the inescapable subject is Iraq. Bush's decision to invade Iraq was not only the defining event of his presidency, but a hinge in time -- an event so momentous that history arranges itself around it.

The administration justified the war as a necessary strike against Islamic terrorism. Its mantra is "9/11 changed everything": The horrific image of the twin towers falling is the Bush administration's visceral trump card. If Bush regains the White House, it will be because he has succeeded in convincing enough Americans that, as he argued in the debates, the best way to defeat terrorism is to take the fight to "the terrorists," and that he alone, not the vacillating Kerry, has the guts to do that.

In the eyes of Bush and his supporters, the "war on terror" requires simplicity, not complexity; courage, not brains; patriotism, not alliance-building. For them, 9/11/01 was really 9/1/39; the planes hitting the towers were the Nazis invading Poland. You don't think about the meaning of the Panzers, you react to them, hard and ruthlessly, across the board. Anyone who dreams that there is any alternative to a fight to the finish is a woolly-headed idealist. The hatred of the terrorists for us is implacable, metaphysical, as unchangeable as that felt by the Muslims for the Crusaders. Any sign of weakness on our part encourages them in their single-minded pursuit of our destruction. The terrorists hope for a Kerry victory because he's weak. They fear Bush because he will smash them in the mouth and keep smashing until they're all dead.

In the aftermath of 9/11, this view of "the terrorists" (a group never clearly defined) dominated the public discourse. It was aggressively promulgated by the White
House and assented to by Congress and the media, both liberal and conservative. To question it was to risk being denounced as an appeaser, even a fifth columnist. The belief that it represented mainstream American thinking was why wavering Democrats signed off on the resolution giving Bush the power to invade. And even now, after Iraq has become a bloody quagmire, this view is held by most Americans who support Bush.

There are powerful reasons for its popularity. It appeals to primordial instincts -- self-preservation, anger, revenge, patriotism. It derives its power from a hypnotic and inescapable image, like a hideous Tarot card that turns up again and again: the apocalyptic vision of the towers collapsing. And there are elements of truth in its assessment of the enemy. There are indeed fanatical Islamists whose hatred of America, although it may have had political origins, has become essentially religious, i.e. absolute. They cannot be reasoned with; they must be fought.

But this analysis is profoundly and dangerously mistaken. It is based on a misreading of the Arab-Muslim world. In its high-minded guise it posits a reified Islam, monolithic in its theocratic piety, reflexively opposed to modernity and democracy. In its vulgar form it is historically ignorant and racist. And it is frequently, though not necessarily, associated with either a deep-seated pro-Israeli bias or a triumphalist belief in America's mission civilisatrice, or both. In the case of the Bush administration, emphatically both.

Above all, it is a view that is driven by emotion, not thought -- in fact, it's positively hostile to thought. It reached its reductio ad absurdum in conservative columnist
David Brooks' Saturday column in the New York Times, in which he argued that Bush was a better choice to lead the "War on Terror" than Kerry because Bush really, really hated bin Laden -- hated him so much, Brooks notes approvingly, that he was "consumed" by hatred. Brooks and his ilk would do well to go to more fights. Fighters
consumed by hatred, who throw wild haymakers, are inevitably cut down by fighters who know how to box. Brooks and his hate-filled hero could take some lessons from Muhammad Ali.

The very phrase "war on terror" betrays the extremist ideology that has driven the Bush administration. This is not a war against al-Qaida, or against a specific group of terrorists: This is a war against terror. But "terror" is not an enemy; it is a tactic. What Bush is waging war on is not the tactic of terrorism, which as all students of military history know cannot be defeated, but evil itself -- and not just any evil, but Arab-Muslim evil. The "war on terror" is really the "war on Arab-Muslim evil." Bush is too discreet to call it that, but the more fervent of his supporters have no such problem: Neoconservative godfather Richard Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum titled their frightening book (in which, among other modest proposals, they advocate that Israel annex the West Bank and the United States invade
Iran and Syria) "An End to Evil."

For the Bush administration, there's no evil like Arab-Muslim evil. It pays lip service to the junior-varsity version found in North Korea, but its heart isn't in
it. The Middle East is the bull's-eye of evil. Bush persistently insisted that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were connected even though they had no relationship and loathed each other: They're both evil, and they're both Muslims. Ergo, they're both equal representatives of Muslim evil, and both must be destroyed.

For obvious reasons, this view of the Middle East is profoundly informed by the Bush
administration's passionately and unprecedentedly pro-Israel stance, which Bush announced to a baffled National Security Council at his first meeting. ("Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things," Bush said, explaining why he was going to let Sharon do whatever he wanted.) The Iraq war was not fought "for" Israel, although removing a threat to Israel's existence and weakening the Palestinians were seen as important benefits. But the administration's mind-set simply assumed that America's interests and Israel's are identical -- an obviously false position that became much easier to sell to the American people after 9/11, and that was aided by the taboo against raising any criticism of Israel. Bush and his
policymakers saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not as an asymmetrical war driven by issues but as a battle between Israeli good and Palestinian evil. And that moralistic, ahistorical assessment carried over into their views of the Arab and Muslim world, and clearly informed the decision to invade Iraq.

To this day, to raise the inconvenient fact that the Arab and Muslim world have legitimate historical grievances against the U.S. -- even though no grievance, however great, could justify 9/11 -- is to invite charges of appeasement, if not treason. Yet it is precisely a knowledge of history, and a lucid analysis of its consequences, that is called for now. We are dealing not just with one individual and his followers, but with a region and a deeply religious culture that has boiled over,
and boiled over in such a horrific way that it is understandable that many Americans have followed Bush in seeing that region and that culture as evil, fanatical, and medieval. Osama bin Laden is surely all those things, and he and his followers must be captured or killed.

But the larger Arab world, which shares his grievances, is not merely fanatical or medieval. It has real and just grievances, which we must try to understand and, if possible, ameliorate. The Iraq war has done precisely the opposite.

To be sure, the Arab world desperately needs to clean its own house. The 2003 Arab Human Development Report -- a far more important document than any bin Laden video or disgusting, blasphemous snuff film hawked on the streets of Baghdad -- points out that the region is economically backward, politically unfree, poorly educated, and repressive towards women. With commendable honesty, the 26 Arab scholars who authored the report refuse to blame the West -- the region's favorite whipping-boy -- for these shortcomings. And these factors -- and some perhaps having to do with Islam itself, a religion "programmed for victory," as the scholar Malise Ruthven has noted -- help to explain the virulence of Muslim rage.

But they don't explain all of it. There are real, legitimate issues that have brought Arab and Muslim blood to a boil, and that explain why even pleasant taxi drivers and shopkeepers in Lebanon or Egypt, who denounce 9/11 as appalling and contrary to Islam, still say they understand it. Unfortunately, those issues cannot be honestly or fully raised in America's political dialogue, because they all ultimately circle back to a single subject: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And that subject is a third rail. No major American politician, and few journalists, dare touch it. It is the elephant in the room that everyone has to ignore.

This is not just a bizarre situation, it is a dangerous one. We are locked in a struggle whose stakes are incalculably high -- not because any Arab or Muslim state could ever threaten us militarily, but because if we continue on the course we are now on, which is to essentially make the United States indistinguishable from Israel in Arab and Muslim eyes, we will end up living in their nightmare, a fortress nation surrounded by a sea of hatred. Which I'm sure is not a fate that any of my Israeli or Palestinian friends would wish on their worst enemy. This is our situation -- and yet we cannot discuss the single issue that is most critical to resolving it.

Certain aberrations in a nation's behavior can be explained only by ideological conviction. The ideology that inspired Bush's bizarre Iraq adventure, indeed his entire "war on terror," is a specific view of the Arab-Muslim world, one deeply informed by both an unreflective, stark, almost Biblical response to 9/11 and by an extreme pro-Israeli bias. It finds its scholarly expression in the work of Bernard Lewis, employs tactics that mirror those of the hard-line Revisionist Zionist Vladimir Jabotinsky, and was put into practice by a peculiar group consisting of unreconstructed Cold Warriors, cynical political Machiavels, idealistic-unto-blindness liberals, hardcore supporters of Israel's Likud Party and born-again Christians. Although few Middle East experts or academics subscribe to it, its bumper-sticker simplicity has made it easy to sell to an angry and uninformed public.

This view can be summarized thus: The Islamic world is enraged at America and the West not because of American foreign policy, namely, our complicity with Israel in its 37-year occupation of Palestinian land and our oil-driven coziness with various Arab despots (whose number once included none other than Saddam Hussein), but because of what Bernard Lewis called "a feeling of humiliation -- a growing awareness, among the heirs of an old, proud, and long dominant civilization, of having been overtaken, overborne, and overwhelmed by those whom they regarded as their inferiors." Muslims hate America because our very existence is a constant reminder to them that they have failed. Unable to deal constructively with their shortcomings, in large part because Islam has been historically antithetical to secular pursuits like science, the Muslim world turns on the West and seeks to lay it low. Nietzschean ressentiment smashed the airplanes into the twin towers.

What should America do, faced with an enemy whose only "grievance" is our very existence? (Or, to cite Bush's dumbed-down, flag-waving version: "They hate our freedom.") Here Lewis' views dovetail with those of Vladimir Jabotinsky, pre-state leader of Revisionist Zionism and the intellectual father of Israel's Likud Party. Jabotinsky believed that the only way to deal with the Arabs -- whose nationalism
he in fact respected -- was with force. Jabotinsky famously advocated building an "Iron Wall" between Jews and Arabs. In similar fashion, Lewis argued that radical Muslims had come to regard the United States as a paper tiger and that only brute force would get their attention.

(Hesitant pro-war liberal Thomas L. Friedman, probably the most widely read American
commentator on the Middle East in the world, made the same argument before the war, although he added that it was essential that the United States also nurture Arab moderates and broker a fair Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Friedman is bitterly disillusioned with the Bush administration, which does not explain why he ever had
any illusions about it in the first place, or why he was willing to roll the dice on a war that stood a high chance of catastrophic failure even if America had done everything right.)

Not surprisingly, Lewis urged the United States to invade Iraq, where he said U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. Also not surprisingly, Lewis' views were extraordinarily influential with the Bush administration, which invited him to speak at the White House. The Wall Street Journal wrote that "the Lewis doctrine, in effect, had become U.S. policy." As one of the world's eminent scholars of Islam, he provided opinions that gave intellectual respectability to the Bush administration neoconservatives and Cold Warriors who pushed the Iraq war.

Like most grand theories, Lewis' contains considerable truth. Arab-Muslim backwardness, coupled with religious fervor, can indeed lead to a sense of murderous humiliation. Religion plays a far larger role in civic life in Muslim countries than it does in the West (ironically, Bush is doing his best to reverse that trend), and under the right set of circumstances, passions that might have been channeled into secular pursuits can only find outlets in holy rage. The burning anger of Sayyid Qutb, the father of modern Islamism, derived from his pious horror at what he perceived as the decadence of 20th century America. (In addition to being outraged by America's loose sexual mores and spiritual vacuity, he was also troubled by the
attention that the residents of Greeley, Colo., paid to their lawns.) It was not just the Israeli-Palestinian crisis (and, he now says, the Israeli bombing of Beirut) but the presence of infidel American forces on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, home of the Prophet, that pushed Osama bin Laden to order the 9/11 attacks.

To deny that there is an element of the "clash of civilizations" -- the term was originally coined by Lewis, not Samuel Huntington -- in the confrontation between Islamists and America would be myopic. But Lewis' view is fatally flawed, because it radically underestimates the importance of history.

His Islam is a medieval world preserved in amber, outside of time. In the dialectic between nature and nurture, it's all nature, no nurture. Religion and "civilization" are absolute; the West's long and sordid history of colonizing and exploiting the Middle East, and its responsibility for open wounds like the Palestinian tragedy, are
downplayed. His optimism about the aftermath of the invasion was a logical consequence of these views.

Lewis' message was what the Bush administration wanted to hear. And just as it has ignored critical voices on any of its policies -- Bush and Karl Rove decided early on that a pose of Papal Infallibility worked best -- it ignored the numerous dissenting voices that warned of trouble ahead. One of the most eloquent of those voices was that of Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian-American scholar who wrote a valuable book titled "Resurrecting Empire" around the time of the invasion. Khalidi points out that the caricature of Islam as antithetical to democracy betrays historical ignorance of the many pioneering Middle Eastern experiments with democracy -- which, he adds, were
persistently undermined by Western powers. He also reminds Americans that people in the Middle East have a long memory. The British rulers (who, like the Americans, claimed they just wanted to "liberate" the Iraqis) were able to put down an Iraqi revolt in the 1920s only by an intense aerial bombing of civilians. Iraqis have not forgotten this. Khalidi also pointed out the obvious fact that nationalism, a word
banished from discussions of post-invasion Iraq because it didn't fit the uplifting "liberation" paradigm, would be inspired by an invasion.

In short, Khalidi's argument is that it was historically naive for the United States, even assuming its intentions were pure, to discount the region's painful, historically recent experience of Western "liberators" in judging how it would be greeted. Some of the most influential pro-war voices also sounded alarms. Thomas Friedman, to his credit, warned U.S. policymakers that if they wanted to win the
war, not just the battle, they would not only have to pour massive resources into rebuilding Iraq, they would also have to take an active, good-faith role in resolving the Palestine-Israel crisis. Kenneth Pollack, whose "Threatening Storm" was the least ideological and most convincing book advocating war (he has since apologized, saying -- not completely convincingly -- that he based his call to arms on "faulty intelligence"), hedged his pro-war arguments by warning that the postwar period would be more difficult than the war and that a massive U.S. troop presence would be needed for success.

But the Bush administration ignored all of those warnings. Drunk on ideology, it saw an opportunity to run the table -- rearrange the Middle East to Israel's advantage, remove a dangerous regional despot who they imagined threatened America, put the fear of God into the Saudis, Iranians and Syrians, open the spigots to Iraqi oil on favorable terms, create new American military bases in the Middle East, and in the mystical ways discussed above somehow scare terrorists into submission -- all while
assuring Bush's reelection by picking up evangelical and Jewish votes and turning him into a war president, George of Baghdad. And so it launched the most momentous war in half a century based on bogus intelligence provided by a wily con man, with grossly inadequate troop levels, no postwar planning, and only one significant ally.

We know the results.

If it was the Bush administration's secret desire to turn America into Israel in the eyes of the Arab and Muslim world, it has gone a long way to succeeding. A devastating recent poll shows a precipitous decline in America's popularity in the Arab world: Even in moderate countries like Jordan and Morocco, Osama bin Laden is more popular than Bush, and majorities in both countries said suicide bombing against U.S. troops in Iraq was justifiable. The aerial bombardment of Fallujah last spring was not seen by the Arab world as a liberating blow against terrorists but as the American equivalent of Israeli strikes against Palestinian cities. The new U.S. use of targeted assassinations, a tactic employed by the Israelis but one we had always rejected before, has only strengthened the association. Not surprisingly, jihad is on the rise. European Muslims are now making their way to Iraq to fight. And things seem likely to get worse. This is the Bush legacy, whether he wins or loses on Election Day.

The terrorists who hit America on Sept. 11 were filled with religious clarity. And in another perverse historical irony, they passed that clarity on to Bush. A floundering president suddenly found his mission, handed down by God. I am not, of course, equating the actions of Mohamed Atta with those of Bush. But there are reasons to be as suspicious of the president's divine clarity as of the hijacker's. By launching his own crusade against bin Laden's, Bush allowed the fight to take place on the terrorist's terms. It was not a wise idea.

If John Kerry is elected president, he will have to clean up a disastrous mess. The first question, of course, is what to do about Iraq. The likelihood that free, fair and general elections will take place as planned next year grows fainter by the day, which raises the question: At what point should the United States decide that its mere presence in the country is harming the Iraqi people and their future more than its absence? There is no way to answer that question. But it must be asked.

The second issue is the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, which Bush has simply handed over to Ariel Sharon and his extremist counterparts on the Palestinian side. America's eyes are understandably fixed on Iraq, but what happens in Ramallah and Jerusalem is just as important to America's security as what happens in Ramadi. Indeed, the Iraq
debacle, and the attendant rise in anti-American rage, has only made resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis more urgent. Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan could hold promise, but only if he is prevented from trading Gaza for the West Bank, effectively locking the Palestinians up in Bantustans -- a policy that his top aide recently
acknowledged, indeed bragged about. The precarious state of Yasser Arafat's health also demands that America immediately act: Post-Arafat, the Palestinian leadership could degenerate into even worse anarchy than now threatens it. Without a real political plan, the two-state solution, already endangered, would become impossible.
And that outcome would be disastrous for Israel, for the Palestinians, and for America.

It is still possible to rectify Bush's mistakes. It is not too late to restore America's standing in the world in general, and the Arab world in particular. But time is running out. And first of all, he must be removed from an office he has proven manifestly incompetent to hold. It is hard to believe, at this point, that even those who subscribe to Bush's ideology could possibly vote for him.

A pious, foolish and poorly educated man, surrounded by zealots and knaves, dreamed of smiting the evildoers, but instead put a sword into their hands. He imagined that by invading a state in the heart of the Arab world, he would cut through the Gordian knot, but he entangled his army in writhing coils. He fantasized that an all-powerful America would stand atop a grateful world, but he made his nation despised everywhere, and particularly in the one region of the world where it is most important that we not be despised. This is the world Bush left us. We must make a new one.

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About the writer
Gary Kamiya is Salon's executive editor.

slipping down the lists

2005-01-25T14:23:00.000-08:00

gee! we're #37 (when it comes to quality of health care)! somehow that doesn't have quite the ring of "We're #1", does it?

and somehow i doubt that this, or even louder alarms, will wake up the complacent, snoozing 'red staters -' or disabuse them of their fawning L-U-V for their precious Chimp-In-Charge.

how sad that virtually the whole downward slide has happened just within my own lifetime.

Dream On America
For years, much of the world did aspire to the American way of life. But today countries are finding more appealing systems in their own backyards

by Andrew Moravcsik
Published in the January 31, 2005 issue of Newsweek International

Not long ago, the American dream was a global fantasy. Not only Americans saw themselves as a beacon unto nations. So did much of the rest of the world. East Europeans tuned into Radio Free Europe. Chinese students erected a replica of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square.

You had only to listen to George W. Bush's Inaugural Address last week (invoking "freedom" and "liberty" 49 times) to appreciate just how deeply Americans still believe in this founding myth. For many in the world, the president's rhetoric confirmed their worst fears of an imperial America relentlessly pursuing its narrow national interests. But the greater danger may be a delusional America—one that believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the American Dream lives on, that America remains a model for the world, one whose mission is to spread the word.

The gulf between how Americans view themselves and how the world views them was summed up in a poll last week by the BBC. Fully 71 percent of Americans see the United States as a source of good in the world. More than half view Bush's election as positive for global security. Other studies report that 70 percent have faith in their domestic institutions and nearly 80 percent believe "American ideas and customs" should spread globally.

Foreigners take an entirely different view: 58 percent in the BBC poll see Bush's re-election as a threat to world peace. Among America's traditional allies, the figure is strikingly higher: 77 percent in Germany, 64 percent in Britain and 82 percent in Turkey. Among the 1.3 billion members of the Islamic world, public support for the United States is measured in single digits. Only Poland, the Philippines and India viewed Bush's second Inaugural positively.

Tellingly, the anti-Bushism of the president's first term is giving way to a more general anti-Americanism. A plurality of voters (the average is 70 percent) in each of the 21 countries surveyed by the BBC oppose sending any troops to Iraq, including those in most of the countries that have done so. Only one third, disproportionately in the poorest and most dictatorial countries, would like to see American values spread in their country. Says Doug Miller of GlobeScan, which conducted the BBC report: "President Bush has further isolated America from the world. Unless the administration changes its approach, it will continue to erode America's good name, and hence its ability to effectively influence world affairs." Former Brazilian president Jose Sarney expressed the sentiments of the 78 percent of his countrymen who see America as a threat: "Now that Bush has been re-elected, all I can say is, God bless the rest of the world."

The truth is that Americans are living in a dream world. Not only do others not share America's self-regard, they no longer aspire to emulate the country's social and economic achievements. The loss of faith in the American Dream goes beyond this swaggering administration and its war in Iraq. A President Kerry would have had to confront a similar disaffection, for it grows from the success of something America holds dear: the spread of democracy, free markets and international institutions — globalization, in a word.

Countries today have dozens of political, economic and social models to choose from. Anti-Americanism is especially virulent in Europe and Latin America, where countries have established their own distinctive ways—none made in America. Futurologist Jeremy Rifkin, in his recent book "The European Dream," hails an emerging European Union based on generous social welfare, cultural diversity and respect for international law—a model that's caught on quickly across the former nations of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. In Asia, the rise of autocratic capitalism in China or Singapore is as much a "model" for development as America's scandal-ridden corporate culture. "First we emulate," one Chinese businessman recently told the board of one U.S. multinational, "then we overtake."

Many are tempted to write off the new anti-Americanism as a temporary perturbation, or mere resentment. Blinded by its own myth, America has grown incapable of recognizing its flaws. For there is much about the American Dream to fault. If the rest of the world has lost faith in the American model—political, economic, diplomatic—it's partly for the very good reason that it doesn't work as well anymore.

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: Once upon a time, the U.S. Constitution was a revolutionary document, full of epochal innovations—free elections, judicial review, checks and balances, federalism and, perhaps most important, a Bill of Rights. In the 19th and 20th centuries, countries around the world copied the document, not least in Latin America. So did Germany and Japan after World War II. Today? When nations write a new constitution, as dozens have in the past two decades, they seldom look to the American model.

When the Soviets withdrew from Central Europe, U.S. constitutional experts rushed in. They got a polite hearing, and were sent home. Jiri Pehe, adviser to former president Vaclav Havel, recalls the Czechs' firm decision to adopt a European-style parliamentary system with strict limits on campaigning. "For Europeans, money talks too much in American democracy. It's very prone to certain kinds of corruption, or at least influence from powerful lobbies," he says. "Europeans would not want to follow that route." They also sought to limit the dominance of television, unlike in American campaigns where, Pehe says, "TV debates and photogenic looks govern election victories."

So it is elsewhere. After American planes and bombs freed the country, Kosovo opted for a European constitution. Drafting a post-apartheid constitution, South Africa rejected American-style federalism in favor of a German model, which leaders deemed appropriate for the social-welfare state they hoped to construct. Now fledgling African democracies look to South Africa as their inspiration, says John Stremlau, a former U.S. State Department official who currently heads the international relations department at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg: "We can't rely on the Americans." The new democracies are looking for a constitution written in modern times and reflecting their progressive concerns about racial and social equality, he explains. "To borrow Lincoln's phrase, South Africa is now Africa's 'last great hope'."

Much in American law and society troubles the world these days. Nearly all countries reject the United States' right to bear arms as a quirky and dangerous anachronism. They abhor the death penalty and demand broader privacy protections. Above all, once most foreign systems reach a reasonable level of affluence, they follow the Europeans in treating the provision of adequate social welfare is a basic right. All this, says Bruce Ackerman at Yale University Law School, contributes to the growing sense that American law, once the world standard, has become "provincial." The United States' refusal to apply the Geneva Conventions to certain terrorist suspects, to ratify global human-rights treaties such as the innocuous Convention on the Rights of the Child or to endorse the International Criminal Court (coupled with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo) only reinforces the conviction that America's Constitution and legal system are out of step with the rest of the world.

ECONOMIC PROSPERITY: The American Dream has always been chiefly economic—a dynamic ideal of free enterprise, free markets and individual opportunity based on merit and mobility. Certainly the U.S. economy has been extraordinarily productive. Yes, American per capita income remains among the world's highest. Yet these days there's as much economic dynamism in the newly industrializing economies of Asia, Latin America and even eastern Europe. All are growing faster than the United States. At current trends, the Chinese economy will be bigger than America's by 2040. Whether those trends will continue is not so much the question. Better to ask whether the American way is so superior that everyone else should imitate it. And the answer to that, increasingly, is no.

Much has made, for instance, of the differences between the dynamic American model and the purportedly sluggish and overregulated "European model." Ongoing efforts at European labor-market reform and fiscal cuts are ridiculed. Why can't these countries be more like Britain, businessmen ask, without the high tax burden, state regulation and restrictions on management that plague Continental economies? Sooner or later, the CW goes, Europeans will adopt the American model—or perish.

Yet this is a myth. For much of the postwar period Europe and Japan enjoyed higher growth rates than America. Airbus recently overtook Boeing in sales of commercial aircraft, and the EU recently surpassed America as China's top trading partner. This year's ranking of the world's most competitive economies by the World Economic Forum awarded five of the top 10 slots—including No. 1 Finland—to northern European social democracies. "Nordic social democracy remains robust," writes Anthony Giddens, former head of the London School of Economics and a "New Labour" theorist, in a recent issue of the New Statesman, "not because it has resisted reform, but because it embraced it."

This is much of the secret of Britain's economic performance as well. Lorenzo Codogno, co-head of European economics at the Bank of America, believes the British, like Europeans elsewhere, "will try their own way to achieve a proper balance." Certainly they would never put up with the lack of social protections afforded in the American system. Europeans are aware that their systems provide better primary education, more job security and a more generous social net. They are willing to pay higher taxes and submit to regulation in order to bolster their quality of life. Americans work far longer hours than Europeans do, for instance. But they are not necessarily more productive—nor happier, buried as they are in household debt, without the time (or money) available to Europeans for vacation and international travel. George Monbiot, a British public intellectual, speaks for many when he says, "The American model has become an American nightmare rather than an American dream."

Just look at booming Britain. Instead of cutting social welfare, Tony Blair's Labour government has expanded it. According to London's Centre for Policy Studies, public spending in Britain represented 43 percent of GDP in 2003, a figure closer to the Eurozone average than to the American share of 35 percent. It's still on the rise — some 10 percent annually over the past three years—at the same time that social welfare is being reformed to deliver services more efficiently. The inspiration, says Giddens, comes not from America, but from social-democratic Sweden, where universal child care, education and health care have been proved to increase social mobility, opportunity and, ultimately, economic productivity. In the United States, inequality once seemed tolerable because America was the land of equal opportunity. But this is no longer so. Two decades ago, a U.S. CEO earned 39 times the average worker; today he pulls in 1,000 times as much. Cross-national studies show that America has recently become a relatively difficult country for poorer people to get ahead. Monbiot summarizes the scientific data: "In Sweden, you are three times more likely to rise out of the economic class into which you were born than you are in the U.S."

Other nations have begun to notice. Even in poorer, pro-American Hungary and Poland, polls show that only a slender minority (less than 25 percent) wants to import the American economic model. A big reason is its increasingly apparent deficiencies. "Americans have the best medical care in the world," Bush declared in his Inaugural Address. Yet the United States is the only developed democracy without a universal guarantee of health care, leaving about 45 million Americans uninsured. Nor do Americans receive higher-quality health care in exchange. Whether it is measured by questioning public-health experts, polling citizen satisfaction or survival rates, the health care offered by other countries increasingly ranks above America's. U.S.
infant mortality rates are among the highest for developed democracies. The average Frenchman, like most Europeans, lives nearly four years longer than the average American. Small wonder that the World Health Organization rates the U.S. healthcare system only 37th best in the world, behind Colombia (22nd) and Saudi Arabia (26th), and on a par with Cuba.

The list goes on: ugly racial tensions, sky-high incarceration rates, child-poverty rates higher than any Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development country except Mexico — where Europe, these days, inspires more admiration than the United States. "Their solutions feel more natural to Mexicans because they offer real
solutions to real, and seemingly intractable, problems," says Sergio Aguayo, a prominent democracy advocate in Mexico City, referring to European education, health care and social policies. And while undemocratic states like China may, ironically, be among the last places where the United States still presents an attractive political and social alternative to authoritarian government, new models are rising in prominence. Says Julie Zhu, a college student in Beijing: "When I was in high school I thought America was this dreamland, a fabled place." Anything she bought had to be American. Now that's changed, she says: "When people have money, they often choose European products." She might well have been talking about another key indicator. Not long ago, the United States was destination number one for oreign students seeking university educations. Today, growing numbers are going elsewhere—to other parts of Asia, or Europe. You can almost feel the pendulum swinging.

FOREIGN POLICY: U.S. leaders have long believed military power and the American Dream went hand in hand. World War II was fought not just to defeat the Axis powers, but to make the world safe for the United Nations, the precursor to the World Trade Organization, the European Union and other international institutions that would strengthen weaker countries. NATO and the Marshall Plan were the twin pillars upon which today's Europe were built.

Today, Americans make the same presumption, confusing military might with right. Following European criticisms of the Iraq war, the French became "surrender monkeys." The Germans were opportunistic ingrates. The British (and the Poles) were America's lone allies. Unsurprisingly, many of those listening to Bush's Inaugural pledge last week to stand with those defying tyranny saw the glimmerings of an argument for invading Iran: Washington has thus far shown more of an appetite for spreading ideals with the barrel of a gun than for namby-pamby hearts-and-minds campaigns. A former French minister muses that the United States is the last "Bismarckian power" — the last country to believe that the pinpoint application of military power is the critical instrument of foreign policy.

Contrast that to the European Union—pioneering an approach based on civilian instruments like trade, foreign aid, peacekeeping, international monitoring and international law—or even China, whose economic clout has become its most effective diplomatic weapon. The strongest tool for both is access to huge markets. No single policy has contributed as much to Western peace and security as the admission of 10 new countries—to be followed by a half-dozen more—to the European Union. In country after country, authoritarian nationalists were beaten back by democratic coalitions held together by the promise of joining Europe. And in the past month European leaders have taken a courageous decision to contemplate the membership of Turkey, where the prospect of EU membership is helping to create the most stable democratic system in the Islamic world. When historians look back, they may see this policy as being the truly epochal event of our time, dwarfing in effectiveness the crude power of America.

The United States can take some satisfaction in this. After all, it is in large part the success of the mid-century American Dream — spreading democracy, free markets, social mobility and multilateral cooperation — that has made possible the diversity of models we see today. This was enlightened statecraft of unparalleled generosity. But where does it leave us? Americans still invoke democratic idealism. We heard it in Bush's address, with his apocalyptic proclamation that "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." But fewer and fewer people have the patience to listen.

Headlines in the British press were almost contemptuous: DEFIANT BUSH DOES NOT MENTION THE WAR, HAVE I GOT NUKES FOR YOU and HIS SECOND-TERM MISSION: TO END TYRANNY ON EARTH. Has this administration learned nothing from Iraq, they asked? Can this White House really expect to command support from the rest of the world, with its different strengths and different dreams? The failure of the American Dream has only been highlighted by the country's foreign-policy failures, not caused by them. The true danger is that Americans do not realize this, lost in the reveries of greatness, speechifying about liberty and freedom.

With Christian Caryl in Tokyo, Katka Krosnar in Prague, Mac Margolis in Rio de Janeiro, Tracy Mcnicoll in Paris, Paul Mooney in Beijing, Henk Rossouw in Johannesburg and Marie Valla in London

© Copyright 2005 Newsweek International

paleo over neo-con, any day of the week. go figure

2005-01-24T10:53:00.000-08:00

it's a measure of just how strange the times in which we live in have become... that people like me are finding so much to agree with actual *conservatives* about. i mean, that's really amazing - here i am, a confirmed Sixties-hallowing, sex-n-drugs-n-rock-n-roll-lovin' hippie wannabe, reading: The American Conservative. and i bet i have plenty of company from my beloved freak-flag-flyin' Left here.

"politics makes strange bedfellows." never more true than now...

this conservative writer unleashes his righteous scorn at today's chickenshit neocon adventurists.

January 31, 2005 issue
Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative

Walking Wounded
Old soldiers don't fade away

by Fred Reed

The observant will have noticed that we hear little from the troops in Iraq and see almost nothing of the wounded. Why, one might wonder, does not CNN put an enlisted Marine before a camera and, for 15 minutes without editing, let him say what he thinks? Is he not an adult and a citizen? Is he not engaged in important events on our behalf?

Sound political reasons exist. Soldiers are a risk PR-wise, the wounded a liability. No one can tell what they might say, and conspicuous dismemberment is bad for recruiting. An enlisted man in front of a camera is dangerous. He could wreck the governmental spin apparatus in five minutes. It is better to keep soldiers discreetly out of sight.

So we do not see much of the casualties, ours or theirs. Yet they are there, somewhere, with missing legs, blind, becoming accustomed to groping at things in their new darkness, learning to use the wheelchairs that will be theirs for 50 years. Some face worse fates than others. Quadriplegics will be warehoused in VA hospitals where nurses will turn them at intervals, like hamburgers, to prevent bedsores. Friends and relatives will soon forget them. Suicide will be a frequent thought. The less damaged will get around.

For a brief moment perhaps the casualties will believe, then try desperately to keep believing, that they did something brave and worthy and terribly important for that abstraction, country. Some will expect thanks. But there will be no thanks, or few, and those quickly forgotten. It will be worse. People will ask how they lost the leg. In Iraq, they will say, hoping for sympathy, or respect, or understanding. The response, often unvoiced but unmistakable, will be, "What did you do that for?" The wounded will realize that they are not only crippled, but freaks.

The years will go by. Iraq will fade into the mist. Wars always do. A generation will rise for whom it will be just history. The dismembered veterans will find first that almost nobody appreciates what they did, then that few even remember it. If—when, many would say—the United States is driven out of Iraq, the soldiers will look back and realize that the whole affair was a fraud. Wars are just wars. They seem important at the time. At any rate, we are told that they are important.

Yet the wounds will remain. Arms do not grow back. For the paralyzed there will never be girlfriends, dancing, rolling in the grass with children. The blind will adapt as best they can. Those with merely a missing leg will count themselves lucky. They will hobble about, managing to lead semi-normal lives, and people will say, "How well he handles it." An admirable freak. For others it will be less good. A colostomy bag is a sorry companion on a wedding night.

These men will come to hate. It will not be the Iraqis they hate. This we do not talk about.

It is hard to admit that one has been used. Some of the crippled will forever insist that the war was needed, that they were protecting their sisters from an Islamic invasion, or Vietnamese, or Chinese. Others will keep quiet and drink too much. Still others will read, grow older and wiser—and bitter. They will remember that their vice president, a man named Cheney, said that during his war, the one in Asia, he "had other priorities." The veterans will remember this when everyone else has long since forgotten Cheney.

I once watched the first meeting between a young Marine from the South, blind, much of his face shot away, and his high-school sweetheart, who had come from Tennessee to Bethesda Naval Hospital to see him.

Hatred comes easily. There are wounds and there are wounds. A friend of mine spent two tours in Asia in that war now little remembered. He killed many people, not all of them soldiers. It is what happens in wars. The memory haunts him. Jack is a hard man from a tough neighborhood, quick with his fists, intelligent but uneducated—not a liberal flower vain over his sensitivity. He lives in Mexican bars few would enter and has no politics beyond an anger toward government. He was not a joyous killer. He remembers what he did, knows now that he was had. It gnaws at him. One is wise to stay away from him when he is drinking.

People say that this war isn't like Vietnam. They are correct. Washington fights its war in Iraq with no better understanding of Iraq than it had of Vietnam, but with much better understanding of the United States. The Pentagon learned from Asia. This time around it has controlled the press well. Here is the great lesson of Southeast Asia: the press is dangerous, not because it is inaccurate, which it often is, but because it often isn't. So we don't much see the caskets — for reasons of privacy, you understand.

The war in Iraq is fought by volunteers, which means people that no one in power cares about. No one in the mysteriously named "elite" gives a damn about some kid from a town in Tennessee that has one gas station and a beer hall with a stuffed buck's head. Such a kid is a redneck at best, pretty much from another planet, and certainly not someone you would let your daughter date. If conscription came back, and college students with rich parents learned to live in fear of The Envelope, riots would blossom as before. Now Yale can rest easy. Thank God for throwaway people.

The nearly perfect separation between the military and the rest of the country, or at least the influential in the country, is wonderful for the war effort. It prevents concern. How many people with a college degree even know a soldier? Yes, some, and I will get e-mail from them, but they are a minority. How many Americans have been on a military base? Or, to be truly absurd, how many men in combat arms went to, say, Harvard? Ah, but they have other priorities.

In 15 years in Washington, I knew many, many reporters and intellectuals and educated people. Almost none had worn boots. So it is. Those who count do not have to go, and do not know anyone who has gone, and don't interest themselves. There is a price for this, though not one Washington cares about. Across America, in places where you might not expect it—in Legion halls and VFW posts, among those who carry membership cards from the Disabled American Veterans—there are men who hate. They don't hate America. They hate those who sent them. Talk to the wounded from Iraq in five years.
_________________________________________________________

Fred Reed's writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Harper's, and National Review, among other places.

a pithy observation...

2005-01-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

from none other than Terry Jones of Monty Python fame (who shows here that he'd probably be as good as a political leader as he has been as a naked organist):

"The war on terror is a war on an abstract noun. An abstract noun
can't surrender; it can't do anything really. How do you know when you've won? When the noun gets kicked out of the Oxford English Dictionary? But that's a very useful tool for politicians, to declare an unwinnable war. They can keep it going as long as they like. They can decide when it's won."

yep.

"put that in your [hash] pipes and smoke it," i would say to all the credulous idiots who are presently oohing and aahing about ShrubCo's ridiculously over-the-top, lethally faux-pious inaugural rant yesterday. (i mean, really - was the guy reverting to pre-sobriety days? huffing glue? what?)

post-inaugural words...

2005-01-21T07:56:00.000-08:00

these (from "The Outsiders," by R.E.M.) seem especially fitting right now.

is it '06 yet?

A man walks away when every muscle says to stay
How many yesterdays? they each weigh heavy
Who says what changes may come?
Who says what we call home?
I know you see right through me, my luminescence fades
The dusk provides an antidote, I am not afraid
I've been a million times in my mind
This is really just a technicality, frailty, reality

It's time to breathe, time to believe
Let it go and run towards the sea
They don't teach that, they don't know what you mean
They don't understand, they don't know what you mean
They don't get it, I wanna scream
I wanna breathe again, I wanna dream
I wanna float a quote from Martin Luther King
I am not afraid
I am not afraid
I am not afraid

I am not afraid
I am not afraid
I am not afraid
I am not afraid

(c) 2004 R.E.M./Athens Ltd.

new year? time for a new crisis

2005-01-13T06:46:00.000-08:00

ShrubCo's current moves on SS should indeed look familiar to anybody who watched the invidious, panic-mongering buildup to the Iraq invasion in 2002-03. which would be most of us, thanks to the breathless, servile media coverage of same.

my question is: if this pattern of rule-by-fear is so obvious and so ruinous (and it is both of those things), why were so many people inclined to do something as stupid as to vote for its continuation?

but that, like all the truly Big Questions, will i'm sure go forever unanswered... since there really IS no answer that an intelligent human being could possibly understand.

President of Fabricated Crises
By Harold Meyerson
The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 12, 2005; Page A21

Some presidents make the history books by managing crises. Lincoln had Fort Sumter, Roosevelt had the Depression and Pearl Harbor, and Kennedy had the missiles in Cuba. George W. Bush, of course, had Sept. 11, and for a while thereafter -- through the overthrow of the Taliban -- he earned his page in history, too.

But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the
privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none.

So Iraq became a clear and present danger to American hearths and homes, bristling with weapons of mass destruction, a nuclear attack just waiting to happen. And now, this week, the president is embarking on his second great scare campaign, this one to convince the American people that Social Security will collapse and that the only remedy is to cut benefits and redirect resources into private accounts.

In fact, Social Security is on a sounder footing now than it has been for most of its 70-year history. Without altering any of its particulars, its trustees say, it can pay full benefits straight through 2042. Over the next 75 years its shortfall will amount to just 0.7 percent of national income, according to the trustees, or 0.4 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That still amounts to a real chunk of change, but it pales alongside the 75-year cost of Bush's Medicare drug benefit, which is more than twice its size, or Bush's tax cuts if permanently extended, which would be nearly four times its size.

In short, Social Security is not facing a financial crisis at all. It is facing a need for some distinctly sub-cataclysmic adjustments over the next few decades that would increase its revenue and diminish its benefits.

Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935. But Bush doesn't need Karl Rove's counsel to know that repealing Social Security for reasons of ideology is a non-starter.

So it's time once more to fabricate a crisis. In Bushland, it's always time to fabricate a crisis. We have a crisis in medical malpractice costs, though the CBO says that malpractice costs amount to less than 2 percent of total health care costs. (In fact, what we have is a president who wants to diminish the financial, and thus political, clout of trial lawyers.) We have a crisis in judicial vacancies, though in fact Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block just 10 of Bush's 229 first-term judicial appointments.

With crisis concoction as its central task -- think of how many administration officials issued dire warnings of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein or, now, by Social Security's impending bankruptcy -- this presidency, more than any I can think of, has relied on the classic tools of propaganda. Indeed, it's almost impossible to imagine the Bush presidency absent the Fox News Network and right-wing talk radio.

With the blurring of fact and fiction so central to the Bush presidency's purposes, is it any wonder that government agencies ranging from Health and Human Services to the Office of National Drug Control Policy have been filming editorial messages as mock newscast segments, complete with mock reporters, and offering them to local television stations?

Is it any wonder that the Education Department paid commentator Armstrong Williams $241,000 to promote its No Child Left Behind programs? In this administration, it is the role of a government agency to turn out pro-Bush news by whatever means possible. Fox News viewership in the African American community wasn't very large, and here was Williams, who seemed to have learned during his clerkship for Clarence Thomas that it was rude to decline any gifts.

We've had plenty of presidents, Richard Nixon most notoriously, who divided the media into friendly and enemy camps. I can't think of one, however, so fundamentally invested in the spread of disinformation -- and so fundamentally indifferent to the corrosive effect of propaganda on democracy -- as Bush. That, too, should earn him a page in the history books.

meyersonh@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

an open letter

2005-01-07T13:32:00.000-08:00

...sent via the senator's website email utility earlier this afternoon. this pretty much is all i have to say on yesterday's events.

Dear Senator Boxer,

Though I am not a constituent of yours, I wanted you to know how much your support of Rep. Tubbs-Jones' objection to the Ohio election certification means to me. I am quite sure I speak for thousands of my fellow Texans when I say 'thank you' for your principled and statesmanlike decision yesterday to stand up for every single American voter, at this time when our most fundamental right has become so endangered.

I know that nothing as honorable as this kind of action can ever be done without the actor paying a political price for it. Therefore I salute you for your exemplary courage in taking this stand, and in standing up to forces that are threatening the very life of our democracy.

I only wish that your Senate colleagues, many of whom purport to agree with you on the principle involved here, had found the same kind of courage in themselves and had supported you in the objection. Their timorous behavior only places your own honorable act in higher relief.

Once more, thank you, Senator Boxer, from a grateful Texan and a fellow American - one who longs for the day when ALL of our voices will finally be heard.

Respectfully,
[prufie]

a fleeting, shining moment...

2005-01-06T13:08:00.000-08:00

the following is Sen. Barbara Boxer's statement in support of U.S. Representative Stephanie Tubbs-Jones' formal complaint regarding the 2004 Ohio presidential vote. i understand that Sen. Obama is also joining in support of the complaint. Tom Harkin, too. and even Harry Reid now - despite his rather craven attitude toward bucking the tyrant thus far.

all of them are that rarity among us: elected Americans of whom their decent fellow citizens, for this single day of honesty about the train-wreck that is our current election system, can be truly proud. of course the howling pack of jackals that is the Republican majority, the voice of the mob and the moral void, will shout them down, fall on them, swiftly end this moment of majesty... but we should still savor and hallow this day while we can.

doing so is our duty - on behalf of the Founders of a nation, an idea, that has almost completely been obscured by the corruption and chicanery of today's politics.

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Statement On Her Objection To The Certification Of Ohio's Electoral Votes
January 6, 2005

For most of us in the Senate and the House, we have spent our lives fighting for things we believe in – always fighting to make our nation better.

We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice.

Now we must add a new fight – the fight for electoral justice.

Every citizen of this country who is registered to vote should be guaranteed that their vote matters, that their vote is counted, and that in the voting booth of their community, their vote has as much weight as the vote of any Senator, any Congressperson, any President, any cabinet member, or any CEO of any Fortune 500 Corporation.

I am sure that every one of my colleagues – Democrat, Republican, and Independent – agrees with that statement. That in the voting booth, every one is equal.

So now it seems to me that under the Constitution of the United States, which guarantees the right to vote, we must ask:

Why did voters in Ohio wait hours in the rain to vote? Why were voters at Kenyan College, for example, made to wait in line until nearly 4 a.m. to vote because there were only two machines for 1300 voters?

Why did poor and predominantly African-American communities have disproportionately long waits?

Why in Franklin County did election officials only use 2,798 machines when they said they needed 5,000? Why did they hold back 68 machines in warehouses? Why were 42 of those machines in predominantly African-American districts?

Why did, in Columbus area alone, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 voters leave polling places, out of frustration, without having voted? How many more never bothered to vote after they heard about this?

Why is it when 638 people voted at a precinct in Franklin County, a voting machine awarded 4,258 extra votes to George Bush. Thankfully, they fixed it – but how many other votes did the computers get wrong?

Why did Franklin County officials reduce the number of electronic voting machines in downtown precincts, while adding them in the suburbs? This also led to long lines.

In Cleveland, why were there thousands of provisional ballots disqualified after poll workers gave faulty instructions to voters?

Because of this, and voting irregularities in so many other places, I am joining with Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones to cast the light of truth on a flawed system which must be fixed now.

Our democracy is the centerpiece of who we are as a nation. And it is the fondest hope of all Americans that we can help bring democracy to every corner of the world.

As we try to do that, and as we are shedding the blood of our military to this end, we must realize that we lose so much credibility when our own electoral system needs so much improvement.

Yet, in the past four years, this Congress has not done everything it should to give confidence to all of our people their votes matter.

After passing the Help America Vote Act, nothing more was done.

A year ago, Senators Graham, Clinton and I introduced legislation that would have required that electronic voting systems provide a paper record to verify a vote.

That paper trail would be stored in a secure ballot box and invaluable in case of a recount.

There is no reason why the Senate should not have taken up and passed that bill. At the very least, a hearing should have been held. But it never happened.

Before I close, I want to thank my colleague from the House, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

Her letter to me asking for my intervention was substantive and compelling.

As I wrote to her, I was particularly moved by her point that it is virtually impossible to get official House consideration of the whole issue of election reform, including these irregularities.

The Congresswoman has tremendous respect in her state of Ohio, which is at the center of this fight.

Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones was a judge for 10 years. She was a prosecutor for 8 years. She was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame in 2002.

I am proud to stand with her in filing this objection.

there IS a God...

2004-12-22T08:36:00.000-08:00

...and S/He goes by "Dieu" at least some of the time, i'm thinking.

thanks to Acid for pointing out this link. :-)

mark gets on the buy-blue train

2004-12-22T08:24:00.000-08:00

jeez - Et tu, Amazon??? well, it's better that we know, anyway.

consumer news you can use follows. glad to see that mighty Mark is onboard with this...

Amazon.com Is For Republicans

Attention, liberal shoppers! Next year, screw those GOP-supportin' companies, and try buying blue

- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Do you care much that greasy ol' Pizza Hut gave tens of thousands in PAC money to the GOP last year? How about the fact that Taco Bell stopped pumping out their happily toxic semirancid meatlike substances just long enough to write a fat check to the conservative Right? Isn't that weirdly fascinating, in a depressing and indigestible sort of way?

Does it matter a whit that, say, Fruit of the Loom underwear gave nearly 100 percent of its corporate donations to tighty-whitey-wearing Republicans, nearly every one of whom I'm guessing wouldn't know appetizing undergarments from a flap of burlap and some string?

Do you think maybe it should? Matter, that is?

This is what happened: there was this list, see, a long and rather surprising list of major consumer corporations in America, and it detailed just how much money each company forked over to the respective political parties last year in political-action-committee (PAC) donations.

Stop yawning. It gets better.

And the list was a bit revelatory and interesting, as such lists are often wont to be, and the companies' fiscal behavior might even surprise you a little, might even take you aback and make you reconsider your consumerist options, especially the part about how Amazon.com gave 60 percent of their donations to the GOP and except maybe for the part about how Coors Brewing gave almost every penny of their donations to Republicans in a concerted effort to, presumably, stop them icky Colorado gays from getting married and keep women in their place, all while furthering the cause of skanky undrinkable pisswater beer made for red-blooded Americans who lack taste buds and hope.

And this list, it recently winged its way around the Net and landed in a million liberal e-mail boxes and it became an instant mini sensation, and then did what any good electronic sensation does: it spawned a Web site.

And the site, called buyblue.org (along with its more detailed but less intuitively named counterpart, choosetheblue.com), spawned a mini movement and the mini movement spawned this very column and now you are right now encouraged to go see for yourself and discover the moderately shocking truths regarding which big shiny companies suck up to the happy sneering homophobic enviro-slappin' warmongering Repubs and which give thousands to the whiny limping kick-us-when-we're-down Demos.

And then what? Just what are you supposed to do with this information? Well, like any good American living in a gutted economy that's trillions in debt, all while a massive bogus unwinnable war is being waged by the most irresponsible cadre of pseudo-leaders this nation has ever known, you go shopping.

But maybe, just maybe, you shift your choices just a little. Maybe you change where your weakened and abused dollar goes as it slowly dawns on you that you might not be as powerless as you might've thought.

And maybe you recognize that if there's one thing that corporations absolutely goddamn never fail to respond to in a million years, it's the bottom line, consumer satisfaction, the almighty but increasingly limp dollar. You think?

Because I don't care how shriveled the souls of a given company's GOP-lovin' board of directors are, if they see profits dropping because all the shoppers in the huge and culturally potent blue cities -- the shoppers, in other words, who don't live in the red welfare states and hence who actually have a shred of disposable income and maybe a modicum of concern and integrity regarding who profits when they spend it -- if they notice that those shoppers are suddenly skipping nasty little Circuit City (98 percent to Repubs) and instead buy their compressed-plastic Japanese-made landfill-ready electronics at monstrous Price Club (98 percent to Dems), well, it sends them a message.

And the message is, in a calm and respectful nutshell, "Bite me."

Because this is what I get asked all the time: What can I do? How can I possibly help stop the ominous onslaught of born-again right-wing hypocrisy and fear and the Parents Television Council and all the bogus Texas machismo now flooding the nation like a bad country song? Here is part of your answer.

And no, it ain't exactly like marching in the streets and it ain't exactly as helpful as shifting your lifestyle over to organic foods and sustainable living and to buying local and supporting hybrid this and recyclable that, all while cranking your alt-spiritual vibration and having spectacular and deeply nonconservative sex.

But it's something. It's a start, a baby step. It is about getting informed, just a little, and realizing that you are, in fact, the fuel for America's economic engine, and if you decide to get yourself into massive credit card debt at the right kind of stores instead of those whose executives apparently believe that God really does hate gays and trees and women and the poor and anyone who wears a turban or speaks French, well, maybe it will make you feel just slightly more aligned and maybe it can make a tiny bit of difference and Goddess knows a difference is so desperately needed right now you can't even believe it.

What can you do? You can skip the Marriott or the Holiday Inn (76 and 73 percent to the GOP respectively), and stay at the lib-friendly Hyatt. Skip Yahoo.com (a shocking 92 percent to the GOP -- what the hell?) and head over to Google, which gave 100 percent (!) of their donations to the Dems (side note: Google rules).

What else? Toss American and Continental, fly JetBlue. Join NetFlix. Screw Repub-lovin' Wal-Mart and K-Mart (and, if you're reading this column, chances are you need no prompting from me to avoid those epic karmic wastelands) and head over to the giant vortex of consumer madness known as Bed Bath & Beyond, which gave 93 percent to the Dems. I know. I hate that store, too. But now you get to hate them a little less.

Another amazing example? Starbucks. And as much as I despise their ruthless march into funky neighborhoods and strip malls across the nation, the coffee monolith does indeed have truly fabulous employee benefits and incredible customer service, and now you learn that they gave 100 percent of their donations, every single frothy frappaccinoed dime, to the Democrats. It's true. So leave that hideous Folgers and
the Sanka swill to jittery BushCo. Go get yourself a peppermint mocha and feel good about it.

As for Amazon, well, it is a bit distressing for many of us who love that bulbous megastore and who shop there all the time to discover that they gave so much to Repubs, which is just odd and a bit inexplicable, especially given how they're based in hugely liberal Seattle and geeky CEO Jeff Bezos seemed at one time to be reasonably attuned and quirky and progressive, except maybe he's not.

Maybe he's just another hollow profiteer who supports war and disses foreigners and thinks gays are, you know, icky. But then again, Amazon did give 40 percent to Democrats. So it's a close call. After all, the venerable and terminally annoying Barnes & Noble gave 98 percent to the Dems, and I can't stand Barnes & Noble. But now, like Starbucks, I hate them a little less. And now maybe I'll just skip Amazon and buy my next gift copy of "The Surrender" or "What's the Matter with Kansas?" from B&N instead.

See? See how easy? Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

i love it!!!

2004-12-21T14:14:00.000-08:00

what are they going to arrest people for... turning around?

and Shrub's hyperactive little public-wrangler trolls won't know who's involved until the moment of the Great About-Face. yay!!!

just wish i could be there to do it myself. i hope it gets splashed all OVER people's TV screens... in your face, red states! (and here's NOT looking at you, frat-boy scumbag).

when playing the victim...

2004-12-20T14:53:00.000-08:00

...it's much more convincing if you're actually being victimized.

Frank Rich states here, more eloquently than i can, just how ridiculous it is for these minions of the majority to whine about supposedly being marginalized. hypocritical histrionics - that's all this earnest right-wing fundy whining about Christmas is.

December 19, 2004
The New York Times
2004: The Year of 'The Passion'
By FRANK RICH

Will it be the Jews' fault if "The Passion of the Christ," ignored by the Golden Globes this week, comes up empty in the Oscar nominations next month? Why, of course.

"Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular," William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, explained in a colloquy on the subject recently convened by Pat Buchanan on MSNBC. "It's not a secret, O.K.?" Mr. Donohue continued. "And I'm not afraid to say it. That's why they hate this movie. It's about Jesus Christ, and it's about truth." After the show's token (and conservative) Jewish panelist, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, pointed out that "Michael Moore is certainly not a Jew" and that Scorsese, Coppola and Lucas are not "Jewish names," Mr. Donohue responded: "I like Harvey Weinstein. How's that? Harvey Weinstein is my friend."

How's that? Not quite good enough. Surely Mr. Donohue knows that decorum in these situations requires that he cite a Jew as one of his "best friends," not merely a friend. For shame.

As we close the books on 2004, and not a moment too soon, it's clear that, as far as the culture goes, this year belonged to Mel Gibson's mammoth hit. Its prurient and interminable wallow in the Crucifixion, to the point where Jesus' actual teachings become mere passing footnotes to the sumptuously depicted mutilation of his flesh, is as representative of our time as "Godspell" was of terminal-stage hippiedom 30 years ago. The Gibson conflation of religion with violence reflects the universal order of the day — whether the verbal fisticuffs of the culture war within America, as exemplified by Mr. Donohue's rant on national television or, far more lethally, the savagery of the actual war that radical Islam brought to our doorstep on 9/11.

"The Passion" is a one-size-fits-all touchstone, it seems. It didn't just excite and anger a lot of moviegoers in our own country but also broke box-office records abroad, including in the Middle East. Most Arab governments censor films that depict prophets (Jesus included), even banning recent benign Hollywood products like the Jim Carrey vehicle "Bruce Almighty" and the animated musical "Prince of Egypt." But an exception was made for Mr. Gibson's blood fest nearly everywhere. It was seen in Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Among the satisfied customers last spring was Yasser Arafat, who called the film "moving and historical" — a thumb's up that has not, to my knowledge, yet surfaced in the film's low-key Oscar campaign.

Arafat's animus was clear enough; an aide said at the time that he likened Jesus' suffering, as depicted in "The Passion," to that of the Palestinians at the hands of Israel. Our domestic culture war over religion is not so easily explained.

You'd think peace might reign in a nation where there is so much unanimity of faith. In Newsweek's "Birth of Jesus" holiday cover article — not to be confused with Time's competing "Secrets of the Nativity" cover — a poll found that 84 percent of American adults call themselves Christian, 82 percent see Jesus as the son of God, and 79 percent believe in the Virgin Birth. Though by a far slimmer margin, the presidential election reinstalled a chief executive who ostentatiously invokes a Christian Almighty. As for "The Passion of the Christ," it achieved the monetary landslide of a $370 million domestic gross (second only to the cartoon saviors Shrek and Spider-Man).

Yet if you watch the news and listen to certain politicians, especially since Election Day, you'll hear an ever-growing drumbeat that Christianity is under siege in America. Like Mr. Gibson, the international movie star who portrayed himself as a powerless martyr to a shadowy anti- Christian conspiracy in the run-up to the release of "The Passion," his fellow travelers on the right detect a sinister plot — of secularists, "secular Jews" and "elites" — out to destroy the religion followed by more than four out of every five Americans.

In the latest and most bizarre twist on this theme, even Christmas is now said to be a target of the anti-Christian mob. "Are we going to abolish the word Christmas?" asked Newt Gingrich, warning that "it absolutely can happen here." Among those courageously leading the fight to save the holiday from its enemies is Bill O'Reilly, who has taken to calling the Anti-Defamation League "an extremist group" and put the threat this way: "Remember, more than 90 percent of American homes celebrate Christmas. But the small minority that is trying to impose its will on the majority is so vicious, so dishonest — and has to be dealt with."

If more than 90 percent of American households celebrate Christmas, you have to wonder why the guy is whining. The only evidence of what Pat Buchanan has called Christmas-season "hate crimes against Christianity" consists of a few ridiculous and isolated incidents, like the banishment of a religious float from a parade in Denver and of religious songs from a high school band concert in New Jersey. (In scale, this is nothing compared with the refusal of the world's largest retailer, Wal- Mart, to stock George Carlin's new best seller, "When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?," whose cover depicts its author at the Last Supper.) Yet the hysteria is being pumped up daily by Fox News, newspapers like The New York Post and The Washington Times, and Web sites like savemerrychristmas.org. Mr. O'Reilly and Jerry Falwell have gone so far as to name Michael Bloomberg an anti-Christmas conspirator because the mayor referred to the Christmas tree as a "holiday tree" in the lighting ceremony at Rockefeller Center.

What is this about? How can those in this country's overwhelming religious majority maintain that they are victims in a fiery battle with forces of darkness? It is certainly not about actual victimization. Christmas is as pervasive as it has ever been in America, where it wasn't even declared a federal holiday until after the Civil War. What's really going on here is yet another example of a post-Election-Day winner-takes-all power grab by the "moral values" brigade. As Mr. Gibson shrewdly contrived his own crucifixion all the way to the bank, trumping up nonexistent threats to his movie to hype it, so the creation of imagined enemies and exaggerated threats to Christianity by "moral values" mongers of the right has its own secular purpose. The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy. If you're against their views, you don't have a differing opinion — you're anti-Christian (even if you are a Christian).

The power of this minority within the Christian majority comes from its exaggerated claims on the Bush election victory. It is enhanced further by a news culture, especially on television, that gives the Mel Gibson wing of Christianity more say than other Christian voices and that usually ignores minority religions altogether. This is not just a Fox phenomenon. Something is off when NBC's "Meet the Press" and ABC's "This Week," mainstream TV shows both, invite religious leaders to discuss "values" in the aftermath of the election and limit that discussion to all-male panels composed exclusively of either evangelical ministers or politicians with pseudo-spiritual credentials. Does Mr. Falwell, who after 9/11 blamed Al Qaeda's attack partly on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," speak for any sizable group of American Christians? Does the Rev. Al Sharpton, booked on TV as a "balance" to Mr. Falwell, do so either? Mr. Sharpton doesn't even have a congregation; like Mr. Falwell, he is a politician first, a religious leader second (or maybe fourth or fifth).

Gary Bauer and James Dobson are also secular political figures, not religious leaders, yet they are more frequently called upon to play them on television than actual clergy are. "It's theological correctness," says the Rev. Debra Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister who directs a national interfaith group, the Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice and Healing, and is one of the rare progressive religious voices to get any TV time. She detects an overall "understanding" in the media that religion "is one voice — fundamentalist." That understanding may have little to do with the beliefs of television news producers — or even the beliefs of fundamentalists themselves — and more to do with the raw, secular political power that the press has attributed to "values" crusaders since the election. "There is the belief that the conservative view won, and the media are more interested in winners," says Frances Kissling, president of Catholics for a Free Choice.

Even more important than inflated notions of the fundamentalists' power may be their entertainment value. As Ms. Kissling points out, the 50 million Americans who belong to progressive religious organizations are rarely represented on television because "progressive religious leaders are so tolerant that they don't make good TV." The Rev. Bob Chase of the United Church of Christ agrees: "We're not exciting guests." His church's recent ad trumpeting its inclusion of gay couples was rejected by the same networks that routinely give a forum to the far more dramatic anti-gay views of Mr. Falwell. Ms. Kissling laments that contemporary progressive Christians lack an intellectual star to rival Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin, but adds that today "Jesus Christ would have a tough time getting covered by TV if he didn't get arrested."

This paradigm is everywhere in our news culture. When Jon Stewart went on CNN's "Crossfire" to demand that its hosts stop "hurting America" by turning news and political debate into a form of pro wrestling, it may have sounded a bit hyperbolic. "Crossfire" is an aging show that few watch. But his broader point holds up: it's all crossfire now. In the electronic news sphere where most Americans live much of the time, anyone who refuses to engage in combat is quickly sent packing as a bore.

Toss the issue of religion into that 24/7 wrestling match, as into any conflict in human history, and the incendiary possibilities are limitless. When even phenomena as innocuous as Oscar nominations or the lighting of a Christmas tree can be inflated into divisive religious warfare, it's only a matter of time before someone uncovers an anti-Christian plot in "White Christmas." It avoids any mention of religion and it was, as William Donohue might be the first to point out, written by a secular Jew.

a welcome flaming of "centrism"

2004-12-20T08:40:00.000-08:00

...again, from The Nation.

just when are progressives going to catch on to the FACT that we are the ones in the true mainstream after all?

i guess we'll know that moment when it comes - because the likes of Al From, Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman will all be scampering away from their seats of power, yipping like whipped dogs, under the lash of TRUE populism.

personally, i can't wait.

Debunking 'Centrism'

by DAVID SIROTA
THE NATION
[from the January 3, 2005 issue]

Looking out over Washington, DC, from his plush office, Al From is once again foaming at the mouth. The CEO of the corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Council and his wealthy cronies are in their regular postelection attack mode. Despite wins by economic populists in red states like Colorado and Montana this year, the DLC is claiming like a broken record that progressive policies are hurting the Democratic Party.

From's group is funded by huge contributions from multinationals like Philip Morris, Texaco, Enron and Merck, which have all, at one point or another, slathered the DLC with cash. Those resources have been used to push a nakedly corporate agenda under the guise of "centrism" while allowing the DLC to parrot GOP criticism of populist Democrats as far-left extremists. Worse, the mainstream media follow suit, characterizing progressive positions on everything from trade to healthcare to taxes as ultra-liberal. As the AP recently claimed, "party liberals argue that the party must energize its base by moving to the left" while "the DLC and other centrist groups argue that the party must court moderates and find a way to compete in the Midwest and South."

Is this really true? Is a corporate agenda really "centrism"? Or is it only "centrist" among Washington's media elite, influence peddlers and out-of-touch political class?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "centrism" as "the political philosophy of avoiding the extremes of right and left by taking a moderate position." So to find out what is really "mainstream," the best place to look is public polling data.

Let's start with economic policy. The DLC and the press claim Democrats who attack President Bush and the Republicans for siding with the superwealthy are waging "class warfare," which they claim will hurt Democrats at the ballot box. Yet almost every major poll shows Americans already essentially believe Republicans are waging a class war on behalf of the rich--they are simply waiting for a national party to give voice to the issue. In March 2004, for example, a Washington Post poll found a whopping 67 percent of Americans believe the Bush Administration favors large corporations over the middle class.

The "centrists" tell Democrats not to hammer corporations for their misbehavior and not to push for a serious crackdown on corporate excess, for fear the party will be hurt by an "anti-business" image. Yet such a posture, pioneered by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, is mainstream: A 2002 Washington Post poll taken during the height of the corporate accounting scandals found that 88 percent of Americans distrust corporate executives, 90 percent want new corporate regulations/tougher enforcement of existing laws and more than half think the Bush Administration is "not tough enough" in fighting corporate crime.

On taxes, self-described "centrists" like Senator Joe Lieberman, a senior DLC leader, attacked proposals to repeal the Bush tax cuts to pay down the deficit. Yet even the DLC's pollster found in 2001 that a majority of Americans support such a policy, and that a strong plurality of voters would actually be more likely to vote for a Democrat who endorsed this proposal. Lieberman caricatured those in favor of repeal as extreme, claiming a repeal would alienate millions of voters who supposedly feel the tax cut helped them. Yet a September 2004 CBS News poll found that 72 percent of Americans say they have either not been affected by the Bush tax cuts or that their taxes have actually gone up.

On healthcare, we are led to believe that it is a "liberal," "left" or "socialist" position to support a single-payer system that would provide universal coverage to all Americans. But if you believe the Washington Post, that would mean America was some sort of hippie commune. The newspaper's 2003 national poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans say they prefer a universal healthcare system "that's run by the government and financed by taxpayers" as opposed to the current private, for-profit system.

Same thing with prescription drugs. DLCers like Senators John Breaux and Evan Bayh, who both pocket thousands from the pharmaceutical industry, have vehemently opposed bipartisan legislation allowing Americans to import lower-priced, FDA-approved medicines from Canada. But polls consistently show overwhelming support for the proposal. A March 2004 AP poll, for instance, showed that two-thirds of Americans favor making it "easier for people to buy prescription drugs from Canada or other countries at lower cost." The measure is so popular among average Americans that even some ardent Republicans like Senator Trent Lott have been embarrassed into supporting it. But apparently the same can't be said for some corporate factions of the Democratic Party.

On energy policy, those who want government to mandate higher fuel efficiency in cars are labeled "lefties," even though a 2004 Consumers Union poll found that 81 percent of Americans support the policy. Corporate apologists claim this "extremist" policy would hurt Democrats in places like Michigan, where the automobile manufacturers employ thousands. But the Sierra Club's 2004 polling finds more than three-quarters of Michigan voters support it--including 84 percent of the state's autoworkers.

Even in the face of massive job loss and outsourcing, the media are still labeling corporate Democrats' support for free trade as "centrist." And the DLC, which led the fight for NAFTA and the China trade deal, attacks those who want to renegotiate those pacts as just a marginal group of "protectionists." Yet a January 2004 PIPA/University of Maryland poll found that "a majority [of the American public] is critical of US government trade policy." A 1999 poll done on the five-year anniversary of the North American trade deal was even more telling: Only 24 percent of Americans said they wanted to "continue the NAFTA agreement." The public outrage at trade deals has been so severe, pollster Steve Kull noted, that support dropped even among upper-income Americans "who've most avidly supported trade and globalization [and] who've taken the lead in pushing the free-trade agenda forward."

Despite this overwhelming evidence, Washington, DC, Democrats apparently have not gotten the message that their current definition of "centrism" is actually pulling the party further and further out of the mainstream. Instead, insiders are doing their best ostrich imitation: putting their heads in the sand, pretending nothing is wrong and continuing down the same path that sells out America's working class--the demographic that used to be the party's base.

For instance, the DLC has issued a "heartland strategy," telling Democrats to jettison economic populism, which has been used to elect Democrats in various red regions in America. Their solution? "Talk more about reducing teen pregnancy and out-of-wedlock births, which have led to an expansion of single-parent families beset by poverty, welfare dependence, and other social ills." Above all else, they caution, do not turn up "the volume on anti-business and class warfare themes"--a euphemism for not discussing DLC-backed free-trade policies that have ravaged economies throughout the heartland. The strategy conveniently avoids the issues that might make the DLC's corporate backers uncomfortable.

Now an effort is under way to set this faux "centrism" in stone. One of the leading candidates for Democratic National Committee chairman is Simon Rosenberg, a former free-trade lobbyist and head of the business-backed New Democrat Network. His group is joined by even more organizations designed to push the party to the right. The Washington Post reports that a group calling itself the "Third Way" (read: "Wrong Way") is forming to tout "centrist" policies for Democrats. Instead of leaving the Beltway and holding a town meeting to gauge the pulse of red America's working-class core, the group held its initial meeting "over dinner at a Georgetown mansion." Instead of engaging in grassroots funding efforts, it is openly relying on corporate contributions.

"The answer to the ideological extremes of the right has to be more than rigid dogma from the left," said Senator Bayh, a leader of the new group and one of Washington's most highly trumpeted "centrists." But really, who is pushing a rigid dogma: these bankrolled politicians who have hijacked "centrism" to sell out America's middle class, or the progressive populists who most often have the backing of the American people?

an intelligent indictment of Wally World

2004-12-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

...from The Nation. this actually takes a compassionate look at Wal-Mart customers as well as workers - who are often the same people - and illustrates just how the company is able to carry out its vile strategy with the help of good, if powerless, people.

my favorite quote: "It's ironic that a company so dependent on the public dole supports so many right-wing politicians who'd like to dismantle the welfare state."

Down and Out in Discount America
by LIZA FEATHERSTONE
THE NATION
[from the January 3, 2005 issue]

On the day after Thanksgiving, the biggest shopping day of the year, Wal-Mart's many progressive critics--not to mention its business competitors--finally enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude when the retailer had to admit to "disappointing" sales. The problem was quickly revealed: Wal-Mart hadn't been discounting aggressively enough. Without low prices, Wal-Mart just isn't Wal-Mart.

That's not a mistake the big-box behemoth is likely to make again. Wal-Mart knows its customers, and it knows how badly they need the discounts. Like Wal-Mart's workers, its customers are overwhelmingly female, and struggling to make ends meet. Betty Dukes, the lead plaintiff in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the landmark sex-discrimination case against the company, points out that Wal-Mart takes out ads in her local paper the same day the community's poorest citizens collect their welfare checks. "They are promoting themselves to low-income people," she says. "That's who they lure. They don't lure the rich.... They understand the economy of America. They know the haves and have-nots. They don't put Wal-Mart in Piedmonts. They don't put Wal-Mart in those high-end parts of the community. They plant themselves right in the middle of Poorville."

Betty Dukes is right. A 2000 study by Andrew Franklin, then an economist at the University of Connecticut, showed that Wal-Mart operated primarily in poor and working-class communities, finding, in the bone-dry language of his discipline, "a significant negative relationship between median household income and Wal-Mart's presence in the market." Although fancy retailers noted with chagrin during the 2001 recession that absolutely everybody shops at Wal-Mart--"Even people with $100,000 incomes now shop at Wal-Mart," a PR flack for one upscale mall fumed--the Bloomingdale's set is not the discounter's primary market, and probably never will be. Only 6 percent of Wal-Mart shoppers have annual family incomes of more than $100,000. A 2003 study found that 23 percent of Wal-Mart Supercenter customers live on incomes of less than $25,000 a year. More than 20 percent of Wal-Mart shoppers have no bank account, long considered a sign of dire poverty. And while almost half of Wal-Mart Supercenter customers are blue-collar workers and their families, 20 percent are unemployed or elderly.

Al Zack, who until his retirement in 2004 was the United Food and Commercial Workers' vice president for strategic programs, observes that appealing to the poor was "Sam Walton's real genius. He figured out how to make money off of poverty. He located his first stores in poor rural areas and discovered a real market. The only problem with the business model is that it really needs to create more poverty to grow." That problem is cleverly solved by creating more bad jobs worldwide. In a chilling reversal of Henry Ford's strategy, which was to pay his workers amply so they could buy Ford cars, Wal-Mart's stingy compensation policies--workers make, on average, just over $8 an hour, and if they want health insurance, they must pay more than a third of the premium--contribute to an economy in which, increasingly, workers can only afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

To make this model work, Wal-Mart must keep labor costs down. It does this by making corporate crime an integral part of its business strategy. Wal-Mart routinely violates laws protecting workers' organizing rights (workers have even been fired for union activity). It is a repeat offender on overtime laws; in more than thirty states, workers have brought wage-and-hour class-action suits against the retailer. In some cases, workers say, managers encouraged them to clock out and keep working; in others, managers locked the doors and would not let employees go home at the end of their shifts. And it's often women who suffer most from Wal-Mart's labor practices. Dukes v. Wal-Mart, which is the largest civil rights class-action suit in history, charges the company with systematically discriminating against women in pay and promotions [see Featherstone, "Wal-Mart Values: Selling Women Short," December 16, 2002].

Solidarity Across the Checkout Counter

Given the poverty they have in common, it makes sense that Wal-Mart's workers often express a strong feeling of solidarity with the shoppers. Wal-Mart workers tend to be aware that the customers' circumstances are similar to their own, and to identify with them. Some complain about rude customers, but most seem to genuinely enjoy the shoppers.

One longtime department manager in Ohio cheerfully recalls her successful job interview at Wal-Mart. Because of her weight, she told her interviewers, she'd be better able to help the customer. "I told them I wanted to work in the ladies department because I'm a heavy girl." She understands the frustrations of the large shopper, she told them: "'You know, you go into Lane Bryant and some skinny girl is trying to sell you clothes.' They laughed at that and said, 'You get a second interview!'"

One plaintiff in the Dukes lawsuit, Cleo Page, who no longer works at Wal-Mart, says she was a great customer service manager because "I knew how people feel when they shop, so I was really empathetic."

Many Wal-Mart workers say they began working at their local Wal-Mart because they shopped there. "I was practically born in Wal-Mart," says Alyssa Warrick, a former employee now attending Truman State University in Missouri. "My mom is obsessed with shopping.... I thought it would be pretty easy since I knew where most of the stuff was." Most assumed they would love working at Wal-Mart. "I always loved shopping there," enthuses Dukes plaintiff Dee Gunter. "That's why I wanted to work for 'em."

Shopping is traditionally a world of intense female communication and bonding, and women have long excelled in retail sales in part because of the identification between clerk and shopper. Page, who still shops at Wal-Mart, is now a lingerie saleswoman at Mervyn's (owned by Target). "I do enjoy retail," she says. "I like feeling needed and I like helping people, especially women."

Betty Dukes says, "I strive to give Wal-Mart customers one hundred percent of my abilities." This sentiment was repeated by numerous other Wal-Mart workers, always with heartfelt sincerity. Betty Hamilton, a 61-year-old clerk in a Las Vegas Sam's Club, won her store's customer service award last year. She is very knowledgeable about jewelry, her favorite department, and proud of it. Hamilton resents her employer--she complains about sexual harassment and discrimination, and feels she has been penalized on the job for her union sympathies--but remains deeply devoted to her customers. She enjoys imparting her knowledge to shoppers so "they can walk out of there and feel like they know something." Like Page, Hamilton feels she is helping people. "It makes me so happy when I sell something that I know is an extraordinarily good buy," she says. "I feel like I've done somebody a really good favor."

The enthusiasm of these women for their jobs, despite the workplace indignities many of them have faced, should not assure anybody that the company's abuses don't matter. In fact, it should underscore the tremendous debt Wal-Mart owes women: This company has built its vast profits not only on women's drudgery but also on their joy, creativity and genuine care for the customer.

Why Boycotts Don't Always Work

Will consumers return that solidarity and punish Wal-Mart for discriminating against women? Do customers care about workers as much as workers care about them? Some women's groups, like the National Organization for Women and Code Pink, have been hoping that they do, and have encouraged the public not to shop at Wal-Mart. While this tactic could be fruitful in some community battles, it's unlikely to catch on nationwide. A customer saves 20-25 percent by buying groceries at Wal-Mart rather than from a competitor, according to retail analysts, and poor women need those savings more than anyone.

That's why many women welcome the new Wal-Marts in their communities. The Winona (Minnesota) Post extensively covered a controversy over whether to allow a Wal-Mart Supercenter into the small town; the letters to the editor in response offer a window into the female customer's loyalty to Wal-Mart. Though the paper devoted substantial space to the sex discrimination case, the readers who most vehemently defended the retailer were female. From the nearby town of Rollingstone, Cindy Kay wrote that she needed the new Wal-Mart because the local stores didn't carry large-enough sizes. She denounced the local anti-Wal-Mart campaign as a plot by rich and thin elites: "I'm glad those people can fit into and afford such clothes. I can barely afford Shopko and Target!"

A week later, Carolyn Goree, a preschool teacher also hoping for a Winona Wal-Mart, wrote in a letter to the Post editor that when she shops at most stores, $200 fills only a bag or two, but at Wal-Mart, "I come out with a cart full top and bottom. How great that feels." Lacking a local Wal-Mart, Goree drives over the Wisconsin border to get her fix. She was incensed by an earlier article's lament that some workers make only $15,000 yearly. "Come on!" Goree objected. "Is $15,000 really that bad of a yearly income? I'm a single mom and when working out of my home, I made $12,000 tops and that was with child support. I too work, pay for a mortgage, lights, food, everything to live. Everything in life is a choice.... I am for the little man/woman--I'm one of them. So I say stand up and get a Wal-Mart."

Sara Jennings, a disabled Winona reader living on a total of $8,000, heartily concurred. After paying her rent, phone, electric and cable bills, Jennings can barely afford to treat herself to McDonald's. Of a recent trip to the LaCrosse, Wisconsin, Wal-Mart, she raved, "Oh boy, what a great treat. Lower prices and a good quality of clothes to choose from. It was like heaven for me." She, too, strongly defended the workers' $15,000 yearly income: "Boy, now that is a lot of money. I could live with that." She closed with a plea to the readers: "I'm sure you all make a lot more than I. And I'm sure I speak for a lot of seniors and very-low-income people. We need this Wal-Mart. There's nothing downtown."

From Consumers to Workers and Citizens

It is crucial that Wal-Mart's liberal and progressive critics make use of the growing public indignation at the company over sex discrimination, low pay and other workers' rights issues, but it is equally crucial to do this in ways that remind people that their power does not stop at their shopping dollars. It's admirable to drive across town and pay more for toilet paper to avoid shopping at Wal-Mart, but such a gesture is, unfortunately, not enough. As long as people identify themselves as consumers and nothing more, Wal-Mart wins.

The invention of the "consumer" identity has been an important part of a long process of eroding workers' power, and it's one reason working people now have so little power against business. According to the social historian Stuart Ewen, in the early years of mass production, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernizing capitalism sought to turn people who thought of themselves primarily as "workers" into "consumers." Business elites wanted people to dream not of satisfying work and egalitarian societies--as many did at that time--but of the beautiful things they could buy with their paychecks.

Business was quite successful in this project, which influenced much early advertising and continued throughout the twentieth century. In addition to replacing the "worker," the "consumer" has also effectively displaced the citizen. That's why, when most Americans hear about the Wal-Mart's worker-rights abuses, their first reaction is to feel guilty about shopping at the store. A tiny minority will respond by shopping elsewhere--and only a handful will take any further action. A worker might call her union and organize a picket. A citizen might write to her congressman or local newspaper, or galvanize her church and knitting circle to visit local management. A consumer makes an isolated, politically slight decision: to shop or not to shop. Most of the time, Wal-Mart has her exactly where it wants her, because the intelligent choice for anyone thinking as a consumer is not to make a political statement but to seek the best bargain and the greatest convenience.

To effectively battle corporate criminals like Wal-Mart, the public must be engaged as citizens, not merely as shoppers. What kind of politics could encourage that? It's not clear that our present political parties are up to the job. Unlike so many horrible things, Wal-Mart cannot be blamed on George W. Bush. The Arkansas-based company prospered under the state's native son Bill Clinton when he was governor and President. Sam Walton and his wife, Helen, were close to the Clintons, and for several years Hillary Clinton, whose law firm represented Wal-Mart, served on the company's board of directors. Bill Clinton's "welfare reform" has provided Wal-Mart with a ready workforce of women who have no choice but to accept its poverty wages and discriminatory policies.

Still, a handful of Democratic politicians stood up to the retailer. California Assemblywoman Sally Lieber, who represents the 22nd Assembly District and is a former mayor of Mountain View, was outraged when she learned about the sex discrimination charges in Dukes v. Wal-Mart, and she smelled blood when, tipped off by dissatisfied workers, her office discovered that Wal-Mart was encouraging its workers to apply for public assistance, "in the middle of the worst state budget crisis in history!" California had a $38 billion deficit at the time, and Lieber was enraged that taxpayers would be subsidizing Wal-Mart's low wages, bringing new meaning to the term "corporate welfare."

Lieber was angry, too, that Wal-Mart's welfare dependence made it nearly impossible for responsible employers to compete with the retail giant. It was as if taxpayers were unknowingly funding a massive plunge to the bottom in wages and benefits--quite possibly their own. She held a press conference in July 2003, to expose Wal-Mart's welfare scam. The Wal-Mart documents--instructions explaining how to apply for food stamps, Medi-Cal (the state's healthcare assistance program) and other forms of welfare--were blown up on posterboard and displayed. The morning of the press conference, a Wal-Mart worker who wouldn't give her name for fear of being fired snuck into Lieber's office. "I just wanted to say, right on!" she told the assemblywoman.

Wal-Mart spokespeople have denied that the company encourages employees to collect public assistance, but the documents speak for themselves. They bear the Wal-Mart logo, and one is labeled "Wal-Mart: Instructions for Associates." Both documents instruct employees in procedures for applying to "Social Service Agencies." Most Wal-Mart workers I've interviewed had co-workers who worked full time for the company and received public assistance, and some had been in that situation themselves. Public assistance is very clearly part of the retailer's cost-cutting strategy. (It's ironic that a company so dependent on the public dole supports so many right-wing politicians who'd like to dismantle the welfare state.)

Lieber, a strong supporter of the social safety net who is now assistant speaker pro tempore of the California Assembly, last year passed a bill that would require large and mid-sized corporations that fail to provide decent, affordable health insurance to reimburse local governments for the cost of providing public assistance for those workers. When the bill passed, its opponents decided to kill it by bringing it to a statewide referendum. Wal-Mart, which just began opening Supercenters in California this year, mobilized its resources to revoke the law on election day this November, even while executives denied that any of their employees depended on public assistance.

Citizens should pressure other politicians to speak out against Wal-Mart's abuses and craft policy solutions. But the complicity of both parties in Wal-Mart's power over workers points to the need for a politics that squarely challenges corporate greed and takes the side of ordinary people. That kind of politics seems, at present, strongest at the local level.

Earlier this year, labor and community groups in Chicago prevented Wal-Mart from opening a store on the city's South Side, in part by pushing through an ordinance that would have forced the retailer to pay Chicago workers a living wage. In Hartford, Connecticut, labor and community advocates just won passage of an ordinance protecting their free speech rights on the grounds of the new Wal-Mart Supercenter, which is being built on city property. Similar battles are raging nationwide, but Wal-Mart's opponents don't usually act with as much coordination as Wal-Mart does, and they lack the retail behemoth's deep pockets.

With this in mind, SEIU president Andy Stern has recently been calling attention to the need for better coordination--and funding--of labor and community anti-Wal-Mart efforts. Stern has proposed that the AFL-CIO allocate $25 million of its royalties from purchases on its Union Plus credit card toward fighting Wal-Mart and the "Wal-Martization" of American jobs.

Such efforts are essential not just because Wal-Mart is a grave threat to unionized workers' jobs (which it is) but because it threatens all American ideals that are at odds with profit--ideals such as justice, equality and fairness. Wal-Mart would not have so much power if we had stronger labor laws, and if we required employers to pay a living wage. The company knows that, and it hires lobbyists in Washington to vigorously fight any effort at such reforms--indeed, Wal-Mart has recently beefed up this political infrastructure substantially, and it's likely that its presence in Washington will only grow more conspicuous.

The situation won't change until a movement comes together and builds the kind of social and political power for workers and citizens that can balance that of Wal-Mart. This is not impossible: In Germany, unions are powerful enough to force Wal-Mart to play by their rules. American citizens will have to ask themselves what kind of world they want to live in. That's what prompted Gretchen Adams, a former Wal-Mart manager, to join the effort to unionize Wal-Mart. She's deeply troubled by the company's effect on the economy as a whole and the example it sets for other employers. "What about our working-class people?" she asks. "I don't want to live in a Third World country." Working people, she says, should be able to afford "a new car, a house. You shouldn't have to leave the car on the lawn because you can't afford that $45 part."

i am pleased and most honored to post here...

2004-12-17T14:16:00.000-08:00

...the galvanizing and encouraging words of someone i admire very much: Starhawk.

Ride Out to Meet Them: Some Post-Election Thoughts
by Starhawk

On my way to New York last summer to help organize protests against the Republican National Convention, I found myself on a plane watching Lord of the Rings over and over again. One thing struck me: every time the heroes were in deep troubled, surrounded, outnumbered, trying desperately to hold off ten thousand orcs and all the forces of evil, their leader Aragorn would turn to the others and say, “Let’s ride out to meet them!” Let’s take the offensive, go forward courageously instead of cowering in fear, and meet the enemy on our terms.

While the movie, and the books, can rightly be critiqued for their gender and racial stereotypes, I think a little of that heroic spirit is what we need now, as the forces of destruction close ranks around us, smirking to boot. In the last month, since the election, I’ve been on the road touring with my new book, The Earth Path, speaking to groups just about every night, listening to the deep despair that has settled over progressives across the land. I see the stricken faces and hear people asking what to do, where to go? Can’t we just curl up under the covers and moan for a while, or move to Canada? Where do we flee to when there’s nowhere to go?

Maybe we need to retreat, moan, and regroup—for a while, but not for long. Counterintuitive as it may seem, this is a crucial time to ride out and meet the onslaught head-on, not to run away. In doing so, we should not buy into the media propaganda that the left is somehow ‘out of touch’ with Real America. Our strength is precisely that we are in touch with realities the neocons refuse to acknowledge or face, and reality eventually catches up with even the most entrenched power. So here are some key fronts that we can advance upon:

Election Fraud and Voter Repression: It becomes clearer and clearer that there are massive, unexplained discrepancies between exit polls (historically quite accurate and used in many countries—Ukraine, for example-- to verify election results) and vote counts, too many black box machines that leave no paper trail, too many stories of ballots disappearing, of counts in locked rooms from which observers are excluded. And there are the thousands of out front, obvious attempts to intimidate, confuse and discourage voters from targeted groups—communities of color and students. Absentee ballots that disappeared, the ‘challengers’ inside polling places, the lack of machines in key areas leading to lines hours long, the clearly partisan election officials: all of this needs to be challenged. We can actively pressure the mainstream media to start covering these scandals. They are reluctant to do so—but organize even a small demonstration on their doorstep and you can suddenly find yourself on the evening news. And we can pressure our Democratic representatives to step up and demand a full Congressional investigation.

In waging this fight, we should not define victory as overturning the election results. This is a fight for the future, to assure that elections cannot be stolen, that at least the small aspect of democracy that voting represents is open to all. And this is a battle to reframe the election, to make clear that Bush and Co. did not win because they suddenly have a huge mandate for their policies, but squeaked by on a narrow margin they achieved through lying, cheating and outright fraud. Success is the chipping away of their legitimacy, laying the groundwork for a possible new Watergate. We need to wage a long term campaign not just to remove the current neocons from power but to utterly discredit their philosophies and policies. Since ‘morals’ are being put forward as a rationale for right-wing success, we need to put this forward also in moral terms: Stealing elections is morally wrong. Intimidating voters, the whole toolbox of dirty tricks and intimidation, T.V. ads that lie, misrepresentation of issues and facts—these are all moral issues, whatever your religion or lack thereof.

The War in Iraq: Since we’re talking about morals, what about closing hospitals, killing civilians, denying the Red Cross access to provide aid to the wounded, physical and psychological torture of prisoners? All of these are moral issues, and against international law as well.

Tom Hayden, in a recent article for AlterNet, suggests that we can bring an end to the war by denying funding, troops, alliances and political standing to the Bush administration. We know the war is not going to go well—and we need neither prophets nor the now-purged CIA to tell us so. Our long term strategy, again, is to discredit the whole idea of pre-emptive war, of Empire building through military adventurism, of the US as the global bully superpower commandeering the resources of the rest of the world. We can do this by constantly revealing the truth of the war’s human, economic and environmental costs, by supporting the veterans who resist the war and those who return home broken and wounded to face inadequate medical, psychological and economic resources.

The Environment: What else do we know that Bush & Co. don’t know or refuse to know? We know that global warming and climate change are a reality, are happening faster than hoped for, and are scary enough to make Al Quaeda look like a bunch of kids knocking over blocks. To stabilize the climate would require not the 5% reduction of carbon emissions in the Kyoto treaty, but a 50-70% reduction. We also know that oil will become more and more expensive to extract and will eventually run out, and that our present way of life is not sustainable. Technologies exist that could help us make a transition into an oil-free economy of environmental balance and energy independence. The future belongs to those who anticipate and invest resources, energy and planning into that change. So we can push for those policies on local and state levels, work to develop those alternatives, and support efforts like the Apollo Alliance, www.apolloalliance.org, which calls for massive investment in renewable energy and sustainable technologies to create good jobs in economically depressed communities and exciting opportunities for youth.

These are just a few of the ways we can move forward. The characters currently controlling the political scene are more frightening than all the trolls and monsters of fairy tales, and we are not mythic heroes, alas. If we ride into the face of all the forces ranged against us, no white wizard on a shining horse will appear to save the day. But the momentum of courageous action will call forth all those energies, within and around us, that can shift fate, generate surprises, kindle hope, and bring about change.

another round of whining about "frivolous" lawsuits...

2004-12-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

...this time featuring the chimp-in-charge.

between smirking, self-enchanted Shrub and the heartless honchos of places like Home Depot who he's "standing up for," i'm starting to regret having had lunch a little while ago.

none of the excesses of over-litigation justify the kind of irresponsibility that Home *Despot* exhibits, apparently on a routine basis(don't miss the sidebar articles about them).

finally, some original thinking

2004-12-16T07:32:00.000-08:00

...regarding the ongoing overextended, overtasked, underfunded, underprovisioned adventure in Mess-O-Potamia.

hardly sillier than some of the things that are already happening Over There. and it's... well, it's the American way of doing things, right?

Why Not the Coalition of the Shilling?
By MAUREEN DOWD
The New York Times

Published: December 16, 2004

Duke Rummy the Domineering is not used to being challenged, so he's probably still smarting from his bruising brush with reality in Kuwait.

He has surrounded himself with so many sycophantic generals that it took a grunt from Tennessee to point out that the defense secretary has no clothes - or armor for his troops. He has taken the greatest military in the history of the world and pushed it to the breaking point.

Some people think he's toast, now that conservatives like John McCain, Chuck Hagel and Bill Kristol have turned on him - and now that the grumbles are getting louder in the military, from Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf and the TV generals to the rank-and-file reservists who have other jobs to go back to.

(Besides, what can Rummy do to punish reservists who push back - send them to Iraq?)

But, hey, it's Christmas. Overcome with the spirit of giving, I'd like to give Rummy a lifeline to escape the flak over armor.

It's amazing that President Bush, who planned to run his administration like a business, and Rummy, who was a chief executive himself, haven't already come up with this brainstorm. They're always touting the private sector, even for fixing Social Security.

They should take a lesson from their own playbook and reach out to corporate America. If Rummy can't adequately supply the Army, maybe I.B.M. and Xerox can.

Why should it just be parents of kids in Iraq who send them compasses and Kevlar vests? Everybody wants to support our troops.

If the Olympics can attract top corporate sponsors, why can't Rummy's Global War on Terrorism? Bring it on, Bank One!

Picture this: a truck rumbling across the desert on the evening news, completely armored and emblazoned with golden arches. Or a fleet of Visa Humvees. You know Donald Trump would love to slap his name on a few Chinooks. The 82nd Trumpborne.

And what about product placement? When soldiers give their Christmas greetings on Fox News or MSNBC, they could be holding cans of Pepsi or calling home on Samsung phones. Why merely send their love when they could be writing love letters in the sand on Apple computers?

Like athletes or Nascar drivers, they could sell every inch of their body: STP helmets, Nike boots, Staples "Yeah, we got that" dog tags, Starbucks M.R.E.'s, CamelBak canteens by Camels, Sony laser target designators.

All those old, out-of-shape reservists being dragged back by Rummy would be great pitchmen for arthritis medication. And Celebrex night vision goggles.

The really big corporate sponsors might set up some hospitality yurts dispensing Wellbutrin in the desert. Sure, security's so bad that Rummy was afraid to go any farther than Kuwait last week, but Michael Eisner might want to visit with some Disney imagineers and check out a different kind of Fantasyland: the neocon variety. Mr. Eisner could use some good publicity.

In this day and age, when every sports arena has been hideously renamed for some corporate entity - like Minute Maid Park in Houston, Network Associates Coliseum in Oakland, Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego and FedEx Field in D.C. - Rummy could easily think big.

How about the American Express Green Zone? Instead of those four huge facsimiles of Saddam's head that adorned the Iraqi Republican Palace, why not put up big heads (and necks) of Geoffrey, the Toys "R" Us giraffe?

Whole units could begin shopping themselves on eBay and trolling for corporate sponsors, just as the Dartmouth swimming team did in 2002 with the pitch, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own a piece of N.C.A.A. Division I collegiate memorabilia."

What's a measly swimming team compared with the thrill of ponying up for the Third Infantry Division of Fort Stewart, Ga., the Army unit that conducted the famous "thunder run" and took Baghdad - and is now about to be redeployed in Iraq?

Rummy's a little distracted trying to get his silly space shield, which fizzled yet again in a test yesterday, and fighting hard for his job, so it may take him awhile to focus on privatizing. Meanwhile, we still have that pesky armor shortage.

So how about Tommy "Stop Writing Books and Finish the War" Franks, Paul "You Disbanded the Iraqi Army, Dummy" Bremer and George "Slam-Dunk" Tenet taking off those preposterous Medals of Freedom and contributing them. Just as Scarlett and Melanie took off their gold wedding rings for the Confederate cause, those medals can be melted down for a little Humvee armor.

With help like that and some corporate support - maybe Levitra could even sponsor his next trip to Iraq - Rummy could get the Army he wants and wishes to have sooner rather than later. Like, while we're actually fighting a war.

The sponsors could help a lot in keeping the Army in top shape. After all, our troops could be stuck there for years, perhaps decades. And could even wind up defending an Iraqi ayatollah.

With all the foreign companies investing, we could finally have a real coalition. The coalition of the shilling. No German troops, but why not a Passat partnership?

have yourself a Blue little xmas...

2004-12-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

here's another great buying guide for progressives.

the link was posted in a fellow lefty's blog... which you should definitely check out! :-)

just 'cause it's been decreed shop-till-you-drop season, you don't necessarily have to support The Man.

mark does the maple-leaf dance

2004-12-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

so spot-on true. so wonderful. so sad.

i so want to be somewhere that civilized.

Canada Goes To Hell
Legal pot? Legal gay marriage? Universal health care? What's next, free porn and candy?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Did you hear the screams? Did you feel the menacing chill? Did you see the black and ominous clouds, moving north?

Did you sense, in other words, the very presence of Satan himself as he laughed maniacally and tossed around bucketfuls of ultrathin condoms and little travel-size packets of Astroglide like confetti while riding his Harley Softail up to Toronto or maybe Edmonton to join the ghastly and sodomitic celebrations?

Because it's happened. Canada's high court just ruled that the government can, if it so desires, redefine marriage to include gay couples, which it has declared it will do almost immediately, thus solidifying Canada's place as the chilly yet mellow and gay friendly and hockey-riffic epicenter of all known hell.

It's true. It's rather amazing. Gay marriage will be completely legal in Canada very soon. It's been oddly ignored in much of the U.S. media and hasn't really been much discussed among those in the terrified red states except when, deep in the night, from their respective lumpy twin beds, they whisper to each other across the room as they pop their Ambien and stroke their portfolios and curse their very genitals: oh my God what's wrong with those freakin' Canadians?

I mean (they continue), I thought they loved red meat and brutish sports and manly hunting. Are they all just freaks and perverts now? Have they been sniffing too many elk pelts? Is it something in the clean and plentiful water up there? Something to do with those weird French-esque people in Quebec, maybe?

I knew we should've been paying more attention to that border! Didn't I say so, honey? Didn't I say we should keep an eye on those northern weirdos after they dissed the Iraq war and legalized medical pot and sort of went about their happy and calm Canadian business whilst we here in panicky red-blooded America chewed our own karmic legs off in a paranoid and jingoistic rage? Hippies and perverts, I said! Save a few bombs for Ontario, George, I say!

Let us now do the naughty math: Canada has roughly 32 million inhabitants, of whom about 75 percent are over 18, of whom it can be loosely estimated that anywhere from 2 to 8 percent are gay (depends, of course, on who you ask).

All of which translates into a ballpark figure of anywhere from 1 million to 2 million gay Canadians of legal marrying age who will now eagerly laugh and kiss in the streets and confound poor reactionary born-again George W. Bush, and they will flash their wedding rings at parties and annoy all the single people, all while proving for the umpteenth time that love knows no gender limitations or legal restrictions and will trump your whiny sanctimonious religious puling any given Sunday. Heathens!

It's getting more confusing by the minute, isn't it? I mean, Canada now has legal medical pot and legal gay marriage and universal health care and no known terrorist enemies and a relatively successful multiparty political system. They also have, according to U.N.'s Human Development Index, one of the highest qualities of life in the world. All coupled with a dramatically reduced rate of gun violence and far better gun-control legislation than the U.S., despite having the exact same per capita rate of gun ownership and gun-sport enthusiasm.

What the hell? How is this possible? Why aren't they scared to death like whiny red-state Americans? Why don't they want to kill each other along with anything that might threaten their access to televised hockey and cheap beer and yummy poutine?

Aren't they aware of what's happening in the world? Don't they know they are openly hated for their freedoms and their cafés and their vinegared french fries? Aren't they human, fer Chrissakes? Oh, red states. How confused and irritated you must be.

After all, unlike the U.S., Canada backed the Kyoto Treaty (along with 165 other heathen nations). They also spend more per capita on education and less on health-care overhead than the U.S. They have a $10 billion federal surplus, a new record. They are not, as of yet, abusing the hell out of their vast natural resources (freshwater, huge forests, oil and natural gas, mineral deposits, etc.) and embarrassing themselves on a global scale every single day and making a mockery of their constitution or their citizens' civil liberties. What the hell is wrong with them?

Yes yes, I know, Canada's universal health care is flawed and not always of the best quality, and a great many Canadians think their prime minister is a bit of a schmuck and they hate paying taxes and of course they can be all profitable and progressive when they don't have a massive bogus unwinnable war to pay for, one run by a ravenous and fiscally idiotic federal government, and they only have one-tenth of our population and one-fiftieth of our desperate consumeristic gluttony. They have it easy, right?

Remember, Canada is boring. Canada is rarely in the news. Canada has no massive belching socioeconomic engine like America does, what with our NASCAR and Hollywood and Fox News and bad porn and the absolute best medical care on the planet despite how only a tiny fraction of us have access to it while the rest languish in bloated abusive HMOs and poverty and disease and 40 percent of us have no access to health care whatsoever. Take that, Canada! Oh wait.

We hate gays and love guns and think pot is evil but hand out Prozac and Zoloft like Chiclets. Meanwhile (as "Bowling for Columbine" so beautifully illuminated), Canadians leave their doors unlocked and don't feature violence and death on every newscast and still value community and diversity and discussion over solipsism and protectionism and a general hatred of foreigners and the French. See? We rule! Oh wait.

All of which makes you wonder: how many more countries will it take? How many more nations will have to, for example, prove that gun licensing works, or that gay-marriage legislation is a moral imperative, or that health care for all is mandatory for a nation's well being, before America finally looks at itself and says, whoa, damn, we are so silly and small and wrong? Is there any number large enough? After the announcement that gay Chinese and gay Russians may legally marry and grow lovely gardens of marijuana as they all get free dental care, will America remain terrified of nipples and queers?

Canadians. So mellow. So laid back. So gay. So not producing any truly superlative modern-rock music or ultraviolent buddy-cop movies and not actively siccing Wal-Mart or Starbucks or Paris Hilton on the rest of the world like a goddamn cancer. They're just so ... nice. And boring. And calm. And solid. And friendly.

And they simply beat us senseless on the whole open-minded, progressive thing. Kicked our flag-wavin' butts. Trounced our egomaniacal self-righteous selves and made the red states look even more foolish and backward than the whole world already knows them to be.

They did it. Canada made the whole gay marriage issue look effortless and obvious and healthy, and a massive black rain of hellfire did not pour down upon them and the very idea of hetero marriage did not immediately explode and their economy did not unravel like all the sneering cardinals and right-wing nutballs screamed it would. We must ask, one last time: what the hell is wrong with them?

Oh wait. Maybe we should rephrase. What the hell, we should be asking, is wrong with us?

sweet smoking Jesus

2004-12-14T14:50:00.000-08:00

just when i thought it was flat IMPOSSIBLE for ShrubCo to up the ante any further as far as travesties go... really. pass the airsick bag. then spare a kind thought for all those actually WORTHY souls who have won this medal in the past -- and for whom it has now been unspeakably cheapened.

actually i'm reminded of 'Catch-22' here - the scene when the colonel in command of Yossarian's flight squadron decided to give a bomber crew medals after they had erroneously gone around their target twice and lost a couple of men aboard to flak on the second pass:

"Let's give them all medals!"

"But sir, they endangered their own lives, their plane and the other planes in the squadron when they went around twice! Why should they get medals?"

"For going around twice, of course. Yes, that's it: Let's boast about something we ought to be ashamed of. That's a tactic that NEVER fails to work!"

Yahoo!/Reuters News
Bush Gives Top Civilian Honor to Iraq War Figures
By David Morgan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush on Tuesday bestowed America's highest civilian honor on three leading figures of the Iraq war, including the former spymaster under whose watch the CIA produced flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

Former CIA Director George Tenet, retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks and former Coalition Provisional Authority chief Paul Bremer stood with Bush in the White House East Room to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The award for exceptional service was established by Harry Truman as a war service medal but reintroduced by John F. Kennedy as a means of honoring distinguished civilian service in peacetime.

"These three men symbolize the nobility of public service, the good character of our country, and the good influence of America on the world," Bush said.

[I'm sorry, I can't read any more of this dreck, much less inflict it on all of you.]

that rarest of Mountain things, a non-political post

2004-12-09T11:52:00.000-08:00

yes, that's right - just this once. no, i haven't been kidnapped by aliens (or Karl Rove). just had to share this. after this, we return to polemics already in progress...

iRie, they are iRight!!!

mad props follow:

i have to say, i wish i could somehow redeem all the years i spent banging my head against the wall due to MS Windows issues, when there has clearly been a Better Way.

i had a wireless network problem come up just last night on my iMac at home; specifically the Airport express had stopped talking to the network because my DSL modem went offline last night, and as part of remedying the situation, Verizon tech support had me do a hard reset of the Airport Extreme base. that did the trick as far as net connectivity was concerned, but confused the AE in the process... which meant i couldn't play iTunes through the stereo anymore. rats. grrr. waaahhh...

hey, i'm still learning this stuff, okay? in six months i might be a real mensch with regard to the Apple OS, but not yet. so i spent an hour or so futzing around with settings myself, to little avail... it was late and i was tired. and, of course, wireless networking (at least for home users) is not what one would call a mature technology - not yet.

anyway: today i called Apple tech support on my lunch hour - well, maybe hour and a half today - and within 20 minutes the problem was fixed. no charge for the call, no per-incident charge, no listening to 87 gazillion godsdamn Barry Manilow songs on hold... i'd say i was on hold less than five of those 20 minutes, and most of that was because the tech who first took the call wanted to MAKE SURE THE INFO HE WAS GIVING ME WAS RIGHT SO HE CALLED IN A PRODUCT SPECIALIST!

sorry for shouting, but can you even effing imagine a Microsoft human sprocket doing something like that (and that's setting aside the fact that you call them on your own nickel and pay per-incident fees)?

neither can i.

bottom line: Apple goooood. don't let any condescending PC nerd tell you otherwise. and that's coming from a reformed condescending PC nerd, dammit.

yeah, there ought to be an "eight-strikes" rule...

2004-12-09T09:16:00.000-08:00

...or however many elections the Dems have lost by embracing the pusillanimous DLC approach. with a strategy like that, we hardly even need to have 'Pubs around to beat us; we're quite capable of doing that for ourselves. (and the one DLC success, Slick Willie, almost succeeded in amputating the party's soul.)

Arianna's right, as is Dean, as are many other "Dems from the Dem wing of the party." Only question is, are there enough of them? this lefty sure hopes so.

Why moving to the right is wrong

The Democrats need to stand for red-meat populism, not GOP-lite pandering.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Arianna Huffington

Dec. 9, 2004 | This Saturday in Orlando, Fla., at a meeting of state party chairmen, a lineup of potential candidates are going to be making the case for why they should be the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

I don't have a candidate. But I do have a litmus test: Anyone raising the idea that the Democratic Party needs to "move to the middle" should immediately be escorted out of the building. Better yet, a trapdoor should open beneath them, sending them plummeting down an endless chute into electoral purgatory -- which is exactly where the party will be permanently headquartered if it continues to adopt such a strategy.

Among those eyeing the position are Howard Dean, former White House aide Harold Ickes, Texas Rep. Marty Frost, former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, New Democrat Network founder Simon Rosenberg, political strategist Donnie Fowler and telecom exec Leo Hindery.

Although fewer than 450 people will ultimately decide who becomes the next party chairman, when the DNC votes on Feb. 12, the outcome will have a profound effect on shaping the party's future. Will Democrats continue to toe the strategy line of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council that has brought them to the brink of permanent minority-party status? Or will they finally return to the party's roots and recapture its lost political soul?

Welcome to the Great Democratic Party Identity Crisis of 2005.

Ever since the election, Democratic leaders have been crawling over one another in a mad scramble to the middle. Indeed, this is the worst case of midriff bulge since Kirstie Alley stopped by Sizzler's all-you-can-eat buffet.

"Things are accomplished in the middle. We have to work toward the middle. And I think that that's clear." That was new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on "Meet the Press" this weekend. Almost makes you long for the spineless bleating of Tom Daschle, doesn't it?

Last week's meeting of the 21-strong Democratic Governors Association was similarly an orgy of centrist groping, best summed up by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who said, "This, for us, is our moment to push an agenda that is centrist and that speaks to where most people are."

If Gov. Granholm, a rising star in the party, really thinks the center is where the majority of voters were located this past election, the Democrats are in even worse trouble than we think. Have these people learned nothing from 2000, 2002 and 2004?

Putting aside for a moment the question of the party's soul and focusing entirely on hardball power playing, running to the middle has proved to be the single stupidest strategy the Democrats can continue to pursue. As cognitive psychologist George Lakoff told me: "Democrats moving to the middle is a double disaster that alienates the party's progressive base while simultaneously sending a message to swing voters that the other side is where the good ideas are." It unconsciously locks in the notion that the other side's positions are worth moving toward, while your side's positions are the ones to move away from.

And if middle-of-the-roadism is such a great idea, why don't we see Republicans moving there to gain votes? In fact, framing the political debate in right-left terms is so old, so tired and so wrong that we need to resist all temptation to do so. There is nothing left wing about wanting corporations to pay their fair share rather than hide their profits in P.O. boxes in Bermuda, or ensuring access to healthcare now rather than paying the bill at the emergency room later.

That's why the DNC race is so important. The party needs a chairman able to drive a stake through the heart of its bankrupt GOP-lite strategy and champion the populist economic agenda that has already proved potent at the ballot box in many conservative parts of the country. Just how potent is revealed in "The Democrats' Da Vinci Code," a brilliant upcoming American Prospect cover story by David Sirota that shows how a growing number of Democrats in some of the reddest regions in America have racked up impressive, against-the-grain wins by framing a progressive economic platform in terms of values and right vs. wrong.

"This," writes Sirota, "is not the traditional (and often condescending) Democratic pandering about the need for a nanny government to provide for the masses. It is us-versus-them red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary Americans." These red state progressives have brought the Democratic Party back to its true calling and delivered, according to Sirota, "as powerful a statement about morality and authenticity as any of the GOP's demagoguery on 'guns, God, and gays.'"

This strategy of economic populism coincides perfectly with what is the most significant shift in Democratic politics in a generation: the astounding growth of a grass-roots donor base. Thanks in no small part to the Internet, the Kerry campaign and the DNC raised between them over $300 million from grass-roots donors. John Kerry alone raised over $71 million from donors who contributed $200 or less. What's more, the DNC experienced a sevenfold increased in donors -- skyrocketing from 400,000 in 2000 to 2.7 million in 2004. This reallocation of power away from lobbyists and big corporate donors will finally allow Democrats to stop taking policy dictation from their corporate financiers and start offering up an alternative vision to compete with George W. Bush's. But only if the will is there -- which means only if the next DNC chairman understands and embraces this tectonic shift.

And only if he promises, at all costs, to avoid playing in the middle of the road.

a carrying voice

2004-12-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

many of the messages i post here one can easily imagine being delivered in thunderously loud fashion. not so this relatively quiet, but dignified and eloquent, statement from one of the few federal legislators whose vote and position - as AlterNet notes - has remained utterly consistent throughout the nightmarish last four years. but this is a case where a quiet voice of reason, regret and persistent vision carries across a room, across a city, perhaps across a nation - better than an impassioned shout.

we need more - so many more - like Russ Feingold in today's excuse for a government.

"America Is So Much Better than This"
By Senator Russ Feingold
AlterNet.org

Tuesday 07 December 2004

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) has the unique distinction of being the lone dissenter in the Senate on the vote approving the Patriot Act. He also was among a handful of Senators opposing the resolution to authorize the Iraq war. And last month, he won re-election, beating his well-financed Republican opponent 55-44 percent. On Nov. 18, when President Bush's nomination of Condoleeza Rice to replace Secretary of State Colin Powell came before the U.S. Senate, Sen. Feingold stood on the Senate floor and, in his characteristically forthright manner, spoke the following words.

Mr. Feingold: On Tuesday, the President announced the nomination of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice to be the next U.S. Secretary of State.

I admire Dr. Rice's obvious intellectual gifts and her communication skills, and I congratulate her. I also believe that the president has the right to appoint cabinet officers who reflect his ideology and his perspective. Barring serious concerns about a nominee's qualifications or ethical record, and in keeping with Senate practices and precedents, my inclination is to give the president substantial deference in his cabinet choices, so I do expect, barring something unforeseen, that I will be supporting Dr. Rice.

But I am deeply troubled by the signal that this nomination appears to send - a signal suggesting that the modest moderating influence of the State Department over the last four years will disappear, and that the next four years will be guided even more closely by the voices that shouted loudest in the first term, and that led our country into seriously flawed foreign policies. Our country cannot afford to continue down the foreign policy path that was forged during the first term of the Bush administration.

Over the past four years, we have witnessed the greatest loss of a very valuable type of American power in our history: our power to lead, to persuade, and to inspire. As Joseph Nye has pointed out, this power will not convert the extremists who oppose us no matter what. Those people must be eliminated, pure and simple. But it can thwart their plans, by denying them new recruits, undermining their appeal and their message, and unifying, rather than dividing, Americans and the rest of the international community. Rather than bolstering this asset, which has helped to make us the most powerful country on earth, I'm afraid we have squandered it.

In March, the Pew Research Center found that one year after the start of the war in Iraq, "discontent with America and its policies has intensified rather than diminished" across the world. Majorities in Pakistan, Jordan, Morocco and Turkey believe that the U.S. is exaggerating the terrorist threat. They doubt the sincerity of the U.S. war on terrorism and say that it is an effort to control Mideast oil and dominate the world. The Center found that "at least half the people in countries other than the U.S. say as a result of the war in Iraq they have less confidence that the United States is trustworthy. Similarly, majorities in all of these countries say they have less confidence that the U.S. wants to promote democracy globally." Our motives are questioned, our public justifications and explanations viewed with skepticism, and our post-9/11 public diplomacy efforts have too often missed the mark, substituting pop music broadcasts, brochures and videos for the kind of respectful dialogue and engagement that could convince generations of angry young people that their humiliation is not our goal.

We have had over three years since Sept. 11, 2001, to think strategically about how to win the fight against terrorism. But I'm afraid we have little to show for this time.

We have relied upon a doctrine that fails to recognize that our enemies do not rely on explicit state sponsorship of terrorism. By focusing primarily on possible state sponsors of terror, the administration failed to realize that our terrorist enemies operate effectively in weak and failing states and without the backing of national governments. This is a new enemy waging a new war against us, but the administration appears still to be stuck in an old cold war mindset.

We have muddled our language and our focus by conflating other priorities with the fight against terrorism, costing us credibility around the world and shattering the unified and resolved global coalition that emerged to support us in the aftermath of 9/11. By choosing to fight the war in Iraq in such a divisive and astronomically expensive fashion, we have diverted resources away from the fight against the terrorist networks that seek to destroy us and undermined our ability to win the hearts and minds of many whose support we will need to succeed in the long run. We have recognized the dangers of nuclear proliferation in an age of terrorism, but have then pursued policies that may well create incentives for states to develop nuclear weapons as quickly as possible.

We have developed essentially no measures of success or failure when it comes to one of our most urgent priorities, as the 9/11 Commission underscored - preventing the continued growth of Islamist terrorism. In fact, we do not even know where we stand today in this vital struggle.

We have not given any serious thought to how to avoid the mistakes of the Cold War, when we gave a free pass to forces of repression and brutality, as long as they did not come with a Communist bent. Those mistakes, as we all know, actually helped to make Afghanistan the brutally repressive terrorist haven that it was on 9/11/2001.

We have not made an adequate investment in bolstering our diplomatic resources and engagement around the world. From Northern Nigeria to Eastern Kenya, we have virtually no presence. In Somalia, despite knowing that al Qaeda-linked terrorists have operated in the country, we simply failed to develop any policy at all.

While the administration's policy was failing on all of these fronts, the president's team was devoting its time and attention to selling the world and the American people a war in Iraq with fundamentally flawed intelligence, manipulative and misleading characterizations, and rosy predictions that proved horribly, dangerously off-the-mark.

The administration's Iraq policies in the first term painted a picture of an American government that isn't so sure it rejects torture; that isn't competent and careful enough to properly vet intelligence presented in major speeches and briefings; that willfully rejects the lessons of history and the advice of its own experts; that is surprised when disorder results in massive looting; that misleads taxpayers regarding the costs and commitments entailed in its policies; that spends billions upon billions without any effort to even budget for these extremely predictable costs; and that is willing to politicize issues fundamental to our national security in the ugliest possible way.

We deserve better. Certainly the brave men and women of the U.S. military who are fighting every day to make this effort in Iraq work deserve better. We do not honor them by accepting lousy, irresponsible policy in the halls and hearing rooms of the Capital and then leaving our soldiers holding the bag on the ground, when policy collides with the hard truth.

The administration's record of the past four years suggests a foreign policy careening out of control, driven by ideologues who want to test their theories in the laboratory of the Middle East one minute, by domestic political considerations the next, and by spiteful attempts to punish those who disagree with their methods the next.

Where is this going? Who is in charge? Who knows? No one ever seems to be held accountable for the blunders, the failures, the wildly inaccurate presentations and projections or the painfully ineffective initiatives. Congress cannot simply accept more of the same, keep our heads down and hope that somehow we will muddle through. The stakes are far too high. Our national security, the stability of the world that our children will inherit, our troops - even our country's honor - are on the line. Congress has an obligation, not to oppose every administration effort, but to reassert our role in helping to steer the ship of state wisely rather than recklessly. I look at our foreign policy over the past four years, and I know that America is so much better than this.

I look forward to the opportunity to raise these concerns with Dr. Rice when she testifies before the Foreign Relations Committee, and to receiving some assurance that she will work with Congress to put our country's foreign policy on a better, more effective footing.

he's baaaaack...

2004-12-07T13:35:00.000-08:00

...and i, for one, have missed him.

the Mighty K, Economist and Realist Extraordinaire, shreds the present rush toward "privatization" of Social Security. the last para, typically, nails the real motivations of the right-wing mob.

i notice that nobody else can EVER be found talking about the right's
past quiet tinkering with the payroll tax, btw... gee, i wonder why. ;-)

Inventing a Crisis
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Tuesday 07 December 2004

Privatizing Social Security - replacing the current system, in whole or in part, with personal investment accounts - won't do anything to strengthen the system's finances. If anything, it will make things worse. Nonetheless, the politics of privatization depend crucially on convincing the public that the system is in imminent danger of
collapse, that we must destroy Social Security in order to save it.

I'll have a lot to say about all this when I return to my regular schedule in January. But right now it seems important to take a break from my break, and debunk the hype about a Social Security crisis.

There's nothing strange or mysterious about how Social Security works: it's just a government program supported by a dedicated tax on payroll earnings, just as highway maintenance is supported by a dedicated tax on gasoline.

Right now the revenues from the payroll tax exceed the amount paid out in benefits. This is deliberate, the result of a payroll tax increase - recommended by none other than Alan Greenspan - two decades ago. His justification at the time for raising a tax that falls mainly on lower- and middle-income families, even though Ronald Reagan had just cut the taxes that fall mainly on the very well-off, was that the extra revenue was needed to build up a trust fund. This could be drawn on to pay benefits once the baby boomers began to retire.

The grain of truth in claims of a Social Security crisis is that this tax increase wasn't quite big enough. Projections in a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (which are probably more realistic than the very cautious projections of the Social Security Administration) say that the trust fund will run out in 2052. The
system won't become "bankrupt" at that point; even after the trust fund is gone, Social Security revenues will cover 81 percent of the promised benefits. Still, there is a long-run financing problem.

But it's a problem of modest size. The report finds that extending the life of the trust fund into the 22nd century, with no change in benefits, would require additional revenues equal to only 0.54 percent of G.D.P. That's less than 3 percent of federal spending - less than we're currently spending in Iraq. And it's only about one-quarter of the revenue lost each year because of President Bush's tax cuts - roughly equal to the fraction of those cuts that goes to people with incomes over $500,000 a year.

Given these numbers, it's not at all hard to come up with fiscal packages that would secure the retirement program, with no major changes, for generations to come.

It's true that the federal government as a whole faces a very large financial shortfall. That shortfall, however, has much more to do with tax cuts - cuts that Mr. Bush nonetheless insists on making permanent - than it does with Social Security.

But since the politics of privatization depend on convincing the public that there is a Social Security crisis, the privatizers have done their best to invent one.

My favorite example of their three-card-monte logic goes like this: first, they insist that the Social Security system's current surplus and the trust fund it has been accumulating with that surplus are meaningless. Social Security, they say, isn't really an independent entity - it's just part of the federal government.

If the trust fund is meaningless, by the way, that Greenspan-sponsored tax increase in the 1980's was nothing but an exercise in class warfare: taxes on working-class Americans went up, taxes on the affluent went down, and the workers have nothing to show for their sacrifice.

But never mind: the same people who claim that Social Security isn't an independent entity when it runs surpluses also insist that late next decade, when the benefit payments start to exceed the payroll tax receipts, this will represent a crisis - you see, Social Security has its own dedicated financing, and therefore must stand on its own.

There's no honest way anyone can hold both these positions, but very little about the privatizers' position is honest. They come to bury Social Security, not to save it. They aren't sincerely concerned about the possibility that the system will someday fail; they're disturbed by the system's historic success.

For Social Security is a government program that works, a demonstration that a modest amount of taxing and spending can make people's lives better and more secure. And that's why the right wants to destroy it.

ah, but what do THEY know?

2004-12-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

all of the below... *from the Pentagon,* no less... but who does the Chimp keep in the leadership cabal after the 11/2 debacle? Rummy and Wolfy.

what a complete and utter fool. see, on the strength of stuff like this the sonofabitch ought to be impeachable - on the very basic grounds of violating the oath of office. you know - the "preserve, protect and defend" part. obviously the greenest newly-commissioned second lieutenant understands the oath better.

U.S. Admits the War for 'Hearts and Minds' in Iraq is Now Lost
By Neil Mackay
The Sunday Herald

Sunday 05 December 2004
Pentagon report reveals catalogue of failure.

The Pentagon has admitted that the war on terror and the invasion and occupation of Iraq have increased support for al-Qaeda, made ordinary Muslims hate the US and caused a global backlash against America because of the "self-serving hypocrisy" of George W Bush's administration over the Middle East.

The mea culpa is contained in a shockingly frank "strategic communications" report, written this autumn by the Defence Science Board for Pentagon supremo Donald Rumsfeld.

On "the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds", the report says, "American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended".

"American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies."

Referring to the repeated mantra from the White House that those who oppose the US in the Middle East "hate our freedoms", the report says: "Muslims do not 'hate our freedoms', but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favour of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the long-standing, even increasing support, for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states.

"Thus when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypo crisy. Moreover, saying that 'freedom is the future of the Middle East' is seen as patronising ... in the eyes of Muslims, the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering. US actions appear in contrast to be motivated by ulterior motives, and deliberately controlled in order to best serve American national interests at the expense of truly Muslim self-determination."

The way America has handled itself since September 11 has played straight into the hands of al-Qaeda, the report adds. "American actions have elevated the authority of the jihadi insurgents and tended to ratify their legitimacy among Muslims." The result is that al-Qaeda has gone from being a marginal movement to having support across the entire Muslim world.

"Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic," the report goes on, adding that to the Arab world the war is "no more than an extension of American domestic politics". The US has zero credibility among Muslims which means that "whatever Americans do and say only serves ... the enemy".

The report says that the US is now engaged in a "global and generational struggle of ideas" which it is rapidly losing. In order to reverse the trend, the US must make "strategic communication" - which includes the dissemination of propaganda and the running of military psychological operations - an integral part of national security. The document says that "Presidential leadership" is needed in this "ideas war" and warns against "arrogance, opportunism and double standards".

"We face a war on terrorism," the report says, "intensified conflict with Islam, and insurgency in Iraq. Worldwide anger and discontent are directed at America's tarnished credibility and ways the US pursues its goals. There is a consensus that America's power to persuade is in a state of crisis." More than 90% of the populations of some Muslims countries, such as Saudi Arabia, are opposed to US policies.

"The war has increased mistrust of America in Europe," the report adds, "weakened support for the war on terrorism and undermined US credibility worldwide." This, in turn, poses an increased threat to US national security.

America's "image problem", the report authors suggest, is "linked to perceptions of the US as arrogant, hypocritical and self-indulgent". The White House "has paid little attention" to the problems.

The report calls for a huge boost in spending on propaganda efforts as war policies "will not succeed unless they are communicated to global domestic audiences in ways that are credible".

American rhetoric which equates the war on terror as a cold-war-style battle against "totalitarian evil" is also slapped down by the report. Muslims see what is happening as a "history-shaking movement of Islamic restoration ... a renewal of the Muslim world ...(which) has taken form through many variant movements, both moderate and militant, with many millions of adherents - of which radical fighters are only a small part".

Rather than supporting tyranny, most Muslim want to overthrow tyrannical regimes like Saudi Arabia. "The US finds itself in the strategically awkward - and potentially dangerous - situation of being the long-standing prop and alliance partner of these authoritarian regimes. Without the US, these regimes could not survive," the report says.

"Thus the US has strongly taken sides in a desperate struggle ... US policies and actions are increasingly seen by the overwhelming majority of Muslims as a threat to the survival of Islam itself ... Americans have inserted themselves into this intra-Islamic struggle in ways that have made us an enemy to most Muslims.

"There is no yearning-to- be-liberated-by-the-US groundswell among Muslim societies ... The perception of intimate US support of tyr-annies in the Muslim world is perhaps the critical vulnerability in American strategy. It strongly undercuts our message, while strongly promoting that of the enemy."

The report says that, in terms of the "information war", "at this moment it is the enemy that has the advantage". The US propaganda drive has to focus on "separating the vast majority of non-violent Muslims from the radical- militant Islamist-Jihadist".

According to the report, "the official take on the target audience [the Muslim world] has been gloriously simple" and divided the Middle East into "good" and "bad Muslims".

"Americans are convinced that the US is a benevolent 'superpower' that elevates values emphasising freedom ... deep down we assume that everyone should naturally support our policies. Yet the world of Islam - by overwhelming majorities at this time - sees things differently. Muslims see American policies as inimical to their values, American rhetoric about freedom and democracy as hypocritical and American actions as deeply threatening.

"In two years the jihadi message - that strongly attacks American values - is being accepted by more moderate and non-violent Muslims. This in turn implies that negative opinion of the US has not yet bottomed out

Equally important, the report says, is "to renew European attitudes towards America" which have also been severely damaged since September 11, 2001. As "al-Qaeda constantly outflanks the US in the war of information", American has to adopt more sophisticated propaganda techniques, such as targeting secularists in the Muslim world - including writers, artists and singers - and getting US private sector media and marketing professionals involved in disseminating messages to Muslims with a pro-US "brand".

The Pentagon report also calls for the establishment of a national security adviser for strategic communications, and a massive boost in funding for the "information war" to boost US government TV and radio stations broadcasting in the Middle East.

The importance of the need to quickly establish a propaganda advantage is underscored by a document attached to the Pentagon report from Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary, dated May.

It says: "Our military expeditions to Afghanistan and Iraq are unlikely to be the last such excursion in the global war on terrorism."

Scheer skewering

2004-12-06T13:21:00.000-08:00

it's odd, though -- despite the deliciousness of the contradictions involved in things like this, hypocrisy is just never really the subject of redneck / red-state outrage. i'm not sure why. could be, though, that it just involves a little bit too much intelLECK-shual effort on their part... or that they know damn well that the pot's in no condition to be assigning color value to the kettle.

ah, well; back to "Will and Grace." (i'm a heathen secular liberal, so i don't *have* to apologize for watching such swill... except to myself, i mean).

The Invisible Hand Holds the Remote

Red states love the crap entertainment corporations dish out just as much as the blue ones
By Robert Scheer

November 30, 2004 – What does it mean that a whopping 70% of Americans, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll, believe that mass culture is responsible for debasing our moral values? It means, if the poll is accurate, that we are a nation of lascivious hypocrites. In fact, the lure of sin, as represented by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, is as tempting to Americans today as apples ever were to Adam and Eve.

Whether in Utah, Georgia or New York, the TV ratings show that we are choosing the equivalent of fast-food entertainment over quality programming. Sex and violence sell well everywhere; high culture does not. So the entertainment titans keep dishing up more of the same.

The top two shows in the nation right now are a grisly crime serial and a cynical and sex-soaked demolition of life in the suburbs, and both are beloved in both red states and blue.

In the Atlanta market, for example, "Desperate Housewives" is the No. 1 show, while in Salt Lake City, the gory "CSI" franchise dominates local TV sets, with "Housewives" placing a respectable fourth. Both regions backed President Bush solidly, giving him 58% and 72% of the vote, respectively. In other words, we have met the enemy and it is us. If anything is to blame for what appears on our screens it is the free market, a deregulated and hypercompetitive mediascape where a right-wing mega-capitalist like Rupert Murdoch can simultaneously make millions off satires like "Married With Children" and "The Simpsons" and a right-wing news channel that wraps itself in the very "God, country, family" tropes that those satires so crassly yet cleverly spoof.

Yet even some liberals have apparently bought the Big Lie, spewed with a vengeance throughout this election year, that a liberal, permissive, secular, coastal culture has perverted the otherwise pristine heartland of our nation. In reality, what we have here is Econ 101: supply and demand. Adam Smith's invisible hand, combined with mass media technology, now allows the best that humanity has to offer to compete with the lowest common denominator. And guess what is winning.

On rare occasions, the good triumphs. Religious censors, for example, would have killed D.H. Lawrence's exquisite depiction of Lady Chatterley's affair with her gamekeeper if he hadn't been able to find printers who valued cash over the church's approval. Today, however, the admixture of greed and art allows "Desperate Housewives" to cash in on the same sex-with-a-hireling story line, with more cleavage and far less sincerity. Catering to our base desires also finds us eagerly paying for video games in which one can spend the afternoon slaughtering innocents and monsters alike, while our prime-time television is dominated by "Survivor"-style shows whose logical conclusion seems to be Piggy's execution by the mob in "Lord of the Flies."

But hey, to each his own, right? Personally, I could do without ever again hearing jingoistic country songs like Toby Keith's hit that warned the world: "You'll be sorry that you messed with the U.S. of A. / 'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass / It's the American way." But I'd never ask for such drivel to be banned.

The bottom line of capitalism is that if somebody will buy it, somebody will make it. Yet instead of insisting that cultural consumers take personal responsibility for the choices they make – or, better yet, providing new resources for public education and nonprofit media – the professional tsk-tskers feign outrage at the sullying of televised football with Janet Jackson's breast or a naked Desperate Housewife jumping into the arms of an NFL player.

Worse, these national moralists – dominated these days by evangelical Christians – politicize the issue by blaming "liberal Hollywood" for what deregulation and the free market have wrought. Never mind that Arnold Schwarzenegger made all those violent movies, it is the Democrats and their ilk who are corrupting youth by promulgating our "relativistic" morality. But that's just bunk. The real engine at work here, for better or worse, is the profit motive. If this patently obvious point is absent from the complaints of social conservatives, it is because the truth of the matter is inconvenient to their agenda.

It's much easier for them to politicize the moral decay of our culture than to admit that its wellspring is the domination of media corporations, along with the rampant consumerism that has led us deep into personal debt. Let's face it: There's not much money to be made off children's piano recitals, songs sung around the campfire or performances by your local orchestra, but the choice to consume such fare is always there.

So if you're upset with what's on the boob tube tonight, just ask yourself: What would Jesus watch? My guess is PBS.

Copyright © 2004 Robert Scheer

good morning and welcome. i'll be your provocateur

2004-12-06T09:13:00.000-08:00

an interesting thought piece which has, i'm sure, the potential to alienate just about everybody. but, as the product of an Army family with its share of liberals and a tradition of acceptance for same, i think E.J. makes some very good points.

Let the Military on Campus

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
Friday, December 3, 2004; Page A27

When a circuit court ruled this week that universities could bar military recruiters from campuses without the risk of losing federal money, many liberals cheered. They should hold the cheering and reconsider the implications of their actions.

Whatever the merits of the ruling, the idea of keeping recruiters away from elite universities is a large mistake -- for the military, for our country and for liberalism itself. The growing separation between the military and many parts of our society, especially its most liberal and elite precincts, is a huge problem. Closing that divide should be one of liberalism's highest priorities. It should be a high priority for the military, too.

The case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit involved a decade-old federal provision pushed through by the late representative Gerald Solomon (R-N.Y.). The law prohibits the federal government from giving money to colleges and universities that block military recruiting. A group of law schools insisted that they be able to keep the recruiters away because the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality violated their own policies forbidding discrimination against gays and lesbians.

In a 2 to 1 decision, the majority ruled that an earlier Supreme Court decision allowing the Boy Scouts to bar homosexuals from becoming scoutmasters created the same freedom of association for the law schools. "The Solomon Amendment requires law schools to express a message that is incompatible with their educational objectives," the majority wrote, "and no compelling governmental interest has been shown to deny this freedom."

Let's accept for the sake of argument that, in a close call, the court made the right ruling in protecting academic freedom. I'd assert further that the universities are absolutely right in opposing "don't ask, don't tell." The policy is both wrong and stupid.

It's wrong because it puts the government in a position of encouraging gays and lesbians in the military to lie about who they are. It is stupid because at a moment when we want our military to have access to all the talent it can get, we should welcome the service of all patriotic Americans, including those who are openly gay. We shouldn't make these patriots vulnerable to intimidation, pressure and even blackmail.

But having won their principle in court, these universities, including the law schools, should now voluntarily open their doors to recruiters. Liberals especially should be worried about the growing divide between the armed forces and many parts of our society. They should acknowledge that if liberals stay out of the military, their chances of influencing the military culture are reduced to close to zero. Above all, liberals should worry about the unfairness in the way the burdens of service are borne.

As former Navy secretary John Lehman wrote in The Post last year, "Our all-volunteer force, for all its many virtues, is not representative of American society. The privileged are largely absent from it. Thus the burdens of defense and the perils of combat do not fall even close to fairly across all of our society."

Lehman was reacting to a notable 2002 New York Times op-ed by Rep. Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat. "A disproportionate number of the poor and members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the military, while the most privileged Americans are underrepresented or absent," Rangel wrote.

One of the most powerful warnings about the dangerous gap between military and civilian life came from Thomas E. Ricks, now a correspondent on military affairs for The Post. In his book "Making the Corps" and in an influential 1997 article in the Atlantic Monthly, Ricks spoke of the increasing distance between military and civilian life -- and in particular the split between the military and our professional civilian classes.

"U.S. military personnel of all ranks are feeling increasingly alienated from their own country, and are becoming both more conservative and more politically active than ever before," Ricks wrote in the Atlantic. He argued that the division between military and civilian life was a symptom of something larger: "the isolation of professional Americans, or the upper middle class, from the broad concerns of society. Ignorance of the military is, I think, just one manifestation of that larger problem."

Yes, and liberal university administrators can do something about it. The best way to change the military and to create greater fairness in sharing the burdens of defending our country is to embrace the call to service, not reject it. By opening their doors to recruiters, our universities can strengthen our democracy.

2004-12-06T05:27:00.000-08:00

the author here is talking about the very same "elephants" i've spent much of my adult life trying to get people to acknowledge. the dedication to denial here is little short of awe-inspiring.

i thought the flag that symbolizes this nation's identity and interests had three colors - red, white and blue - as opposed to the latter two hues alone. and i thought it held 50 five-pointed stars... not a single six-pointed one.

uh-oh. guess that makes me an "anti-semite."

All Mosquitos, No Swamp; No Elephants Either
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Sunday 05 December 2004

Last Thursday's conference on "Al Qaeda 2.0: Transnational Terrorism After 9/11," sponsored by the New America Foundation and the New York University Center on Law & Security, was a valuable gift to those wanting an update on informed opinion on the subject. The event proved to be as highly instructive for what was not addressed, though, as for
the issues that were. The elephants known to be present remained largely unacknowledged.

The cavernous Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building was full to the gunwales. Panel after panel of distinguished presenters from near and far, from right and left - including authors Peter Bergen, Michael Scheuer, Jessica Stern and Col. Pat Lang - exuded and freely shared their expertise. But there was myopia as well.

The mosquitos of terrorism were dissected and examined as carefully as biology students once did drosophila, but typing the generic DNA of terrorism proved more elusive. Worse, no attention was given to the swamp in which terrorists breed. Were it not for a few impertinent questions from the audience evoking a pungent smell, the swamps might have eluded attention altogether.

The first panel featured two experts from RAND, both of whom touched only in passing - and quite gingerly - on the need to drain the swamp. The first closed his remarks with a 30-second peroration in which he observed that less attention might be given to kill/capture metrics in favor of addressing the causes of terrorism and breaking the cycle of terrorist recruitment.

The second speaker from RAND, referring to that organization's numerous studies on influencing public opinion, closed his remarks with this: "When the message coheres with the context in which the message is transmitted, it works." Sending out the right message during the Cold War was easier, he said, because the context (the United States being the only alternative to the USSR) was very clear. On terrorism, he added, we need to ponder "the mismatch between context and message."

What About The Elephants?

Then came a rude question from the audience: Is it not striking that even in an academic-type setting like this, elephants must remain invisible? Is it not ironic, that a panel of the U.S. Defense Science Board, in an unclassified study on "Strategic Communication," completed on September 23 but kept under wraps until after the November 2 election, let the pachyderms out of the bag? Directly contradicting the president, the DSB panel gave voice to what virtually all who were sitting in that ornate Senate Caucus Room knew, but were afraid to say. It named the elephants.

"Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States. Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy."

"...Nor can the most carefully crafted messages, themes, and words persuade when the messenger lacks credibility."

U.S. Support For Israel "Immutable"

Another questioner pressed RAND's expert on mismatch-context-message, asking, "What can we do to change the context?" In answer the expert acknowledged that the United States has a "bad reputation" but insisted that this is "unavoidable" because, for example, U.S. support for Israel is "immutable." The United States is also connected to what many Muslims consider "apostate" regimes, but it is difficult to escape what binds us, because the U.S. needs their "tactical support." (Read: oil; military bases; intelligence.)

There was some wincing and squirming in the audience, but in the end it was left to aptly named Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist, former CIA case officer, and author of the book Understanding Terror Networks (published earlier this year), to state the obvious on Israel and Iraq. Putting it even more bluntly that the Defense Science Board panel, he asserted:

"We are seen as a hypocritical bully in the Middle East and we have to stop!"

Now why should that be so hard to say, I asked myself. And I was reminded of a frequent, unnerving experience I had while on the lecture circuit in recent months. Almost invariably, someone in the audience would approach me after the talk and ensuing discussion, and congratulate me on my "courage" in naming Israel as a factor in discussing the war in Iraq and the struggle against terrorism.

I don't get it. Since when did it take uncommon courage to state simply, without fear or favor, the conclusions that fall out of one's analysis? Since when did it become an exceptional thing to tell it like it is?

Taking The Heat On Israel

I thought of the debate I had on Iraq with arch-neoconservative and former CIA Director James Woolsey on PBS' Charlie Rose Show on August 20, when I broke the taboo on mentioning Israel and was immediately branded "anti-Semitic" by Woolsey. Reflecting later on his accusation, it seemed almost OK since it was so blatantly ad hominem. And his attack was all the more transparent, coming from the self-described "anchor of the Presbyterian wing of JINSA" - the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, a strong advocate of war to eliminate all perceived enemies of Israel - like Iraq. In the ensuing days, a flood of e-mail reached me from all over the country - some of it repeating Woolsey's charge, but most of it warmly congratulating me on my "courage."

I still don't fully understand. And that was my candid answer to the question I dreaded - the one that so often came up during the Q and A sessions following my presentations: Why is it that the state of Israel has such pervasive influence over our body politic? No one denied that it does; most seemed genuinely puzzled as to why. My embarrassment at my inability to answer the question is attenuated by the solace I take in the thought that I am in good company.

Gen. Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to President George H. W. Bush and now chair of his son's President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, has been known to speak out on key issues when his patience is exhausted. Remember how, for example, before the attack on Iraq, he described the evidence of ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda as "scant" when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was calling it "bulletproof?" Well, it sounds like he has again run out of patience. Scowcroft recently told the Financial Times that George W. Bush is "mesmerized" by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Sharon just has
him wrapped around his little finger," Scowcroft is quoted as saying.

Scowcroft and I apparently have less at risk than those working for RAND...or for the New York Times, which gives off the aroma of being similarly mesmerized and intimidated. This shows through with amazing regularity; I'll adduce but two recent examples:

Times Timing...

To its credit, the New York Times on November 24 published a story by Times reporter Thom Shanker on the findings of the Defense Science Board panel report given to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on September 23. But why was the story two months late? And the urban legend that it was the Times that broke the story is not true, even though the Washington Post's somnolent ombudsman, Michael Getler "confirms that legend in his column this morning. (Noting that the story "didn't
appear in the Post," Getler implies that it should have, because "it goes to the heart of both the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq and it raises many crucial issues that don't get probed deeply enough by news organizations, in my opinion.")

It was not the Times on November 24, but rather Reasononline's Matt Welch, who broke the story. On November 15 Welch wrote an account of the panel's report in which he referred to its recommendations as having already been "made public." Were reporters from the mainstream press again asleep? Do they feed only on the thin gruel of approved Pentagon handouts? It is easy to understand that the Defense Department had no incentive to advertise the DSB panel's embarrassing and potentially explosive findings. (How often have we seen a Pentagon-sponsored report contradicting a sitting president on a
matter of such significance - and before a crucial election?) It is not so easy to grasp why the media missed or ignored the story. Or perhaps it is.

Maybe the clue is in the timing. I gave a long interview on US intelligence matters to another Times reporter a few weeks before the election and at the conclusion of the interview I commented that I certainly hoped his story would appear before November 2. This reporter turned out to be as candid as he was embarrassed. No, he confessed, his superiors at the Times had made it clear that there was an embargo on criticism of the administration of the kind I had offered until after the election. I expressed amazement that the New York Times - once courageous publisher of the Pentagon Papers that helped bring an end to our last ill-conceived war - would allow itself to be so intimidated. He replied, with undisguised embarrassment, that this is simply the way it is today.

Again, I find myself wondering how long the Times sat on the material reported by Shanker. Did it have the story before November 2? What does it mean that the Times published Shanker's report only after a decent post-election interval? Also interesting is the date ultimately chosen to run it - the day before Thanksgiving, a very poor time to attract the attention such a story might otherwise evoke. Yet another sign of wimpish desire to pander to administration preferences?

...and Times Surgery

Of equal interest is how the Times abridged the story itself. Shanker did quote from the key paragraph beginning with "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom'" (quoted in full above). But he or his editors deliberately cut out the next sentence about what Muslims do object to; i.e., U.S. "one-sided support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights," and support for tyrannical regimes. The Times did include the sentence that immediately followed the omitted one. In other words, the offending middle sentence was surgically removed from the paragraph like a malignant tumor.

Editing Bin Laden, As Well

Similarly creative editing showed through the Times' reporting on Osama Bin Laden's videotaped speech in late October. Several paragraphs of the story made it onto page one, but the Times saw to it that the key point Bin Laden made toward the beginning of his remarks was relegated to paragraphs 23 to 25 at the very bottom of page nine. Buried there, dwarfed by a large ad for Bloomingdales, was Bin Laden's revealing claim that the idea for 9/11 first germinated after "we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon."

If, as suggested earlier, one were to look for "context," precious little is provided by the Times. A "newspaper of record" might have noted that even the risk-averse 9/11 commissioners pointed out on page 147 of the Commission Report that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind and executioner of the 9/11 attacks, was motivated by "his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel." Was that not news fit to print?

Four More Years

With the mainstream media co-opted, and four-year older but familiar national security faces in place for the president's second term, it is a safe bet we are in for the same inept, misguided policies - only more so. Sadly, Secretary of State Colin Powell's relatively moderate views had little visible impact on policy decisions. Still, when he is gone the president's circle of advisers will have an even shorter diameter. And it is highly unlikely that Powell's designated successor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice, will be any more astute than in the past in seeking counsel from experienced statesmen like her former patron, Gen. Scowcroft.

Foreign leaders are aghast...and have been for years. In August 2002, British senior Labor backbencher Gerald Kaufman, a former shadow foreign secretary, warned that the "hawks" in the U.S. administration were giving the president poor advice:

"Bush, himself the most intellectually backward American president in my lifetime, is surrounded by advisers whose bellicosity is exceeded only by their political, military and diplomatic illiteracy. Pity the man who relies on Rumsfeld, Cheney and Rice for counsel."

Shrinking Circle

On the afternoon of February 5, 2003, after Secretary of State Colin Powell made his embarrassingly memorable speech at the UN, my colleagues and I of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) drafted and sent a short memorandum to the president, which concluded with this observation:

"After watching Secretary Powell today, we are convinced that you would be well served if you widened the discussion beyond... the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic."

Instead, the circle has been squeezed still tighter - as with wagons. And those widely known in Washington as "the crazies" when they were middle-level officials and the president's father was in the White House are now even more firmly ensconced. They remain in charge of things like war - the very same folks who brought us the "cakewalk" that became war in Iraq.

Hold onto your hats!

-------
Ray McGovern's duties during his 27-year career as an analyst at the
CIA included daily briefings of then-Vice President Bush and the most
senior national security advisers to President Ronald Reagan. McGovern
is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity (VIPS).

the Stranger hits again...

2004-12-03T18:07:00.000-08:00

from the latest issue of my new favorite 'zine.

Sugar Land. how utterly gross. the poor lady... i don't know if i could put myself through that, even for family.

HELL FOR THE HOLIDAYS
by Erica C. Barnett

A Red State Refugee Heads Back to Texas for Thanksgiving

Sugar Land, Texas--population: 74,189, altitude: 82 feet--is a former company town nestled in a sharp crook in the Brazos River, about 20 miles southwest of Houston. Founded to house workers for Imperial Sugar, the town has grown in roughly equal proportion to the state's largest city, its cypress forests and rows of wooden postwar company homes supplanted over the decades by "planned communities" that started sprouting in the 1980s and, further out, by gated communities whose wide, winding streets are lined with 10,000-, 15,000- and 20,000-square-foot McMansions. Streets with names like Sugar Mill and Cane Crossing wind past artificial lakes and rows of pecan trees through neighborhoods named after the area's original settlers, including Stephen's Crossing and William's Grant.

Sugar Land is where I go home for the holidays. It is the reddest city in the reddest state in the reddest region of America--a place so conservative that the Washington Post singled it out for feature-length treatment, under the headline "For a Conservative, Life Is Sweet in Sugar Land," last April. Tom DeLay, the House Majority leader for whom House Republicans changed their rules to allow him to continue to serve as House Majority Leader even under the threat of a possible ethics indictment, started his career as an exterminator in my community; this November, 55 percent of Sugar Land residents, including my parents, voted to return him to Washington, in spite (or perhaps, defiantly, because) of his ethics scandal.

Heading home to deep-red Sugar Land from deep-blue Seattle after the November election was a humbling experience, made more so by the fact that my relatives, unlike their neighbors, aren't mere Bush supporters; they're right-wing Republican Party activists, so conservative that they've stopped going to movies because they don't want a single dime of their hard-earned money going to the Hollywood liberal elite. Mine is a house where "the news" comes not from the New York Times, nor even from the (right-leaning) Houston Chronicle, but from Fox, Rush Limbaugh, and the Drudge Report; where books like Bill O'Reilly's No Spin Zone and Rush Limbaugh's See, I Told You So bump covers with autobiographies by Barbara Bush and Dan Quayle; and where I spent my formative years engaging in thunderous, cataclysmic political arguments with parents who'd sooner chew off their own arms than vote for a Democrat.

Plenty of people I know went through their own versions of this dilemma this Thanksgiving: swim out into the red sea to face a potentially emotional (and humiliating) argument about the election or simply avoid the issue, holing up on their urban islands, licking their wounds until they scab over and start to heal. Among people I know with red-state relatives, one spent the holiday with friends in Oregon; one left the country entirely; and another headed, girlfriend in tow, to the bluest place she could find: New York City. Me? I decided to confront my fears head-on. I traveled straight to the heart of red America--to hell for the holidays--on the condition that my family agree to avoid the only topic that was on my mind.

My parents proved surprisingly amenable to my request. And they invited a fellow Democrat, my mom's sister from Austin (Texas' bluest island) to even out the political balance. Aiming to avoid all talk of politics, we landed almost immediately on the one solution guaranteed to render us mute: television. Over the course of four days, we watched episodes of "Desperate Housewives" (the top-rated show in red America, according to the New York Times), "The Apprentice", and an entire season of "Sex and the City." In values-obsessed red America, where there's a church on every corner, one of the most popular programs is a show about a bunch of materialistic, oversexed New Yorkers. In four days, cocooned in the climate-controlled coolness of my parents' 2,500-square-foot suburban home, I heard the word "fuck" more times than you'd read in a whole month of Strangers.

People like my parents choose to live in suburbs like Sugar Land, among many other reasons, to avoid exposing themselves to new, discomfiting ideas. People like me flee the suburbs because we crave that exposure. That's why, as soon as I was old enough to drive, I spent most of my free time in Houston, where all-ages clubs and cultural institutions offer an alternative for kids who would otherwise spend their days ambling aimlessly through the suburbs, watching MTV, and smoking pot out of homemade bongs. And it's why I left the suburbs for the liberal urban oasis of Austin, and then the even more liberal oasis of Seattle, where I've lived for the past four years.

* * * *
There are more of them than there are of us.

That's one of the many depressing thoughts that have occurred to progressives since November 2. Not only did more Americans vote for Bush than for Kerry, those Bush voters are out-breeding Kerry voters. Birth rates in the suburbs and rural areas are higher than they are in the cities, a demographic trend that some have pointed to with alarm. Won't all those red-state babies grow up to vote like their moms and dads? That's far from guaranteed. Lots of suburban kids pack their bags, pick up, and head for the islands of urbanity that stretch across the country. I did. Look around you: How many of your friends--the same ones you got drunk with on election night--are refugees from red families in red states?

Despite every attempt by our parents to instill in us a set of solid red-state values--among them, in varying degrees: intolerance for cultural and religious differences, hatred for big-government programs and the taxes that support them, and fear of whatever is unfamiliar, including gays, science, and the East Coast press--some of us--lots of us--choose to seek out and find our own blue islands.

* * * *
But sometimes, you have to come back home.

Over years of visits, my family has gradually learned to avoid talk of partisan politics. Although my parents aren't the archetypal "values voters" of red-state mythology, they, like most everyone in their suburban enclave, keep at bay any ideas that would contradict their unshakable view of the world outside. My dad believes, in all sincerity, that newspapers--the "liberal media"--just make things up. And, considering the steady diet of Bill O'Reilly and Matt Drudge on which he subsists, who can blame him?

Every morning while I was home, I sought a break from my self-imposed political information blackout by heading out along streets populated by SUVs whose drivers eyed me suspiciously from behind tinted windows to hunt for the day's New York Times. On every day but one, this search proved futile, as the two or three copies that had been ferried out to the suburban Houston hinterlands were snatched up well before 10:00 a.m. I called a friend to kvetch about my quest. "Imagine," he joked, "all those kids reading the New York Times under their covers with a flashlight. To conservatives, there's nothing more pornographic than ideas. "

Even suburbs like Sugar Land aren't impenetrable. Even in a town where the local Democratic Party operates under the incredibly desperate slogan "Because the two-party system is the lifeblood of democracy," the New York Times flies off the shelves, "Sex and the City" sets the bar for family entertainment, and kids get exposure to a world that isn't afraid of ideas, whether their parents like it or not. And some of them, like me, flee the red ocean to islands like Seattle, where, even if you're a stranger to the neighborhood, no one stops to stare.

woe betide...

2004-12-03T17:37:00.000-08:00

...the Christian organization that attempts to promote truly Christian attitudes, such as inclusiveness and non-judgmental love of people whoever and wherever they are.

the corporate-bitch media are such contemptible cowards these days.

[from The Nation.]

The Rev. John Thomas, who serves as general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, is having a hard time figuring out why the same broadcasters that profited so handsomely from airing the vicious and divisive attack advertisements during the recent presidential election are now refusing to air an advertisement from his denomination that celebrates respect for one another and inclusiveness.

"It's ironic that after a political season awash in commercials based on fear and deception by both parties seen on all the major networks, an ad with a message of welcome and inclusion would be deemed too controversial," said Thomas. "What's going on here?"

The ad in question is part of an ambitious new national campaign by the UCC to appeal to Americans who feel alienated from religion and churches, and to equip the denomination's 6,000 congregations across the U.S. to welcome newcomers. In an effort to break through the commercial clutter that clogs the arteries of broadcast and cable television, the UCC ad features an arresting image: a pair of muscle-bound bouncers standing in front of a church and telling some people they can attend while turning others away.

After people of color, a disabled man and a pair of men who might be gay are turned away, the image dissolves to a text statement that: "Jesus didn't turn people away. Neither do we."

Then, as images of diverse couples and families appear on screen, an announcer explains that, "No matter who you are, or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."

It is a graceful commercial, which delivers an important message gently yet effectively -- something that cannot be said of most television advertising these days. But viewers of the CBS and NBC television networks won't see it because, in this age of heightened focus on so-called "moral values," quoting Jesus on the issue of inclusion is deemed to be "too controversial."

What was controversial? Apparently, the networks don't like the ad's implication that the Nazarene's welcome to all people might actually include ALL people.

Noting that the image of one woman putting her arm around another was included in the ad, CBS announced, "Because the commercial touches on the exclusion of gay couples and other minority groups by other individuals and organizations, and the fact the Executive Branch has recently proposed a Constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, this spot is unacceptable for broadcast on the (CBS and UPN) networks."

NBC was similarly concerned that the spot was "controversial." UCC leaders, pastors and congregation members are upset, and rightly so.

"It' seems incredible to me that CBS admits it is refusing to air the commercial because of something the Executive Branch, the Bush administration, is doing," says Dave Moyer, conference minister for the Wisconsin Conference of the UCC. "Since when is it unacceptable to offer a different perspective?"

Moyer says that people of all religious faiths and all ideological perspectives should be concerned that the major networks -- which dominate so much of the discourse in America -- are seeking to narrow the dialogue.

The Rev. Curt Anderson, the pastor of the First United Church of Christ in Madison, Wisconsin, says that people of good will should also be concerned about the message being sent to gays and lesbians in the aftermath of an election season that saw them targeted by the political right.

"I'm thinking of the LGBT folks in my church who felt so under attack after the election. They are getting hit again," explained the pastor. "This is another way where the culture, the media, makes them invisible. It is incredible that it is controversial for one woman to put her arm around another."

It is also bizarrely hypocritical. After all, the same NBC network that found the UCC ad "too controversial" airs programs such as "Will & Grace" that feature gay and lesbian characters. "We find it disturbing that the networks in question seem to have no problem exploiting gay persons through mindless comedies and titillating dramas, but when it comes to a church's loving welcome to committed gay couples, that's where they draw the line," explained the Rev. Bob Chase, director of the national UCC's communication ministry.

Chase has a point. CBS and NBC, networks that reap enormous profits from the public airwaves, are not serving the public interest. Rather, they are assaulting it by narrowing the dialogue and rejecting a message of inclusion that is sorely needed at this point in the American experiment.

dirty pictures

2004-12-03T08:24:00.000-08:00

great subject line, huh? and actually it's not that misleading.

Mighty Mark continues savaging the Savage One.

Very, Very Dirty Pictures

You want explicit? You want raw and uncensored and free of media bias? Here you go
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 3, 2004

This is what you won't see in the paper.

This is what you won't see on CNN or on MSNBC or CBS News or on any major media Web site anywhere and especially no goddamn way ever in hell will you see it within a thousand miles of Fox News.

You aren't supposed to see. You aren't supposed to know. You are to remain ignorant and shielded, and, if you're like most Americans, you have been very carefully conditioned to think Bush's nasty Iraq war is merely this ugly little firecracker-like thing happening way, way over there, carefully orchestrated and somewhat messy and maybe a little bloody but mostly still patriotic and good and necessary and sponsored by none other than God his own angry Republican self.

And hence you and I both have no real idea what the hell goes on in Iraq, no real images to gnaw on and be deeply horrified and saddened by, except for maybe a tiny handful of carefully sanitized snapshots of bombed-out Iraqi cities and maybe some grainy video of U.S. soldiers enjoying a dusty game of pickup football and a turkey dinner at the posh military digs way, way outside of Baghdad.

Or maybe you think war is manly and heroic and cool, as exemplified by that now-famous shot of that macho "Dogface" Marlboro-smokin' Marine whose dirt-encrusted mug was eagerly picked up by newspapers and media Web sites across the nation (including this one), and he became an instant icon for the war and the military was positively giddy about using him an ideal recruitment tool, a model of how to make soldiers look all studly and rugged and badass as opposed to the often poorly educated, disposable hunks of politically abused postpubescent meat BushCo considers them to be.

So then. Here is your uncensored truth: fallujahinpictures.com. Real pictures from Fallujah. Real pictures of war. Brutal and explicit and shocking and just one site of many. Be warned: this is very graphic content. Horrific and deeply disturbing. No censorship. No suppression. No Photoshop. No bogus shots of happy Iraqi children running in the streets begging for candy from American soldiers. No night shots of Marines in bitchin' night-vision goggles bustin' down the door of some palace and then cheering.

Because if you think that's what it's all been about, if you really think war is just this tragic but necessary evil that contains some unfortunate violence and regrettable death but is nonetheless still full of righteous democratic American truth, you have been wildly misled and deeply deceived and might want to consider a nice intellectual emetic. You and Dubya both.

Mind you, fallujahinpictures.com is not all gross-out shots of imploded skulls or severed limbs or brutally decapitated children or mutilated women or splattered brains or rivers of blood and intestine and excrement lining the Iraqi streets. Those horrific photos are indeed available (just Google "Iraq war pictures"). But, really, who wants to see that? Not Dubya, that's who. Besides, that's what slasher movies are for. Republicans and war hawks don't actually want to see that stuff in, you know, real life.

And maybe you already know that our government instituted an unqualified ban on pictures of all those flag-draped U.S. coffins that are pouring into American Air Force bases by the hundreds. Maybe you remember that cargo worker who lost her job last spring for leaking such photos to The Seattle Times.

Maybe you know how back in June the Republican-led Congress upheld the ban on coffin photos, all under the guise of "respecting soldiers' families," which of course translates directly into "If the pubic saw all those kids coming home dead, they might not wave that flag so wildly."

As the saying goes, Bush may be dumb, but he ain't always stupid. Even he doubtlessly remembers the effect of watching TV in the '60s and seeing all those American kids coming home from Vietnam in body bags. Not exactly good for morale back home. Not exactly good for the country's view of itself. And true poison to the pseudo-noble idea of just what the hell it is we think we're doing by launching such brutal and unwinnable wars in the first place.

Make no mistake, the government knows the power of the photo. Words, it's not so worried about. After all, you can read the war descriptions and you can check the appalling U.S. death stats and you can scour the dour headlines and still most of us just shrug our shoulders and say gosh that sounds bad and get on with our day.

But much like that other "un-American" site, sorryeverybody.com, exemplifies so beautifully (in a wholly different but no less effective way), sometimes words just aren't enough. You need to see it. You need to feel it. Visceral and human and deep.

Funny thing is, many right-wing neocons consider the act of displaying such pictures unpatriotic, even traitorous. As if revealing the true horrors of war somehow disrespects our long-suffering soldiers, somehow harms them by depicting the full violence of what they must endure for Bush's snide and viciously isolationist policies. You think soldiers don't want the folks back home to know what they have to deal with? You think they want you numb to the truth of war and pain and death? Guess again.

Maybe this should be the rule: If you can't handle seeing what really goes on in a war, maybe you don't deserve to support it. If you can't stomach the truths of what our soldiers are doing and how brutally and bloodily they're dying and in just what manner they have to kill those innocent Iraqi civilians in the name of BushCo's desperate lurch toward greed and power and Iraqi oil fields and empire, maybe you don't have the right to stick that little flag on your oil-sucking SUV. Clear enough?

The major media, by the way, is often hamstrung and torn. They can rarely run such photos. Newspapers and TV are hemmed in by "no-sensationalism" policies and are often paralyzed by the notion that if they ran such pictures, they would be called insensitive or inflammatory or anti-Bush and advertisers and readers alike would run away in droves. After all, most readers just aren't keen on seeing gross-out pics of 19-year-old kids from Kentucky with massive bleeding head traumas. It just totally ruins "Garfield."

You have to seek the facts yourself. You have to dare yourself to click, to take it in, to see if you can, in fact, handle the truth.

It is not easy. It is definitely not pleasant. But in this time of ever escalating numbers of war dead and flagrant BushCo lies and sanitized BS about the real effects of war, all coupled with a simmering plan to attack Iran and maybe North Korea someday real soon, seeking out such visceral truth is no longer just optional. It is, perhaps, the most patriotic thing you can do.

disengage, with fervor, with righteous rage

2004-12-02T22:30:00.000-08:00

i understand this.

and i am doing all i can myself to minimize my own participation, to the barest, scantest, stingiest possible necessary degree, in any economic activity that might help or encourage or legitimize the "leaders" of a national electorate that has, at least in the short term, sentenced itself to political oblivion. to hel with supporting the big companies, from Exxon to Verizon to AOL TimeWarner to Disney to McDonalds to (of course) Wal-Mart... and any other hypercorps supporting this obscenity of an "administration."

this tactic is as old as Gandhi, as old in fact as Yesh'ua bin Yusuf of Nazareth. and hey, my credit card balance is already dropping, perchance to something sustainable. it's a good thing all around. just - disengage. do not patronize them. do not cooperate. Use your options, which are going to be mostly local and will take some digging to even discover, maybe. yes, i know that mom-n-pops have to do business with the vampires themselves... but you can still minimize your own support, your own complicity in the plutocracy. It will take a little bit of homework, a little extra effort, maybe even a few extra bucks, but it will be worth it. It's your economic vote.

it's culture-jamming, and it's the only thing the swollen bastards understand.

when America as a whole decides to wake up, maybe i'll still be around to help undo the damage of the new Bushie Know-Nothings. and maybe i won't. i'm not sure any help is deserved... at least on the broadest, sea-to-shining-sea level.

maybe balkanization, fragmentation, is better after all. it sure seems the most honest way right now. this doesn't feel or seem like one country at the moment - that much is certain. "North American Confederation" sounds a lot more realistic, just now, than the old "USA" formulation.

and that's just fine with me. the Stars and Stripes will always be a great visual design, and an arresting historic portrait of what was once a nation. they don't have to be any more than that, though. life goes on.

The Ethic of Total Opposition>
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 03 December 2004

Through these fields of destruction
Baptisms of fire
I've witnessed your suffering
As the battle raged higher
And though it did hurt me so bad
In the fear and alarm
You did not desert me
My brothers in arms

- Dire Straits, 'Brothers in Arms'

I was sitting at the bar the other day with Hannah, talking politics over a mug. I commented that morale among those in the progressive movement had cratered since the Presidential election, that the energy and hopefulness which had marked the long slog towards the vote had been replaced by a dimming of expectations, a hunch-shouldered feeling of despair. Hannah wasn't surprised. "I'm a cynic these days," she said. "I don't count on people much anymore."

The feeling is understandable. We've seen hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in the Ukraine to force a showdown over a questionable election. Yet here in America, after a national election with some 30,000 reported cases of irregularities, there is this odd silence. When a former satellite of the Soviet Union shames the greatest democracy in the history of the world on something as elemental as the right to vote, things are badly out of joint.

We've seen 137 American soldiers die in the month of November during the ongoing occupation of Iraq, the deadliest month to date for American forces in this war, combined with God only knows how many civilians killed. Some 200,000 people were forced to flee Fallujah after Bush decided to celebrate the November election by razing much of that city to the ground in a military assault that accomplished exactly nothing. Again, we are greeted with this odd silence.

We've seen the FBI and local police forces investigate political and religious entities, such as the Quakers and the Campaign for Labor Rights along with several peace and environmental activist groups, on the grounds that these organizations might be terrorism-related. These groups have been interviewed, investigated and subjected to searches by a variety of terrorism task forces. It goes without saying that the groups under scrutiny are not friendly to Bush administration policies at home and abroad. The Constitutional guarantee of free speech and free association is falling by the boards, and again, we are greeted with this odd silence.

This is but a small slice of what has already happened, and cannot begin to encapsulate what may lie in wait in the coming weeks, months and years. If the silence that surrounds everything continues, perhaps Hannah's cynicism is justified.

But then again, I met Brian Willson.

The name might not be immediately familiar to you. Willson is a member of the group Veterans for Peace, an organization comprised of military veterans from every war America has fought since World War II. The mission statement on their web page states, "Our collective experience tells us wars are easy to start and hard to stop and that those hurt are often the innocent. Thus, other means of problem solving are necessary." Veterans for Peace has been active in every demonstration
against the Iraq war that I have been to in the last two years.

I met Brian Willson last summer during the VFP convention in San Francisco. Willson is a Vietnam veteran who walks on two prosthetic limbs that reach from his knees to the ground. He did not lose his legs in the war. Willson has been a peace activist for decades, and in 1987 was participating in an action to stop naval trains from delivering cargos of weapons to Central America. His methods were direct; he and his fellow activists would lay their bodies across the tracks and stop the trains. They had done this several times before, and each time, the trains had stopped. One day, however, the train kept going. Willson lost both legs below the knee and had a large hole blasted into his skull.

I think of everything I have sacrificed in the last four years in order to do whatever small amount I could to stop the Iraq invasion and to offset the damage being done by Bush and his people. I gave up a beloved teaching job to wage this battle full time. I have seen friends marry, have children and move away while pursuing lives socalmly ordinary as to leave me wondering which way is up. I have let my health slide in order to concentrate on the tasks at hand. I have traveled over 100,000 miles trying to convince people that we are barreling headlong into a hard brick wall.

But I have not buried a beloved family member who was killed in Iraq while serving in our armed forces. I have not buried a family member who lived in Iraq and was killed for being in the wrong place when the cluster bombs or the napalm struck. I have not seen my job outsourced and been left to wonder how to feed my family. I have not watched my retirement fund get stolen by latter-day corporate robber barons. I did not get my legs cut from my body trying to stop a train filled with weapons from reaching its deadly destination.

If Brian Willson can wake each day, strap his metal legs to his body, and keep marching for what he believes in, who am I to despair? Considering the damage done to so many people these last four years, I've gotten off light. Cynicism is not an option.

There are a number of areas where a concerted effort can yield important fruit. The all-important 9th Circuit Court o Appeals is under conservative assault, but can be successfully defended with the proper amount of attention and action. The nomination of Alberto Gonzales, author of the Abu Ghraib torture justifications, to the post of Attorney General is considered to be a done deal in the pundit realm. That nomination can be stopped with the proper amount of attention and action, and if not, Gonzales's ability to magnify his strange views on American law can be checked through message delivery to the American people. This list goes on and on.

There is an inauguration in Washington DC this January, or so I am told. Progressive Democrats of America is planning a summit to forge a course for the coming years. Probably you should be there. I'll be there.

Perhaps it will all come to nothing. Certainly, with Congress and the White House under the sway of people whose moral compass points ever downwards, with the highest court ripe for the molding by these people, with a national news media that avoids hard truth the way a cat avoids water, it is difficult to imagine the break of dawn coming anytime soon. We are down to the ethic of total opposition, and as lonely as that estate may be, it is what we have, and we owe it to those who have suffered beyond our comprehension to continue as we began.

I refuse to concede defeat in any way, shape or form. Yet I must consider the possibility that all efforts will come to naught. In doing so, I am reminded of a scene in 'The Lion in Winter.' Geoffrey, John and Richard await their executioners, and Richard demands that they face their doom with strength. Geoffrey scoffs, "You fool. As if it matters how a man falls."

Richard's reply: "When the fall is all that's left, it matters."

okay, so maybe they're not ALL hayseeds

2004-12-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

on the other hand... (re the rural vs urban thing): a friend of mine on the faculty here at the school where i work just sent this little gem from The Nation - in response to which, i have a one-word question:

???Montana???

Democrats Score in the Rockies
by JOHN NICHOLS
The Nation
[from the December 6, 2004 issue]

Imagine a parallel universe where, instead of crying in their beer as the election results rolled in on November 2, Democrats were raising microbrews in toasts to their unprecedented success. Now, stop imagining and focus on the Rocky Mountain West, a region that trended so Republican in the 1990s that a popular joke suggested gays and lesbians were afraid to come out of the closet for fear of being thought to be Democrats. This year the Democrats got the last laugh. While those so-simplistic-as-to-be-useless maps of partisan breakdowns in the presidential race paint the region as hopelessly Republican--feeding the sense that wide expanses of America are lost forever to the Democratic Party--Dan Petegorsky of the Western States Center invites a closer look, which reveals that "the 'red' label on the presidential map contrasts sharply with the state-level results."

On the same day that George W. Bush was winning nationally and Republicans were increasing their majorities in Congress, Democrats in the eight states of the Rocky Mountain West were winning state and local contests at a rate not seen in decades and offering valuable lessons for the national Democratic Party, organized labor and progressive activist groups that are sorely in need of new models for campaigning. "Before the pundits write this off as the year when nothing seemed to work right for the Democrats," says Montana Democratic Party executive director Brad Martin, "there is a Western story that needs to be told."

Actually, there are several stories. Shifting demographics, local issues and the extent to which the presidential contest was fought out on the ground had varying influences on state results. But there were some constants: Western Democrats tended to abandon the national party's template and focus on local issues, they relied far more heavily on volunteers than paid staff and they worked much, much harder--and with considerable success--to attract rural voters.

The one other constant was good news. Here's just a little of what happened in the Rocky Mountain West on November 2:

§ Montana elected its first Democratic governor in twenty years. The new governor, rancher Brian Schweitzer, joins Democratic chief executives in Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. Montana Democrats also took back the offices of state attorney general, auditor and superintendent of public instruction. A victory in a key state Public Service Commission race gave Democrats control of Montana's chief regulatory body. They shifted control of the State Senate from 29-21 Republican to 27-23 Democrat. And they came within one vote of taking control of the Montana House. The Democratic delegation includes eight Native Americans, several of whom were set to assume leadership positions in their respective legislative chambers.

§ Colorado Democrats won both a US Senate seat and a US House seat that had been held by Republicans. They also reversed Republican majorities in the state House and Senate to take control of both chambers for the first time in forty-four years, and installed the state's first female State Senate president, a female majority leader in the state House and an African-American Senate president pro tem. The newly empowered Democrats immediately signaled to conservative Republican Governor Bill Owens that he had better select a moderate to replace outgoing Attorney General Ken Salazar--the Democrat who won the state's US Senate seat. The new Democratic Senate majority leader, Ken Gordon, said that to win legislative approval for his nominee, Owens would have to appoint someone with "mainstream values." Asked to define that term, Gordon said, "Not John Ashcroft."

§ Even in the states with the heaviest patterns of Republican voting in the region--and, as it happens, the nation--Democrats scored both symbolic victories and sweet successes. In Wyoming, US House candidate Ted Ladd, whose name never appeared on lists of targeted Democratic challengers, took 42 percent of the vote, the best percentage for a Democratic Congressional candidate in fourteen years. Idaho elected its first openly lesbian legislator, Nicole LeFavour, an environmental activist who easily claimed a Boise seat in the State House. And the Salt Lake Tribune declared on the day after the election, "While the nation and most of Utah tilt further to the right, Salt Lake County is solidifying as a bastion for the left." The new county mayor and the three at-large county council members are all Democrats. The local government wins are part of a trend throughout the region, where Democrats in recent years have taken charge of mayoral posts in Billings, Boise, Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City and Santa Fe.

§ Voters in Western states cast their ballots on the green side of a number of environmental referendums, with Montanans refusing by a 58-42 margin to reverse a six-year-old ban on dangerous cyanide leach mining, and Coloradans passing a Renewable Energy Amendment, which requires major public utilities to get 10 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2015. Nevada voters approved a state minimum-wage hike, Montana voters backed medical marijuana and Colorado voters endorsed a tobacco tax that proponents hope will free substantial new money for healthcare and children's programs.

§ Though John Kerry was dismissed as a "Massachusetts liberal," a phrase that ought to be the kiss of political death in a region where the word "Eastern" can be taken as an insult, the Democrat came close to winning two states that went easily for George Bush in 2000--Colorado and Nevada--and improved the Democratic percentage of the presidential vote in seven of the region's eight states. Even in states where Kerry took a drubbing, the Democratic campaign showed strength--moving up five points in Montana, a state where he never campaigned. In Wyoming one county backed the Democratic presidential ticket. And it turned out to be Teton County, the home of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose neighbors picked the Democratic ticket by a healthy 53-45 margin.

Surveying the results from his office in Missoula, former US Representative Pat Williams said, "When you look at what happened in the West on November 2, it's wildly encouraging. It's a Democratic sweep in Montana, big advances in Colorado, pick-ups everywhere--Democrats winning in places where they haven't won in decades." Williams, a Democrat who left the House eight years ago, has a new catchphrase, "Montana? A Red State? Take Another Look." He's not alone. Democrats in a number of Western states are trying, with somewhat limited success, to call attention to the fact that their region is not nearly as red as the red/blue maps and the pundits would suggest.

There is no one explanation for the improvement of Democratic fortunes in this region. Like any set of election results, those coming out of states like Montana and Colorado are complicated by factors ranging from population shifts to local issues to the relative appeal of particular candidates. But there are signals that can be taken away from the region's results. For Democrats, they may be some of the most instructive lessons to come out of the November 2 voting.

For instance, while many pundits saw in the national election results a signal that Democrats were out of touch with "moral values"--the hot code phrase for opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights--Western Democrats found that one of their big advantages was a growing sense among voters that Republicans had gotten a little too in touch--or, to be more precise, obsessed--with that theme. "The Republican far right has overplayed its hand in the West for more than a decade," says Williams. "I heard a lot of people say that the Republican Party seemed to be more concerned about legislating mores than creating jobs. In Western states, where wages are low, that doesn't make sense." Across the West, Democrats explained their advances at least in part by suggesting that voters had gotten sick and tired of moralizing Republicans. "The Republicans' obsession with narrow cultural issues while the state's looming fiscal crisis was ignored drove a deep wedge between fiscally conservative live-and-let-live Republicans and the neo-conservative extremists with an agenda," explains Denver Post columnist Diane Carman.

Before the election, Susan Good, who in the 1990s served as chair of the Montana Republican Party, told radio listeners in that state to vote for Democratic legislative candidates because the Republican Party had been hijacked by ideologues, who had made it "stagnant." Another Montana Republican, State Senator John Bohlinger, declaring that "somehow we lost our way," jumped party lines to run for lieutenant governor on the Democratic ticket. Charles Johnson, a Statehouse reporter for the Montana Standard newspaper, said, "By most accounts, Montanans loved the bipartisan approach in the ad run by the Democratic team running for governor and lieutenant governor. 'I'm John Bohlinger, I'm a Republican businessman from Billings. And I'm Brian Schweitzer, a Democratic farmer from Whitefish.'" Johnson said it was the most effective ad of the campaign.

The embrace of bipartisanship by Democrats running in a number of Western states played well with voters. But it did not involve an abandonment of principles. Rather, Democrats found old-school Republicans like Bohlinger, whom one Montana newspaper described as "a popular state senator known for his moderate--some would say liberal--views on education and health care," and offered them an opportunity to join in a broad fight against the extreme right-wing forces that have taken charge of most Western Republican parties. There is a huge lesson here for national Democrats and their allies, who failed in the 2004 campaign to make effective use of the many prominent Republicans--and traditionally Republican-leaning newspapers--who said they could not back Bush.

Another huge lesson for the 527 groups that assisted the Kerry campaign and national Democrats has to do with the identification of issues. Democrats in Western states, most of which were not targeted by national campaigns, developed their own sets of issues. In a number of states they emphasized the need for openness in government, which had become a concern during years of wall-to-wall Republican rule that often saw important decisions made in closed caucuses.

Western Democrats also focused a great deal of attention on the threat to water quality posed by environmentally insensitive practices such as coal-bed methane extraction [see Eyal Press, "Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch," October 11]. And they spent a lot of time explaining their positions, developing detailed accounts of why such practices--which were backed by energy-industry lobbyists and their Republican allies--pose a threat to the livelihoods of farmers and ranchers in states like Montana. In Colorado, Democrats pushed renewable energy and water rights initiatives. In states across the region, they embraced the concerns of Native Americans, who have emerged as a powerful and, in many states, reliably Democratic voting bloc.

Along with their own issues, they developed their own kinds of campaigns. A new group, Democrats for the West, served as something of a clearinghouse for ideas and cooperative initiatives--for instance, the Democratic governors of Wyoming and Arizona traveled to Montana to aid Schweitzer's gubernatorial campaign. Campaign techniques varied from state to state but they usually placed a huge emphasis on using volunteers rather than the paid staffers favored by some party and 527 groups that worked the national campaign for the Democrats. In Montana, with a field staff of twenty-one, the state Democratic Party fielded close to 3,000 volunteers for get-out-the-vote efforts. "We reached out early to the pro-choice community, the hunting and fishing community and folks from the labor movement, and we said, 'Look, you've got to be a part of this,'" explained Brad Martin of the Montana Democrats, who came to the party from the public interest research group (PIRG) movement. "We have a strong history of the party being an activist organization, and we really emphasized that in this campaign."

To be sure, there were some home-grown 527 groups, like Forward Colorado, which was formed by four millionaire environmentalists in that state. But Forward Colorado, which is credited with playing a major role in shifting the balance in that state's legislative races, remained close to the ground. The group didn't impose cookie-cutter approaches developed in Washington; rather, it worked closely with local activists to develop messages and mailings targeted for individual districts.

So it was that, on November 2, while national Democrats were wringing their hands after getting wiped out in rural regions of states like Ohio, Democrats in the West were pointing to successes in remote counties. On Colorado's Western Slope, Democrat John Salazar's campaign slogan was "Send a Farmer to Congress." In a district that had elected Republicans in the past, voters followed Salazar's advice. They also backed his brother, Ken Salazar, for the state's US Senate seat. Ken Salazar, who campaigned in his pickup truck and delivered a stump speech that focused on the need to defend the interests of "the forgotten parts of Colorado," ran more than ten points ahead of the national ticket in rural areas. He did so while backing abortion rights and civil unions for gays and lesbians. As Brad Woodhouse, a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman, noted after the election, Salazar "pays homage and respect to the beliefs of rural voters, while also staying true to the core Democratic principles." If there is a single lesson that Democrats and their activist allies need to learn after what was for the most part a 2004 electoral debacle, it is that rural America is still winnable. And they can start by looking west.

go, Arianna

2004-12-02T07:09:00.000-08:00

yep. not so much a need to reinvent the wheel here as a need to keep our shoulders to the damn thing. the 'Pubs have got plenty of rope with which to hang themselves now. we just need to let them strangle themselves on their own internal contradictions... and, in the meantime, keep building a better alternative world in the communities where our vision is not only tolerated, but embraced - the tolerant, sophisticated, multicultural cities that are Blue America.

Can the Dems make 2006 their 1994?

Republicans seized control of both houses of Congress in 1994, just two years after Bill Clinton handed them a devastating defeat. Can Dems pull off the same feat?

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Arianna Huffington

Dec. 2, 2004 | You can't get two Democrats together these days without a debate breaking out over what needs to be done to rescue, resuscitate, reanimate, remake, rebrand and redeem the Democratic Party.

The answers thrashed out in the nation's living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, as well as on the Op-Ed pages, are far-ranging: move to the center, shift to the left, become class warriors, reclaim moral values, go negative, stay positive, figure out how to better sell the brand. But the underlying premise is the same: Democrats are in a
world of trouble, teetering on the verge of what a University of Maryland political scientist recently predicted would be "permanent minority status for a generation or two."

To which I say: poppycock.

Now, don't get me wrong. The Democratic Party is undoubtedly in need of a major overhaul. But for proof that the reclamation project doesn't have to be a long one, we need merely to look at recent political history.

In 1992, the Republican Party found itself in very much the same position as Democrats do today: out of power (with the opposition controlling the White House and both houses of Congress), lacking a compelling core message, and facing the prospect of becoming what any number of pundits at the time deemed, all together now, "a permanent minority party."

Indeed, reading the postmortems of the 1992 election is like coming across the original template for the postmortems of the 2004 election. If you take away the names, you would swear that the Republican quotes from back then were being delivered by the Democrats from right now.

Take this Bill Bennett quote from November 1992 placing the blame for the Republican drubbing on "the lack of a clear, coherent, compelling core message." Doesn't it sound like any number of Democrats complaining about 2004?

Or how about this '92 analysis from John Ashcroft, then governor of Missouri, writing in the Washington Post: "The Republican Party needs to shake itself loose from top-down management, undergo a grassroots renewal and adopt a vigorous, positive agenda that flows from the priorities, views and values of citizens who involve themselves in that process ... Our party needs to frame its priorities more in terms
of what we're for rather than what we are against."

These are precisely the sentiments now being echoed throughout Democratic circles.

And then, just as now, a sense of long-term gloom and doom hovered over the losing side. "All that is clear about the GOP's future," forecast the Los Angeles Times in November '92, "is that its comeback trail will be long and rigorous."

It turned out to be short and sweet. Just two years after being given their political last rites, Republicans rose from their deathbed and seized control of both chambers of Congress, picking up 52 seats in the House and nine in the Senate. The shift was so dramatic that President Clinton, in the wake of the GOP victory, felt the need to
insist at a press conference that he was still "relevant."

This is but one example of how the political landscape can and does change overnight. And these days, with cable TV and the Internet working 24/7, getting to the tipping point can happen faster than ever. With the right message and the right strategies, Democrats can rapidly turn public opinion on its head, doing in 2006 what Republicans did in 1994.

But if they are going to achieve a similarly spectacular reversal of fortune, the Democrats need to take a page out of the GOP playbook and ignore all siren songs urging them to lurch toward the victors.

Instead, they must reclaim the Party's true identify and return to the idealism, boldness, generosity of spirit and core values that marked the presidencies of FDR and JFK, and the short-lived presidential campaign of Bobby Kennedy.

They also need to take a number of practical steps.

For starters, they need to make sure that there is never another election held with electronic voting machines that don't leave a paper trail, or voter suppression caused by long lines and not enough polling places in poor neighborhoods.

Next, they should, to paraphrase Shakespeare, kill all the consultants (and, while they're at it, do away with the bullheaded pollsters, too). The party needs to find and develop campaign teams that can run winning races in the 21st century, not keep rehiring the same professional losers election after election. Shouldn't there be an
"eight strikes and you're out" rule?

Democrats also need to retool their party infrastructure. Conservatives have spent the better part of the last 30 years building a potent message machine -- a network of think tanks, policy centers and media outlets that spends more than $300 million a year to promote its agenda. Instead of sitting around complaining that the big, bad
GOP has them overmatched, Democrats need to open their wallets and build their own well-funded message machine.

A key part of this apparatus will inevitably be the Internet, which must now assume a central role in all party efforts. One of the underreported achievements of the Kerry campaign was its startling success in Internet fundraising, taking in over $82 million in online donations. This same combination of cyber-savvy and sophisticated
marketing must be used to help Democrats spread their message and build citizen participation.

To do this, Democrats have got to nationalize the 2006 congressional races just as Republicans did in '94. They don't necessarily need their own version of the Contract With America, but they do need to make their stands on the crucial political battles of the day including taxes, the environment, the war in Iraq, Social Security and
the Supreme Court part of a larger narrative and not just a laundry list of policy positions and four-point plans.

And, finally, Democrats need to forge ahead with nascent efforts to recruit, train and fund a better crop of candidates. As one film director friend of mine put it: "It's ultimately about casting; I'm tired of voting for some guy who isn't right for the role but got the part anyway."

So, Democrats, stop moping, whining, picking at the scabs left by Nov. 2 and trying to forecast the length of the coming long, cold Republican winter. There's much work to be done and then, many victories ahead. Remember the past, but let it be prologue.

another great one from The Stranger

2004-12-01T14:11:00.000-08:00

(Seattle's indie opinion 'zine). once more, they nail the red-state mentality precisely here.

and btw... to repeat myself here, folks: YOUR COMMENTS ARE WELCOME!!! in fact, if i don't start getting some responses to these entries i may just pull the plug on this blog; the whole idea was to have a place for discussion, after all. yet again, i'm finding myself saying: Is there anybody out there?

FUCK THE SUBURBS
by Jennifer Vogel

On the Prairie, Red Suburbs Are the Enemy of Blue Cities

Minneapolis and St. Paul sit on either side of the upper Mississippi River, in what amounts to the middle of nowhere. For three hundred miles in any direction, there are no cities of size, only prairie, gas stations, and big open sky. We may be on the Mississippi but no one comes here by boat. There are no containers from Japan piling up on the dock. People arrive by bus and car, dusty and road-worn, mostly from the small towns of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas--places where ambitious and misunderstood kids grow up despising their parents' lives.

The Twin Cities were always a haven for people who wanted more and wanted to do more, a stage for re-imagining one's self, the way home towns never are. For years, being a city in the Midwest--at least this part of the Midwest--meant drawing from a rural population that was mostly white. But that wasn't all bad. A homogeneous citizenry, along with harsh winters, made it easy for people around here to be generous with each other, to foster Minnesota's legendary brand of nice, peace-loving liberalism.

Pockets of radicals have existed all over the state, socialist Finns up on the union-heavy Iron Range being a fine example. But it was in the urban centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul, respites from the big nowhere, that our progressive values were forged. Through the years, city pols have organized workers and fought for health care and public housing and education--men like Minneapolis' Floyd B. Olson, a socialist who served as governor during the 1930s, and former Vice President Walter Mondale (Minnesota, with the exception of the District of Columbia, stood alone in choosing Mondale for president in 1984 over Ronald Reagan). But never were we city dwellers more proud than when Hubert Horatio Humphrey Jr. --a small-town boy who grew up to be mayor of Minneapolis--stepped up the microphone at the 1948 Democratic National Convention and convinced the party to finally take a stand against segregation. With his giant forehead shining, he sermonized, "The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!" Humphrey knew what he was talking about. Just two decades earlier, three black men had been lynched in Duluth.

Yes, everything in Minnesota's urban centers was going along famously. Back pats all around. Then minority people started moving in, transforming our pasty Shangri-la into a more typical, and much more interesting, metropolis. The last decade alone has seen an enormous influx of black people from other parts of the U.S. and from Africa, as well as of Mexicans and Hmong. In part, that's because word got around that this was a somewhat cushy place to live (MinnesotaCare, the state health plan, keeps people from dying in the streets). According to the Census Bureau, more than 30 percent of Minneapolis and St. Paul dwellers are non-white--16 percent are foreign born. That's a remarkable transformation. Suddenly, we've got zaub ntsuab, kick-ass Oaxacan tacos, and stores trying to sell marzipan to Somalis.

Not everyone has been thrilled about the presence of darker faces. As the city changed, the "family values" folks moved away. However, they didn't move all the way away. Oh, no. They moved to the suburbs. Tract housing began to sprawl in all directions as many wild-eyed whities climbed over each other to get the hell out of town. And good riddance, I say. Except that these defenders of all that's wholesome have formed a band around the city, a ring of red that's threatening to strangle the very idea of beneficent government. They recline out there on their patio furniture, drinking Zima while squinting to see the edges of their lawns, and complain about the harrowing nature of city streets they never walk.

Suburban life is a perverted response to the perceived problems of the city, where urban unpredictability and diversity are supplanted by the Olive Garden and visits to the biggest mall in the country. Suburbanites drive downtown for work--occupying jobs that rightfully should go to city dwellers--but then they and their earnings hightail it out before sundown, presumably when the human sacrifices begins. They may return in the evening every once in the while for a showing of Riverdance, but only with the car windows rolled all the way up.

These are exactly the people the Republican Party is looking for. President Bush visited Minnesota--mortifyingly, now a swing state--eight times during his recent campaign. But he didn't speak much in the city (his one appearance in downtown Minneapolis was met with fierce protests; a Bush supporter got punched in the nose). He lavished attention on the suburbs, places like Eden Prairie, Chanhassen, and Blaine. His message simply doesn't play well in the city, where people value breathable air and aren't offended by gay couples marrying, where enemy is forced to brush up against supposed enemy and eventually both learn to tolerate each other and live together. The message hits home in the fearful, angry, awful, isolated burbs. Minneapolis, it should be noted, voted 78 percent in favor of John Kerry; St. Paul, 73 percent. But in Chanhassen, just 20 miles from Hennepin Avenue, the very heart of Minneapolis, Bush drew 62 percent of the vote.

Luckily, the sheer number and determination of urban voters overwhelmed the suburban backlash. It's thanks to the electorate of the Twin Cities that Minnesota remains, just barely, a blue state. And within the city, much of the credit goes to our newest citizens--the Hmong, Mexicans, and Africans--who tend to vote like city-dwellers. A favorite scene from the election took place at my local polling place, in a historically Polish neighborhood. An African woman wearing bright robes stood in a gray plastic voting booth with her ballot. She spoke only a little English, so she asked for assistance. A poll volunteer approached and embarked upon a lengthy explanation. The African woman interrupted. "Kerry," she said loudly. "I want Kerry." That was that.

So, sorry suburbs. As Minneapolis and St. Paul become more diverse, they will only become more liberal. Not only that, the city is growing and will continue to grow. Already our values are spreading to some of the inner-ring suburbs, making those areas liberal, too. Incessant carping and fear mongering won't change that. So tell you what, suburbs: Why not find jobs in your own towns--the suburbs you cling to like bulletproof vests--so you don't have to drive to the city at all? Then we could tear down a few parking ramps and cancel Riverdance for good. In fact, why not pick up and move all the way away? It's true that when you're attached to a city in the middle of nowhere, it's hard to think of where else to live. But, hey, I believe there's an Olive Garden in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A nice red state. And a couple of Wal-Marts, too.

oh my god oh my god oh my god

2004-11-24T07:51:00.000-08:00

it staggers the imagination to consider that such things actually EXIST.

this is almost as depressing as it would be to actually tune in to Shrub's inauguration in a couple of months.

ScentStories Up Your Nose
It plugs into the wall and plays "scent CDs" and features Shania Twain, somehow. Hail, Satan

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

The Rule of Gluttony goes like this: When a given society's needs become so ridiculously oversatisfied and oversatiated and just plain obscenely stuffed like a Bush daughter on Bud Light, it begins to invent utterly useless landfill crap no one really needs and that actually turns out to be dangerous to its health.

Enter the new Febreze ScentStories thing, an adorably insidious 40-buck appliance you actually plug into your wall and stick on a side table next to the fake flowers and the cat-shaped fringe lamp and then insert any number of $6 CD-like disks each containing five preprogrammed synthetic scents that, at the push of a button, will then "play" in sequence, just like a music CD -- only, you know, not.

Yay. Rejoice. Weep with a renewed sense of hope for humankind, because if there's one thing we in America desperately need, it's another goddamn appliance to do something a simple candle will do 10 times better for a fraction of the cost and a sliver of the insidiousness and none of the noxious petrochemical landfill.

You know Febreze. You have seen the ads, even if you haven't. Febreze is that frightening Procter & Gamble air freshener whose commercials feature perky sexually denuded khaki-pantsed housewives and cutesy overweight dads running around the house with a can or three of the heavily scented aerosol and spraying huge fogs of it into every room in some ecstatic fit of orgiastic bliss, and then immediately inhaling the misty cloud as deeply as possible into their happily toxified American lungs and smiling like they just discovered heroin and Cheez-Whiz and anal sex, all at once.

What happened? What vile marketing decision was made, and by whom, that said we must now progress from static mute little tabletop chemical-bomb air fresheners to more sinister, electronically activated Glade plug-in thingies with silly little built-in fans to full-fledged toaster-size appliances that require huge amounts of plastic and massive marketing campaigns and full AC power and interchangeable chemical-soaked disks?

This is the marketing strategy: each disc is apparently designed to somehow lift you out of your sanitized tract-home suburban kids-'n'-dogs-'n'-minivans dystopia and transport you straight to the Misty Mountains or the sultry Bahamas or the Brazilian rain forest or whatever, and, according to the Prozacian pastels-'n'-blue-sky ScentStories Web site, it all has something to do with Shania Twain, somehow, inexplicably, because there she is, her photo splashed on the pages for no apparent reason whatsoever and smelling very much like mediocrity and commercial bloat and fast saccharine death, and if her hollow endorsement's not a surefire sign of the apocalypse, baby, nothing is.

And, of course, it's all carefully marketed directly at gullible and slightly narcotized women, housewives and soccer moms and chronic Banana Republic catalog shoppers who dream of escaping their husbands and their suburban stasis and their white luxury carpeting, with its perfectly symmetrical vacuum-cleaner track marks, and running off to the tropics and lying on a hammock or strolling on the beach or hiking in the mountains and numbing their senses to the point of sweet-smelling comatose bliss.

Which of course makes you wonder why P&G just doesn't cut to the marketing chase and be honest about the whole thing and release more apropos scent adventures, like Desperate Affair in a Cheap Motel Room, or Whatever Happened to My Dreams of Opening a Small Business, or Mommy's Valium/Gin Headrush Chocolate Cake. What, too bitter? Naw.

Because then you may also think, hey wait, why aren't there similar scent bombs marketed to men? Why isn't Black & Decker hocking up a similar gizmo and creating discs like I Like to Lick My SUV, or Hey Baby Dig My Pleated Dockers or Sometimes I Wish I Was a Female Mountain Gorilla? Honesty in advertising is all I ask.

Saturation has been reached. Every new household product is now just a silly mutation, a gross plasticized landfill-clogging exaggeration of something simple and functional that came before, brooms to blenders to bread machines to the Swiffer WetJet to Scrubbing Bubbles™ Fresh Brush™ Toilet Cleaning System. You're choking on it.

And it is now no longer a race for which product can offer your life more ease and convenience, what gizmo will reduce stress and calm your exhausted body and actually pretend to be innocuous and fresher and cleaner. Rather, it appears to be a mad race for which product will cause what part of your increasingly toxified American body what virulent strain of cancer first.

Dibs on the lungs! screams the ScentStories appliance. Dibs on the heart! screams that double-cheese McMuffin. Dibs on the brain! screams your cell phone. Dibs on the bloodstream! claim any number of major pharmaceuticals. Dibs on your bone marrow! claims the case of Diet Coke. Dibs on your very soul! screams your television.

See, there is this line. There is this boundary separating logic and common sense and acceptable karmic/environmental damage from utterly laughable and debilitating pain, and it comes into play as we recognize how there are gizmos that are incredibly fun and that add a whole new dimension to the coolness of life and that make your days more interesting and your nights more juicy and your vibrator more waterproof and that can carry 20,000 of your favorite songs on one little machine the size of a deck of cards.

And for the existence of those devices, well, we make some sort of deal with the devil. We know they're toxic and hurtful and will last 5 million years in a landfill, but we make the trade-off, claiming the value they add is worth the effort and if we're careful and maybe just a little more conscious maybe we can minimize the damage and the karmic toll and, besides, 20,000 songs! Dude!

There are bearable and acceptable trade-offs and there are epically bad and deleterious trade-offs, and then there are trade-offs that just make you sad and ill and that you just know with every fiber of your being are simply useless and small minded and point up everything that's wrong with the American mind-set and that infect your home with synthetic scents that poison your dog.

Look at it this way: much like white zinfandel or "Cathy" cartoons or the George W. Bush presidency, ScentStories could vanish tomorrow and no sentient being anywhere on the planet would miss it, ever. And that, verily, is the scent of true perspective.

2004-11-23T20:09:00.000-08:00

folks, if you can figure this stuff out... please do me a favor and explain it to me. i am NOT being sarcastic, sardonic or sar[whatever] here... i mean it. The results reported below - TAKEN TOGETHER - make precisely NO sense to this man.

(Oh, i suppose i *should* disqualify responses involving reflexive dismissal of the facts presented due to their provenance, in this case the NY Times. Really - red-staters in particular - get over that, okay? These people have got education and money and they know to apply it to make sure that their polls are scientifically respectable, and they do lots of comparisons with other opinion samples... involving multiple regressions, chi-square-significance testing and a whole bunch of other measures that I'd understand better if I'd been fully awake in Stat class - but as it is, don't. So stuff that one, all right? Good...)

Anyway: Theories? Ideas? Prognostications? ANY kind of narrative that simultaneously explains everything following here? Huh?

Americans Show Clear Concerns on Bush Agenda
By Adam Nagourney and Janet Elder
The New York Times

Tuesday 23 November 2004

After enduring a brutally fought election campaign, Americans are optimistic about the next four years under President Bush, but have reservations about central elements of the second-term agenda he presented in defeating Senator John Kerry, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

At a time when the White House has portrayed Mr. Bush's 3.5-million-vote victory as a mandate, the poll found that Americans are at best ambivalent about Mr. Bush's plans to reshape Social Security, rewrite the tax code, cut taxes and appoint conservative judges to the bench. There is continuing disapproval of Mr. Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, with a plurality now saying it was a mistake to invade in the first place.

While Democrats, not surprisingly, were the staunchest opponents of many elements of Mr. Bush's second-term agenda, the concerns extended across party lines in some cases. Nearly two-thirds of all respondents - including 51 percent of Republicans - said it was more important to reduce deficits than to cut taxes, a central element of Mr. Bush's economic agenda.

The poll also found pervasive concern about what Americans view as the corrosive effect Hollywood and popular culture have on the nation's values and moral standards. Seventy percent said they were very or somewhat concerned that television, movies and popular music were lowering moral standards in this country.

While this sentiment was voiced by supporters of Mr. Bush and of Mr. Kerry, it appears that the concern about a decline in values is becoming another point of polarization in American politics. Mr. Bush's supporters were more likely to cite it than were Mr. Kerry's voters, and it was an issue that had particular resonance in the South and among weekly churchgoers, rural voters and women.

The poll found that 55 percent of Mr. Kerry's supporters said that Mr. Bush's supporters did not share their views and morals; 54 percent of Mr. Bush's voters said the same thing of those who voted for Mr. Kerry.

In addition, 70 percent of Mr. Kerry's supporters said they were more worried about candidates who "are too close to religion and religious leaders" than about political leaders who "don't pay enough attention" to religion, after a campaign in which Mr. Bush repeatedly spoke of God and his faith. By contrast, 52 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters said they were more worried about public officials who "don't pay enough attention to religion and religious leaders."

Still, in a telling contrast with the 2000 election, 82 percent of respondents said that Mr. Bush legitimately won on Nov. 2. Just before Election Day, 50 percent of respondents said they considered Mr. Bush's defeat of Al Gore in 2000 a legitimate victory.

And even after this tense and vituperative campaign, 56 percent said they were generally optimistic about the next four years under Mr. Bush. Mr. Bush's job approval rating has now inched up to 51 percent, the highest it has been since March.

The Times/CBS News poll was taken from Thursday through Sunday, after a three-week period in which some pollsters questioned some findings of the survey of voters leaving polling places on Election Day. The nationwide telephone poll of 855 adults has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The poll reflected the electoral feat of the Bush campaign this year. He won despite the fact that Americans disapproved of his handling of the economy, foreign affairs and the war in Iraq. There has been a slight increase in the number of Americans who believe the nation should never have gone into Iraq. A majority of Americans continue to believe the country is going in the wrong direction, traditionally a warning sign for an incumbent.

Across the board, the poll suggested that the outcome of the election reflected a determination by Americans that they trusted Mr. Bush more to protect them against future terrorist attacks - and that they liked him more than Mr. Kerry - rather than any kind of broad affirmation of his policies. As such, the result was reminiscent of the state of play Ronald Reagan found in 1980, when he defeated President Jimmy Carter.

Even as two-thirds of respondents said they expected Mr. Bush to appoint judges who would vote to outlaw abortion, a majority continue to say they want the practice to remain either legal as it is now, which was Mr. Kerry's position, or to be legal but under stricter limits.

Americans said they opposed changing the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, which Mr. Bush campaigned on in the final weeks of his campaign. A majority continue to support allowing either same-sex marriages or legally recognized domestic partnerships for gay people.

The public appears ambivalent about the two proposals that Mr. Bush has identified as his major domestic initiatives for a second term: rewriting the Social Security system and reshaping the tax code, including more tax cuts.

On the tax code, administration officials are discussing plans that would, among other things, lower the tax rate on higher-income Americans and eliminate some deductions. In the poll, more than 6 in 10 of the respondents said people with higher incomes should pay a greater proportion of their income in taxes; 3 in 10 said all income groups should pay the same proportion.

About one-third of the respondents said the tax cuts passed in Mr. Bush's first term had been good for the economy; but nearly a fifth said they had done more harm, and just under half said the tax cuts had made little difference.

"I don't mind cutting taxes to some extent, but I think we've cut them quite a bit," Ron Clark, 63, a Republican from Livingston, Mont., said in a follow-up interview. "I'm not really against making the current reductions permanent, but I don't think we need to go beyond where we've gone, because I do worry about the deficit. It's gone up a heck of a lot in the last couple of years."

On Social Security, 45 percent said a proposal to permit people to invest their Social Security withholding money in private accounts was a bad idea; 49 percent said it was a good idea. The poll also found little confidence among Americans that Mr. Bush would assure the future solvency of the program: 51 percent said that Mr. Bush was unlikely to "make sure Social Security benefits are there for people like me."

Among the disputed results of the Election Day survey of voters was the finding that moral issues were critical in determining the outcome.

That survey found that 22 percent of respondents called it the most critical issue in making their decision. Some pollsters criticized the way the question was asked because it was presented as a general category, without any kind of explanation, along with a list of six other specific issues, including Iraq and health care.

In this poll, when allowed freely to name the issue that was most important in their vote, 6 percent chose moral values, although smaller numbers named issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. On a separate question in which voters were given a choice of nine issues, 5 percent chose abortion, 4 percent chose stem cell research and 2 percent chose same-sex marriage.

The top issue was the economy and jobs, which was cited by 29 percent of respondents.

That said, there is a little question that Americans have grown increasingly unhappy with the influence of popular culture on daily life, and that was a significant dynamic in this election. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said that Hollywood was lowering the standard of popular culture. And 70 percent said that all popular culture - music, movies and television - was lowering moral standards in America.

The poll also found, though, that Americans were evenly divided on whether television, movies and books were including too many gay themes and characters.

The poll and follow-up interviews found that Bush supporters and Kerry supporters were in different camps on these issues, eyeing each other with suspicion.

"I think they're driven by hatred and homophobia and vitriol," said Paul Cuthbertson, 53, a Democrat from Atlanta. "The Republicans in recent years have turned 'liberal' into a dirty word, which it isn't. I'm a liberal and proud to be so. This so-called Christian ideal of being against gay marriage is neither American nor Christian. I think it's un-American to discriminate against fellow citizens, and God does not call upon Christians to be vigilantes to punish people that they perceive him not to like."

Pat Gilbert, a Republican from Battle Creek, Mich., said, "The two sides will be as far apart as can be forever."

"I'm sure there are different pockets of voters who voted for Kerry, but I think they believe more in society in general - if you're not hurting anybody it's all right to do it," Ms. Gilbert said, adding: "I don't think they have a firm belief system that they base decisions off of. It's whatever today's climate is. In the long term, you'll have a society of chaos."

By 48 percent to 40 percent, respondents said they believed four more years of a Bush presidency would divide the nation more than it would unite it.

For all the attention paid to the effort Mr. Bush made to increase his support from religious supporters, 31 percent of respondents said they thought that evangelical Christians had too much influence over the administration. By contrast, 66 percent said they thought big business had too much influence over the administration.

Finally, in one bit of presumably good news for a party that is looking for it, Americans now have a better opinion of the Democratic Party than of the Republican Party: 54 percent said they had a favorable view of Democrats, compared with 39 percent with an unfavorable view. By contrast, 49 percent have a favorable view of Republicans, compared with 46 percent holding an unfavorable one.

now on the back of my car...

2004-11-23T18:06:00.000-08:00

"the media are only as liberal as the conservative businesses that own them." yup. along with "Who Would Jesus Bomb?"

it's okay; i have comprehensive coverage, so if the windshield's bashed in or the tires get slashed, i pay $100 and that's it. besides, i drove around with "God WAS My Copilot - but we crashed in the Andes, and I had to eat him" on the old Bluesmobile several years ago in this God-whipped community, and nary a vandalistic riposte then.

anyway... been reading Alterman's What Liberal Media? in between everything else going on lately, and something he said jumped out at me a while back, though i then filed it for future reference (and with the thought that i'd heard this exact line before): the media are the nervous system of a democracy.

okay, nice image, fair enough, room for lots of ratiocination on that one. but only tonight did it occur to me to fly-cast that metaphor out across the cerebral waters (is that a meta-metaphor?)

so if the media = national nervous system... and the population as a whole = national corpus, then it follows:

neocon/Bushite message communicated to / through media = psychoactive substance introduced to / influencing behavior of collective national being specifically, message / substance is one that impairs judgment... thus entraining risks to the corpus as a whole.

yes? oh yes, i think so. the metaphor is pretty much watertight.

so: nation influenced by ShrubCo's message = intoxicated individual. only question remaining is... to which psychoactive substance may said message be specifically compared?

not much room for doubt on that one either, actually. think for a minute: which intoxicant/psychoactive engenders a false sense of accomplishment, invulnerability, confidence etc.? only two that i can think of. not weed, certainly (don't need to explain that to anybody who's toked up). not organic hallucinogenics such as psilocybin, peyote etc.; those tend to "squeegee the Third Eye" in Mr. Hicks' memorable phrase, plus leave one in a satiated, appreciative, non-predatory state of mind. as for the opiates, injected or otherwise - nah. they just make you lay around and drool (albeit drool in an extremely hip, Euro-jet-trash-sophisticated way. i guess.)

what's left? cocaine and hooch.

coke could fill the bill, but i think that's more suitable for comparison to first-year ShrubCo shenanigans. the guileless grandiosity, the sweeping-yet-suspect generalizations, the whole "Fuck those scraggly Ay-rabs, I'll take 'em out!" bravado thing... all those bespeak pre-9/11 forms of populus intoxicatus.

nope, since then it's simple: BOOZE, baby! cheap-ass wine or bullpiss case-for-$12 American lager. that's the poison of choice for America's (slender) majority in these guttering days of 2004. the country, via the nonstop, slurred-but-serene insistence of ShrubCo (as mediated through the malfunctioning 'nervous system' of the media - remember the original metaphor here?) staggers into Dubya Dubya Two-world with a mug full of Dutch courage and slightly history-nervous-tic'ed attitude. "WE'LLLL GET EM YET, EVER'BODY!"

while the world, via sorryeverybody.com and unspoken, multilingual consensus in general, buries its collective head in its hands in embarrassment for its dear friend of yore... and waits for that American friend to come off its multi-year, media-stoked binge.

so there it is, the media/booze metaphor explained. comments welcome, btw; with a very few exceptions, i've had none in this blog. i'm starting to wonder if i'm not just talking to myself, in fact. is anybody out there?

relax: that's not media intoxication talking, at least. ;-)

damn!!!

2004-11-19T13:41:00.000-08:00

yes, yes, i know it's not going to make any material difference that results in the Emperor's ejection from the palace...

but still. i... just... damn!

'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida
By Thom Hartmann
CommonDreams.org

Thursday 18 November 2004

There was something odd about the poll tapes.

A "poll tape" is the phrase used to describe a printout from an optical scan voting machine made the evening of an election, after the machine has read all the ballots and crunched the numbers on its internal computer. It shows the total results of the election in that location. The printout is signed by the polling officials present in that precinct/location, and then submitted to the county elections office as the official record of how the people in that particular precinct had voted. (Usually each location has only one single optical scanner/reader, and thus produces only one poll tape.)

Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.org, the erstwhile investigator of electronic voting machines, along with people from Florida Fair Elections, showed up at Florida's Volusia County Elections Office on the afternoon of Tuesday, November 16, 2004, and asked to see, under a public records request, each of the poll tapes for the 100+ optical scanners in the precincts in that county. The elections workers - having been notified in advance of her request - handed her a set of printouts, oddly dated November 15 and lacking signatures.

Bev pointed out that the printouts given her were not the original poll tapes and had no signatures, and thus were not what she'd requested. Obligingly, they told her that the originals were held in another location, the Elections Office's Warehouse, and that since it was the end of the day they should meet Bev the following morning to show them to her.

Bev showed up bright and early the morning of Wednesday the 17th - well before the scheduled meeting - and discovered three of the elections officials in the Elections Warehouse standing over a table covered with what looked like poll tapes. When they saw Bev and her friends, Bev told me in a telephone interview less than an hour later, "They immediately shoved us out and slammed the door."

In a way, that was a blessing, because it led to the stinking evidence.

"On the porch was a garbage bag," Bev said, "and so I looked in it and, and lo and behold, there were public record tapes."

Thrown away. Discarded. Waiting to be hauled off.

"It was technically stinking, in fact," Bev added, "because what they had done was to have thrown some of their polling tapes, which are the official records of the election, into the garbage. These were the ones signed by the poll workers. These are something we had done an official public records request for."

When the elections officials inside realized that the people outside were going through the trash, they called the police and one came out to challenge Bev.

Kathleen Wynne, a www.blackboxvoting.org investigator, was there.

"We caught the whole thing on videotape," she said. "I don't think you'll ever see anything like this - Bev Harris having a tug of war with an election worker over a bag of garbage, and he held onto it and she pulled on it, and it split right open, spilling out those poll tapes. They were throwing away our democracy, and Bev wasn't going to let them do it."

As I was interviewing Bev just moments after the tussle, she had to get off the phone, because, "Two police cars just showed up."

She told me later in the day, in an on-air interview, that when the police arrived, "We all had a vigorous debate on the merits of my public records request."

The outcome of that debate was that they all went from the Elections Warehouse back to the Elections Office, to compare the original, November 2 dated and signed poll tapes with the November 15 printouts the Elections Office had submitted to the Secretary of State. A camera crew from www.votergate.tv met them there, as well.

And then things got even odder.

"We were sitting there comparing the real [signed, original] tapes with the [later printout] ones that were given us," Bev said, "and finding things missing and finding things not matching, when one of the elections employees took a bin full of things that looked like garbage - that looked like polling tapes, actually - and passed by and disappeared out the back of the building."

This provoked investigator Ellen Brodsky to walk outside and check the garbage of the Elections Office itself. Sure enough - more original, signed poll tapes, freshly trashed.

"And I must tell you," Bev said, "that whatever they had taken out [the back door] just came right back in the front door and we said, 'What are these polling place tapes doing in your dumpster?'"

A November 18 call to the Volusia County Elections Office found that Elections Supervisor Deanie Lowe was unavailable and nobody was willing to speak on the record with an out-of-state reporter. However, The Daytona Beach News (in Volusia County), in a November 17th article by staff writer Christine Girardin, noted, "Harris went to the Department of Elections' warehouse on State Road 44 in DeLand on Tuesday to inspect original Nov. 2 polling place tapes, after being given a set of reprints dated Nov. 15. While there, Harris saw Nov. 2 polling place tapes in a garbage bag, heightening her concern about the integrity of voting records."

The Daytona Beach News further noted that, "[Elections Supervisor] Lowe confirmed Wednesday some backup copies of tapes from the Nov. 2 election were destined for the shredder," but pointed out that, according to Lowe, that was simply because there were two sets of tapes produced on election night, each signed. "One tape is delivered in one car along with the ballots and a memory card," the News reported. "The backup tape is delivered to the elections office in a second car."

Suggesting that duplicates don't need to be kept, Lowe claims that Harris didn't want to hear an explanation of why some signed poll tapes would be in the garbage. "She's not wanting to listen to an explanation," Lowe told the News of Harris. "She has her own ideas."

But the Ollie North action in two locations on two days was only half of the surprise that awaited Bev and her associates. When they compared the discarded, signed, original tapes with the recent printouts submitted to the state and used to tabulate the Florida election winners, Harris says a disturbing pattern emerged.

"The difference was hundreds of votes in each of the different places we examined," said Bev, "and most of those were in minority areas."

When I asked Bev if the errors they were finding in precinct after precinct were random, as one would expect from technical, clerical, or computer errors, she became uncomfortable.

"You have to understand that we are non-partisan," she said. "We're not trying to change the outcome of an election, just to find out if there was any voting fraud."

That said, Bev added: "The pattern was very clear. The anomalies favored George W. Bush. Every single time."

Of course finding possible voting "anomalies" in one Florida county doesn't mean they'll show up in all counties. It's even conceivable there are innocent explanations for both the mismatched counts and trashed original records; this story undoubtedly will continue to play out. And, unless further investigation demonstrates a pervasive and statewide trend toward "anomalous" election results in many of Florida's counties, odds are none of this will change the outcome of the election (which exit polls showed John Kerry winning in Florida).

Nonetheless, Bev and her merry band are off to hit another county.

As she told me on her cell phone while driving toward their next destination, "We just put Volusia County and their lawyers on notice that they need to continue to keep a number of documents under seal, including all of the memory cards to the ballot boxes, and all of the signed poll tapes."

Why?

"Simple," she said. "Because we found anomalies indicative of fraud."

every time i think he can't get any better...

2004-11-19T08:36:00.000-08:00

Mark Morford just proves me wrong.

wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful! as Mr. Welk would have said.

(this screed is in response to a bunch of repressed busybodies calling Monday Night Football because of an ad featuring Nicolette Sheridan and Terrell Owens in a locker room... as Mighty Mark summarizes it, "Nicollette Sheridan, wearing only a towel, provocatively asks Terrell Owens to skip the game for her as the two stand alone in a locker room. She drops the towel and jumps into Owens' arms. That's it. That's the whole damn commercial. You never see more than her upper back. This is what they're all whining about. You've seen racier things in Home & Garden magazine. And lo, the divine god of all things moist and sexual and delicious sighed heavily and went back to ignoring the flyover states, again.")

Monday Night Softcore
Who dares call into a TV network to complain about sex? And can they be stopped?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, November 19, 2004

Do you know who they are? Do you already have an answer?

Can you say who it is, really, who shrieks and cries and calls into the networks regarding "racy" advertising during macho ultraviolent NFL games, calling it sinful and wrong and hurtful? Can someone tell me? Is it a deep unknowable secret? Is it perhaps the most baffling and exasperating question of our age?

Because we need to know. We need to know because I know no one who does this and you know no one who does this and we all understand that most normal and relatively well-adjusted citizens of this fine and deeply jaded nation don't navigate the world wielding such a shockingly uptight and sexually destitute worldview. At least, not around here they don't.

But here's the problem: These people, these groups, these sects of viciously concerned and violently moral people now appear to be the single most powerful and dangerous and rash-inducing hunk of our society today, and that includes fans of either Paris Hilton or Dave Matthews or Axe male body spray.

Why do we need to know? Because these people, they apparently now have the ear of the FCC and hold in their dry fingers the shriveled testicles of most major media conglomerates and they own the very flop sweat adorning the forehead of pasty demon-god Karl Rove, and they are the drawled barely articulated expression of gratitude muttered under the breath the aww-shucks born-again president of the United States. Is why.

So, who are they? Who are the ones who have no problem watching a Monday Night Football game in which huge sweaty steroid-packed men in cutely homoerotic tights smash each other as hard as possible hoping they break bones and induce aneurysms and draw blood during our most violent and drug-addled and corrupted national televised sporting spectacle, but yet who actually picked up the phone to complain to ABC about that "racy" ad promoting the very mediocre "Desperate Housewives" that led into the game?

Who are they who apparently have no problem having their gladiator-style violence interspersed with all manner of Barbie-doll cheerleaders who giggle and jiggle in a sea of Botox and silicon, but who cannot possibly tolerate the exposed shoulder blades of "Housewives" actress Nicollette Sheridan in a tame promo spot lest they clutch their hearts and call their senators in a seething colon-clenched fury?

Maybe you already know who they are. Maybe you've already guessed that they're probably the very same people Bush's ferret of a campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, the 36-year-old Rove protégé and glistening demon-in-training who Dubya just named to head the GOP, so intentionally targeted in the flyover states during this last election in a shockingly successful campaign to pummel their fear-torn selves into such a froth over all those hot-button "morality" issues -- namely, gay marriage and abortion rights and stem-cell research and organic tofu but mostly gay marriage -- that they just had to cinch up the housedress and pop an extra Xanax and get out there and vote lest the heathens and whores and sodomites and Vietnam War heroes take over the country. Is that them? You think?

After all, we've had many hints. We have had plenty of warning signs. These people, these groups, these spiteful and often hyperreligious Concerned Parents Councils and Moral Citizens for Righteousness and Morose Adults with Secret Margarine Fetishes, these groups from places like Colorado Springs and Salt Lake City and Orange County and Oklahoma City, they have left a wake, a trail of terror, marked by what appear to be pages of paper torn out of the Coloring-Book Bible and hurled at the world in a bout of confused anger.

They are the same people who complained about the 1.5 seconds of Janet Jackson's nipple and they are the same ones who complain about low-slung jeans on high school girls and teen sex in Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs and who think ribbed condoms are signs of the devil and Astroglide is some sort of dance step and any reference to anal sex means you should be strung up by your eyelids and beaten with Pat Robertson until you look like Mel Gibson's veal-cutlet Jesus.

They are the same people, it appears, who have no problem restricting a woman's right to choose and rejecting the undeniable value of stem-cell research, but who somehow still think fertility clinics are God's gift to unhappily barren Republican parents, clinics where more "unborn" zygotes that fail to stick are tossed into the trash in a day than in any urban abortion clinic in a year. What, too harsh? Hardly.

And, yes, they are the same ones who fear gays with a shocking and truly heartbreaking intensity and truly believe homosexuals want to "recruit" their children into the world of dildos and show tunes and tight tank tops, but could care less about the fact that Massachusetts (a.k.a. gay-marriage central) has the lowest divorce rate in the nation.

And they are, finally, the same people who find no moral quandary in how U.S. soldiers have now killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Iraq and are themselves being killed by the dozen during this most brutal and useless and unwinnable of BushCo wars, yet find no issue with energy gluttony or U.S.-Iraq arms deals or the false joy of SUVs.

So then. Let this be the rallying cry. These people, they must be outed. They must be brought into the open and shorn of their hollow indignation and held up to the glaring light of truth and sex and conscious culture, dragged like shy recluses into the purview of our utterly baffled universal God, the one who is omnipresent and pansexual and carnivorous and ironic and full of raunchy bliss and deep humor and who isn't perpetually short of cash or firearms or false chastity.

Look. This has nothing to do with the tacky Vegas spectacle that is Monday Night Football. This has nothing to do with how ABC's little PR stunt to promote "Housewives" went off more fabulously than they could've dreamed.

Forget, too, the lockstep moderate Repubs who voted for Dubya out of blind allegiance to a conservative ideal so tarnished and mutilated by this administration that it resembles a genuinely balanced platform about as much as Condi Rice resembles an actual human. These people are not on the radar here. This is about something else entirely.

This is about moral accountability. This is about a call for justice and hope and unity and open-mouthed sex. This is about the deep need for a full and aggressive blasting of the fine fertile grounds of America like Bill Murray exhumes the golf course at the end of "Caddyshack," blasting water through the tunnels and erupting through the holes in order to drive the nasty gophers of intolerance and homophobia and sexlessness and bad hair into the open.

Only then can we see what we are up against. Only then can we see where the tumors lie and see where we must operate and see who really just needs an honest and well-lubed hug to make it all better. Only then, as they say, can the true healing begin. Show yourselves, sad and lost and lonely complainers of America. You know who you are.

Spitzer's on to you, bee-yatches...

2004-11-18T13:46:00.000-08:00

Eliot Spitzer, NY State's attorney general, writing in The New Republic, unmasks the 'Pubs' cynical attempts to don the mantle of "values" and trumpet "the ownership society" as a universal goal... as opposed to what it really is, "ownership" by the few and the privileged.

once more, one has to stand in awe of the sheer shamelessness - and yet the *effectiveness* - of the Rove approach, which involves co-opting the votes of those of modest means to serve the interests of the big shots at the top of the corporate/government ladder. all by the utterly hypocritical invocation of "values" that the reptilian, corporate-bitch 'Pubs do not embody in the least.

Spitzer does, i think, an especially good job at defining the stance of moderate liberalism toward economic activity. as he says, we aren't out to squelch business... but we ARE determined that the playing field becomes, and stays, level. maybe i'm too close to it to be objective here, but it's hard to imagine an argument against that goal.

P.S. wouldn't it just rock to see what Teddy Roosevelt would have done with the current thieving bunch who lay claim to leadership of his beloved Republican Party? (snicker) it would NOT be a pretty sight, after the tender ministrations of the hero of San Juan Hill.

OWN UP
Eliot Spitzer
THE NEW REPUBLIC

The presidential election is over and “values” won. Political observers seem united on this essential point—the reelection of George W. Bush was an affirmation of Republicans and their values and a repudiation of Democrats, who apparently lack them. How could it come to this? Through the years, we have always prided ourselves on being champions of the values that working people and the electorate care about most: fairness, opportunity, inclusion, and responsibility. But, this time around, we didn’t frame our message on these ideals persuasively enough. Instead, Bush’s campaign captured and co-opted the value mantle and made it seem like he stood for everything that is good in the United States and that Democrats, in comparison, stood for nothing.

This never should have happened. And it would not have, had Democrats done a better job of challenging and unmasking Republican claims. Consider the “Ownership Society,” a term Republicans use to describe their vision of the American dream—an environment where any American, no matter his or her station, can compete and achieve financial success, security, and a lasting stake in their community, all by dint of hard work. So integral to Republican political imagery are these phrases that it is hard for some voters to imagine that a Democrat can even say them, much less believe in them.

But, even as Republicans invoke pleasant-sounding slogans at every turn, they pursue policies that undermine the values they claim to represent. Take the following three recent scandals: conflicts of interest among Wall Street analysts, who duped small investors with tainted research; predatory lending, which imposed illegal and unconscionable mortgages on homeowners; and illegal practices of mutual-fund traders, who skimmed billions from people saving for their kids’ college tuitions and their own retirements. In each of these situations, the Bush administration and congressional Republicans not only impeded the investigations but actually proposed legislation that would preempt the ability of state regulators to combat the problems.

Through these and other actions, the Ownership Society is revealed as an empty slogan that should have been turned against the Republicans. Some might say that this is an unduly negative approach, certain to turn off voters. I disagree. Highlighting the disconnect between the Republicans’ sound bites and the alarming reality of their policies is fair game. And it would have been an even more effective strategy if coupled with a passionate articulation of our commitment to fairness and equal access to the American dream.

Democrats have to explain why the government must act when the markets are manipulated and working people are harmed.Teddy Roosevelt understood this nearly a century ago. His trust-busting and environmental activism were meant both to protect citizens and to restore the integrity of the markets. He said, “We demand that big business give people a square deal; in return, we must insist that, when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right, he shall himself be given a square deal.”

Instead of fighting for a square deal for all, Republicans today place corporate interests ahead of consumer interests. When regulators, such as those in my office, try to call them on their cronyism, they portray our efforts as bureaucratic meddling in free markets. But we did not investigate Wall Street because we were troubled by large institutions making a lot of money; we took action to stop a blatant fraud that was ripping off small investors.We sought to right the wrong, reestablishing the level playing field that is a prerequisite to market competition and ensuring that every investor enjoys the same opportunity to profit that the insiders have.

Similarly, we did not ask the courts to stop predatory mortgage lending because we begrudge lenders an appropriate rate of return.We did so because what was happening to borrowers was illegal and wrong and needed to be stopped so that people could, in fact, have a true ownership stake in society.We didn’t investigate mutual-fund companies because of a desire to increase government regulation. We did it to stop a scam that allowed a favored few insiders to benefit at the expense of all other investors.

The Bush administration, in the name of free markets, has allowed business to take advantage of the small investor, victimizing those who want to own a piece of the U.S. economy. The scandals involving Wall Street analysts, banking, and mutual funds all demonstrated the Republicans’ failure to protect those Americans who want to play their part in the Ownership Society.

Now Republicans want to privatize Social Security — leaving those saving for retirement at the mercy of a system they have failed miserably to police. If Social Security had been privatized during the last several years, retirees on fixed incomes would have lost billions more to scams.

Fortunately for millions of small investors, Democrats are watching out for them. Democrats have a proud history of stepping in, not to put the brakes on business but to protect small investors and ensure that the playing field is level for every American.

Here’s a fact almost no one knows: In 2003, when my office uncovered the mutual-fund scandal, outrage was easy to find, but few in political office stepped up to take on the mutual-fund industry, which is one of the largest donors to federal campaigns. The president failed to support any meaningful reforms. Most in Congress ran the other way. There was, however, one exception to the general inertia.

The strongest bill—and, indeed, one of the only bills—to reform the mutual-fund industry was introduced by Senator John Kerry. That is one of the reasons I supported him early in his campaign. It is too bad voters didn’t hear the story about how our Democratic candidate was actually one of the few in government who stood up to defend their stake in an Ownership Society.

With our values and policies, Democrats have been on the right track for a long time. We champion the ideals held most dear by working families, but we simply didn’t articulate campaign issues in the context of those ideals. Instead, we let the Republicans employ wedge issues like gay marriage that diverted attention from their failed domestic policies.

We can’t repeat these mistakes in 2008. Starting today, our party must focus on all the difficulties that working people face—from financial scams to job security to health insurance, from day care for our kids to nursing homes for our parents, from the price of gas to the increasing cost of college tuition, from the safety and security of our neighborhoods to the health of the environment. We must address these issues not as antiseptic policy points but as elements of a living mosaic that, together, form a society that rewards hard work and integrity. Our policies and plans will gain traction with the public when we frame them as a reflection of the core values we believe in.

--
John Holder

"Religion is for people afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there." — D. Creech

i won't be "god-whipped" either

2004-11-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

on the general question of "values" and the myth of "heartland wholesomeness," etc., i kind of wonder why the corporate media whores haven't picked up on facts like Massachusetts, infamous lair of the irreligious, having the lowest divorce rate (per capita) of any other state in the [dis-]Union... or accidents and deaths from "road rage" being far more common in the South and West than up there in blue-state Yankee land.

then i remember: it's because they're corporate media whores.

GOD'S SECOND TERM
The Elect
By Leon Wieseltier
The New Republic

Perhaps the most odious feature of contemporary conservatism is its equation of success with virtue. In the realm of economics, this long ago resulted in the strange belief in the moral superiority of the wealthy, a vulgar Calvinism according to which money is a proof of merit and riches are a mark of righteousness. How else is wealth acquired in America, after all, except justly? And now, in the aftermath of the election, the equation of success and virtue, the conflation of outer worth with inner worth, has been extended to the realm of politics. We are instructed that the Republicans won because they have “values” and the Democrats lost because they do
not have “values.” (Or quantitatively speaking, 59.5 million Americans have “values” and 55.9 million Americans do not have “values.”) Winners are good, losers are bad.

It is not the triumphalism of the Republicans that is so distasteful (victory indeed is theirs), it is the sanctimony; andthis is owed to a further refinement of the Republican worldview, according to which moral values are finally religious values. It is philosophically and historically obtuse, of course, to think that morality cannot exist without religion, or that immorality cannot exist with religion; but for the Republicans “values” are the entailments of “faith.” The good are with God, the bad are without God. And since winners are good and losers are bad, it follows that the winners are with God and the losers are without God. What clarity!

In the days after the election, the losers seemed to be falling for the winners’ clarity. Democrats, it was everywhere observed, are catastrophically wanting in “respect” for American believers. They must immediately “learn to talk about” moral questions and “learn to talk to” religious people.

Suddenly the most significant obstacle to political power in America is secularism. It is certainly the case that John Kerry was not exactly a man with the common touch; and that liberals more generally have trouble imagining common people except as poor people. For this reason, liberals have once again been harshly taught that homo economicus—more concretely, homo Shrumicus—is a fiction. Money is often not the most important thing in the world for poor people, perhaps because they have so little of it. They do not define themselves only, or mainly, by what they lack; whereas they are rich in loves and principles, and so the communal and national and cultural and spiritual dimensions of their identity may loom larger than the economic dimension. (The Bush administration has demonstrated, by contrast, that economic man is more likely to be found among the wealthy, for whom money often does seem to be the most important thing in the world, perhaps because they have so much of it.)

So liberals must indeed develop a fuller and more vivid comprehension of the Americans whom they rightly wish to help; but that is all the intellectual contrition that they need muster. For they have values even when they do not have faith; and they should not contrive to have faith so as to gain values, unless they wish to degrade faith by promoting it mainly for its political utility, as some conservatives do.

I will not be God-whipped. For a start, it is not at all clear that the “values” analysis of George W. Bush’s reelection is correct—my splendidly unquantified suspicion is that he owed his majority to the tiresomely predictable failure of John Kerry to persuade 3.6 million people that he would unambiguously commit American power to the cause of American security—even if the cunning referenda on gay marriage did bring more conservative voters to the polls. (If this were 1960, Karl Rove would have arranged referenda on segregation.) Moreover, the “faith” that is being praised as the road to political salvation, the Bush ideal of religion, is a zealous ignorance, a complacent renunciation of proof and evidence and logic and argument, as if the techniques of reason were merely liberal tools.A few weeks before the election David Brooks explained to his readers that Republicans and Democrats have different notions of leadership. Republicans admire “straight-talking men of faith,” whereas Democrats prefer leaders who are “knowledgeable and thoughtful.” Brooks was serenely unaware of what a damning admission he had made. There is no reason why liberals, even in defeat, should entertain such a surrender of intelligence. The faith fetish, the belief in belief, is an insult not only to the mind, but also to the soul. For there are many varieties of faith, and the “faith” of the Republicans, which does not grasp the old distinction between fideism and faith, represents only one of those varieties. Not all religion in America is as superstitious and chiliastic and emotional and dogmatic and political as this. And not all religion in America is as Christian as this. When the spokesmen for Bush’s holy base call for the restoration of religion to a central position in public life—for the repeal of the grand tradition of mutually beneficial separation that began with Roger Williams’s heroic alienation from the theocracy of Massachusetts—they are usually calling for the restoration of their religion.

Consider the bioethical controversies. In the discussion of stem-cell research, reproductive technologies, birth control, and abortion, politics has collided, and colluded, with theology.

Liberals are regularly castigated for insensitivity to religion when they articulate their views about the proper use of these scientific powers. But they are not being insensitive to religion.They are being insensitive to Catholic and evangelical Christian religion. It happens that the Jewish understanding of the sanctity of life leads Jewish law to rule much differently, and much more “liberally,” in all these matters. Why, then, are so many conservatives insensitive to my religion?

The question answers itself. They have no choice. They believe what they believe. They do not mean to wound me; but all the ecumenical talk about respect, and all the political talk about healing, cannot dissuade them from their consciences. I understand this. I expect them to think as they think. But they had better understand this, too. I think as I think. Like them, I cannot be dissuaded from my conscience. I intend no disrespect, but I also intend no phony respect: Like them, I believe that on certain fundamental issues facing American society, those who think as I think are right and those who think as they think are wrong. The liberal conscience is not a
human failing. It is another kind of conscience. It has reasons. It is a thing of principle, not a thing of taste. The religious right complains of liberal condescension, and often properly; but then it condescends to liberalism by reducing it to class or to culture, and by regarding it not as a moral creed but as a moral corruption. The offense that religious conservatives regularly take from secular liberals is a little ridiculous. Why do they care so much about our disapproval? They are also in the business of disapproval. The truth is that this kind of conservatism is sustained by its feeling of victimization. Grievance makes it glad. It allows the right to combine the power of a majority with the pity of a minority.

When I complain about the scanting of my religion in the bioethical debate, I am not being altogether serious. Obviously I do not expect Congress to act on the sanctity of Judaism when it makes laws about stem-cell research or abortion. This is not only because Judaism has too few adherents to carry the day. It is not the politics of a democracy, but the philosophy of a democracy, that requires me to accept these limitations upon the reach of my faith. For my faith is my faith, even if I believe it to be universally true.The reasons of my religion cannot compel the assent of people who do not share my religion. They have the reasons of their religion, which cannot compel my assent. That the Pope, or some distinguished evangelical divine, holds a certain view is a matter of indifference to me. The Pope may be right and he may be wrong. I may be persuaded of his view, but not because of his authority. I need to be given arguments that I may rationally consider. (I harbor the same skepticism—the same liberalism—about authority in my own tradition. Reason is not an instrument for criticizing other people’s religion.) This is what Adam Michnik meant when he wickedly remarked, in support of the American war against Saddam Hussein, that if Jesus is telling Bush what to do, He is giving him some very good advice.

John Kerry, and his recreational complexity, made the simplicity of George W. Bush look like clarity. This clarity seems perfectly consistent with the president’s religiosity; but in fact the relation of religious faith and political clarity is much less edifying and much more onerous.The belief in God does not guarantee the knowledge of God’s wishes. This is the most elementary lesson of the history of religious faith.The believer lives in the darkness more than he lives in the light. He does not wallow in God’s guidance, he thirsts for it. And when God’s guidance comes, it does not take the form of policy recommendations, unless he has created his God in the image of his desire. What deity is this, that has opinions about preemption and taxation and Quentin Tarantino? In this regard, there is no more ringing refutation of the religion of George W. Bush than the religion of Abraham Lincoln. “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other,” Lincoln proclaimed at the beginning of his second term, and in the middle of a war.“The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully.” For Lincoln, his party was not God’s party; or rather, the other party was as much God’s party as his party was.And he explained this repudiation of human certainty this way: “The Almighty has his own purposes.” He did not know what they were, he knew only that they were.

Beware the politicians, and the politics, that know more.

one of my all-time favorites...

2004-11-18T11:13:00.000-08:00

with all that's happened in the last couple of weeks - from 11/2 forward - i'm not sure why i hadn't thought of this poem sooner.

it surfaces from time to time in my life... a penumbral blessing, a bloody-smile reminder (am i myself one of "the worst" as Yeats would have it here?), and in this case - "its hour come round" once more - with just a touch of Schadenfreude.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Tacitus, updated

2004-11-18T08:06:00.000-08:00

i've been an admirer of Schell since his eloquent jeremiad against nuclear weapons in the early 1980s, The Fate of the Earth. (first section of book, describing the likely aftermath of any sizeable nuclear exchange, was memorably sub-titled "A Republic of Insects and Grass").

anyway, Schell here discusses the Falluja, er, action... and how, for a country supposedly conducting a "War On Terror (TM)", the U. (red) S. is no slouch itself when it comes to using terror as a political tool.

What Happened to Hearts?
By Jonathan Schell
The Nation

Monday 06 December 2004 Issue

For some time now, American political discussion has seemed to revolve around little stock phrases, such as "defining moment" (at the time of the first Gulf War), "the end of history" (at the end of the Cold War), "the economy, stupid" (in the early Clinton years), "shock and awe" (as the second Gulf War began). Sometimes there's a revival of one or another. One of these is "winning hearts and minds." It became popular during the Vietnam War and is enjoying a vogue in the context of the war in Iraq.

However, the phrase has undergone an interesting evolution. This is reflected in two recent columns, one by Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post, the other by Mark Bowden in the Los Angeles Times. You might suppose that any reflection on hearts and minds would revolve around the elections that are planned for January in Iraq. How, someone might ask, can the United States, now hugely disliked in Iraq, make itself so appealing that Iraqis would vote for a government cut to our specifications? Yet the principal occasion for the two writers' reflections is instead the military campaign -- specifically, the Marines' assault on Falluja.

Back in the days of Vietnam, the phrase acquired a definite meaning: In a war of pacification, winning battles was not enough; you also had to win the population's hearts and minds. If you did not, each victory in battle would only be the prelude to further battles, and at the end, when you left, all your work would be washed away by the contrary will of the local people, as happened in Vietnam. It was possible to rule by the sword, as empires have done through the ages, but then you had to be ready to occupy the country indefinitely. Winning hearts and minds, therefore, was not a frill of policy but its foundation, the sine qua non of victory.

In his discussion of the invasion of Falluja, Hoagland begins with a seeming acknowledgment of the Vietnam lesson. He recognizes that the measurements of success cannot merely be the "numbers of insurgents killed or captured, or bomb factories seized or obliterated." For "as Americans learned to their grief in Vietnam," such measurements are "elusive and illusory." We expect to hear at this point that winning hearts and minds is necessary, and Hoagland does not disappoint. But he introduces a variant of the old phrase. Falluja, he says "is part of a battle for minds rather than 'hearts and minds.'" (The title of the article is "Fighting for Minds in Fallujah.") What can he mean? What happened to hearts?

The answer is that the "immediate objective is to dissuade Sunni townspeople from joining, supporting or tolerating the insurrection," and "the price they will pay for doing so is being illustrated graphically in the streets of Fallujah." This isn't a lesson for the heart -- the organ of love, enthusiasm, positive approval. The reaction of the heart -- whether Iraqi or American -- could only be pity, disgust and indignation. Thus, only the "minds" of "the townspeople" could draw the necessary conclusions, as they survey the corpse-strewn wreckage of their city. In short, the people of Iraq will be stricken with fear, or, to use another word that's very popular these days, terror. Then they'll be ready to vote.

Bowden takes up the same theme. "Guerrilla war is always about hearts and minds," he notes. He acknowledges that most of the guerrillas would have escaped in the long buildup to the attack. Still, he argues, the attack was important. True, it will not influence the "boldest" souls, who are motivated by "nationalism, religion, kinship or ideology." (All these things were applauded in the recent American election, but they apparently are to have no place in the life of Iraqis.) But "ordinary people" can still be won over. How? He arrives at the same conclusion as Hoagland. "I suspect fear has more to do with influencing them than anything else." Most Iraqis, "like sensible people everywhere, are looking to see which side is most likely to prevail." The stake for them is "survival" -- depending on which side is more likely to kill them. Bowden wants it to be the United States. The payoff is not any concrete achievement of the attack; it is the spectacle of the subjugated city, which "works as a demonstration of will and power."

Certainly, the assault on Falluja has given the Iraqi people a lot to look at, and a lot to think about. Some 200,000 people -- the great majority of Falluja's population of some 300,000 -- were driven out of their city by news of the imminent attack and the US bombardment. No agency of government, US or Iraqi, which turned off the city's water and electricity in preparation for the assault, offered assistance. Nor did the United Nations Refugee Agency or any other representative of the international community appear. And where are the people now? And what stories are the expelled 200,000 telling the millions of Iraqis among whom they are now mixing? We don't know. No one seems to be interested.

When the attack came, the first target was Falluja General Hospital. The New York Times explained why: "The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties." If there were no hospital, there would be no visible casualties; if there were no visible casualties, there would be no international outrage, and all would be well. What of those civilians who remained? No men of military age were permitted to leave during the attack. Remaining civilians were trapped in their apartments with no electricity or water. No one knows how many of them have been killed, and no official group has any plans to find out. The city itself is a ruin. "A drive through the city revealed a picture of utter destruction," the Independent of Britain reports, "with concrete houses flattened, mosques in ruins, telegraph poles down, power and phone lines hanging slack and rubble and human remains littering the empty streets."

Both columnists do mention the elections. Bowden says the best hope for Iraq is "for elections to take place," and Hoagland believes the attack on Falluja will "clear the way" for them. Ballot boxes are to spring up in the tracks of the tanks. Some commentators even refer to "the Sunni heartland." (As far as I can tell, no one has yet asked how Iraqi "security moms" will vote.) Meanwhile, the insurgency, failing so far to learn its lesson, has opened fronts in other cities, which may soon get the same treatment as Falluja. "They made a wasteland and called it peace," Tacitus famously said. It was left to the United States, champion of freedom, to update the formula: They made a wasteland and called it democracy.

-------
Jonathan Schell is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. His most recent book is The Unconquerable World.

slightly updated version of what i originally sent...

2004-11-18T06:17:00.000-08:00

...to sorryeverybody.com.

must be because he worships "the right god"...

2004-11-17T16:54:00.000-08:00

of course, i'm hardly surprised at this maneuver... it's exactly what i'd expect of Tom's filthy little catamite partisans.

at least Chris Shays has a pair of what the rest of the Republican caucus can't scrounge up so much as one among 'em all.

Republicans Change Rule to Shield DeLay if Indicted

Politics - Reuters

By Joanne Kenen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - House Republicans voted on Wednesday to change their own rules to allow their powerful Majority Leader Tom DeLay to keep his post even if he is indicted in connection with illegal fund-raising activities.

In a closed-door session, House Republicans approved the rule change in a voice vote to allow a leader or chairman to keep his post after an indictment. The leadership would then make recommendations, based on whether the indictment was deemed legitimate or politically-motivated.

Three of DeLay's associates were indicted by a Texas grand jury in September in connection with illegal fund-raising and the prosecutor has said the investigation is not yet finished.

The controversy surrounding DeLay, a Texas Republican, does not seem to have dented his considerable power.

He is credited with helping Republicans increase their majority in the House in this month's elections and many Republican lawmakers feel indebted to him for his fund-raising prowess.

DeLay, who has been admonished by the House Ethics Committee three times this year, told reporters he was "not at all" worried about an indictment.

He said the change in party rules was necessary to protect Republicans against the Democrats' "politics of personal destruction."

Rep. Henry Bonilla, a fellow Texas Republican who initiated the change, said it was essential because, "We are trying to protect members of our leadership from any crackpot district attorney in any state of the nation from taking on a political agenda."

Democrats complained that Republicans were lowering the ethical bar for leadership.

"Not only did the House Republicans vote to re-elect the most ethically challenged member of Congress in modern history to lead them ... now, in an act of unprecedented shamelessness, the Republicans have apparently changed their own rules to allow Mr. DeLay to be indicted for a felony and still keep his job as Majority Leader," said outgoing Rep. Chris Bell, a Democrat who lost his seat because of Texas redistricting pushed by DeLay.

"That is a truly pathetic standard of leadership," added Bell, who brought a House ethics complaint against DeLay.

The new rule does, however, require anyone convicted of a felony to immediately relinquish a leadership position.

Rep. Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, said it was right to distinguish between an indictment and a conviction.

"Someone should not be punished on the basis of an indictment," Franks said.

The vote changes a decade-old rule passed when Republicans wanted to draw attention to the questionable ethics of such powerful Democrats as former Illinois Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, who eventually pleaded guilty to mail fraud and was sentenced to prison.

Connecticut Rep. Christopher Shays, one of the few Republicans to openly oppose the rule change, said it was a return to "business as usual."

"If you are a cop, a judge, a prosecutor, and you are indicted, you step down," he said, adding that Congress should follow similar standards.

"... in any rational culture..."

2004-11-17T15:13:00.000-08:00

"The neocons are feeling quite confident right now. Things are breaking their way. A group of people who in any rational culture should be looking for other jobs are being promoted."

- Jonathan Clarke of the conservative Cato Institute, co-author of a book on the neoconservative movement

so... me, a lefty, finding confirmation by serious libertarians. touching, no?

i'd be all jazzed about it, if it weren't for knowing that somewhere out there, "neocons are feeling quite confident right now." as for what i'd be feeling if I were to meet one or more of them... well, as long as i was carrying an appropriate accessory for the occasion, the answer would be: Recoil.

second from the top

2004-11-17T15:05:00.000-08:00

for what it's worth.