- : http://www.vtvnetwork.com/truealternatives
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Representative Brown:
I am a 35 year old father of (soon to be) two who has been an active voter all of my adult life. As a father, I'm concerned about the nation and world that I'll be leaving to my children.
What makes this even more vital, to me, is the fact that my family belongs to a minority religion (Wicca). Our current President once said that he doesn't consider Wicca to be a valid religion, and his water-carrying for the extremist religious right has my wife and I concerned for the future our children will face as the children of a non-majority religion.
What's even more disheartening is the fact that some Democrats talk as if they would like to begin pandering to these same religious extremists in a mistaken move towards the "center".
What I would like to ask you (and Mr. Hackett as well) is how would you approach guaranteeing religious civil libertoes to all Americans, and not just the majority?
Thank you.
Posted at January 10, 2006 3:31 PM in response to Cause and Effect
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The CIA angle is one I've been thinking about a lot lately. I've studied the CIA a fair amount over the years, and was wondering just how long they'd tolerate being W's whipping boy until they got fed up and struck back.
The popular image of the CIA amongst the liberal crowd (of which I'm a proud member) is nortoriously skewed. Images of hyper-nationalistic cowboys riding roughshod over everyone in their single-minded pursuit of what they believe to be right (think Colonel Flag in M*A*S*H) trump the reality. Anyone who's ever stuided the CIA knows just how wrong this assesment is. Church-commitee reports aside, the CIA is, by and large, made up of low-key professionals who do an important job and do it very well. They take pride in making sure nothing bad happens, and know that they'll never see any glory for it.
And yet, they're also fiercely loyal to the Agency itself, and hate to see it maligned. Piss them off, and they have ways of cutting even the most venal politician down to size. Bush and Co. have done their level best to play the CIA off as the gang that couldn't shoot straight, mainly because the CIA has always avoided being politicized. In this administration, not playing political ball is the worst sin one can commit, and even Tenet reached his breaking point. This administration sees the entire machinery of government as nothing more than a big advertising agency dedicated to selling their policies to the public at large, and the CIA's resistance to playing this role irked it to the point of treason.
Pros at the Agency know that administrations have a very short shelf life, and seem to have helped this one expire early.
Posted at October 27, 2005 1:32 AM in response to What It's Like
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(I also put this on DailyKos)
Remember, grand juries are made up of ordinary citizens, and can be swayed no matter what their political affiliations. When they hear hours upon hours of testimony of shady dealings, they always look towars those who may have been in control, even if the prosecutors are not targeting those individuals.
The Watergate grand jury heard so much about the dirty dealings of Republican operatives during Nixon's tenure that they wanted to indict Tricky Dick himself, even though the special prosecutor was wary of indicting a sitting president (They sttled on naming him an "unindicted co-conspirator").
This grand jury probably heard so much evidence about DeLay's underlings that they were ready long ago to indict him, they just needed something they could get him on. The fact that he's such a power-broker distroys any "they did it without me" defense he may try to mount. That jurisdictional technacalities were the only thing preventing an indictment probably rankled them. The never-ending arrogance and incompetence of national Republicans didn't help DeLay, either
Posted at September 28, 2005 11:30 AM in response to Full Speed Ahead on DeLay
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What we need to do is to find ways to really turn this against them in a very public manner. I envision a television ad that runs like this:
(Images of Katrina devistation, and of people digging out from the debris of ruined buildings with low, ominous music playing)
Voiceover: When Hurricane Katrina hit, over a thousand Americans were killed and millions displaced. After the storm, the people of New Orleans tried to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives.
(Show an unflattering B&W picture of George Bush, perhaps surrounded by millionaires)
Voiceover continues: But where were George Bush's priorities? Before he even declared a Federal Emergency, George Bush cut the wages of the working men and women who would be doing the reconstruction.
(Cut to a blue-collar construction worker...let's play dirty and make him a real "good ol Boy")
Blue Collar Guy: "They can pay some guy $30 an hour to drive a truck in Iraq for Halliburton, but all they want to pay me is $5.15 an hour to rebuild America. I lost everything in the storm, and now I don't know how I'm going to support my family."
(Cut to a picture of some Republican Senate or House candidate standing next to Bush)
Voiceover: Senator/Representative So-And-So stood by Bush and voted for his plan to cheat America's workers. Let's send them a message...America comes first.
Bush will be toxic by the 2006 elections...let's make him stick like glue to the Gopers. Either they'll have to defend him and look hostile to the woorking people of this country, or repudiate him and piss off the rabid right base , but either way it's a hard hit.
Posted at September 17, 2005 10:14 AM in response to It's a Setup!
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We are a nostalgic lot, aren't we? Always trying to find meaning in our current situations by looking to the past. And yet, we often do so at our peril.
This is because we rarely choose the right past events to compare things to. For example: remember after the first Gulf War when the soldiers came home? Remember how determined people were to make things different from when the Vietnam vets came home? We threw big parades, dumped tons of confetti on them, and treated a bunch of professional soldiers (many who never fired a shot) like conquering heroes.
Of course, we wern't doing this for them...we were doing it to mollify a lingering national guilt about how those Vietnam vets were treated. We looked backwards in time, and hoped that if we treated this generation of soliders like Gods then we could be forgiven for those who spat on the Vietnam vets and called them "baby killers".
Only it doesn't work like that. The only way to make things right with the Vietnam vets is to treat them like heros, or at least like human beings.
If King George the Second wants to indulge a bit of WWII nostalgia, then why not harken back to what happened when those WWII soldiers came home? Give them a GI Bill worth having, give them the tools to build a bright future for their families, give them the health care that a grateful nation should give. Hell, why not give all of these things to the Vietnam vets as well? Of course, that's not a good one-day photo-op, is it?
If Georgie and company want a historical analogy for Iraq, then I would direct them to the Soviet invaision of Afghanistan. The Soviets rolled into the country with hardly breaking a sweat, declared victory, and then were slowly bled by an insurgency for year after year after year. Bloodied and battered, with support at home having evaporated, the Soviets withdrew in defeat. Want to know what international observers called Afghanistan?
They called it Russia's Vietnam.
Posted at August 31, 2005 11:51 PM in response to The War on Terror is Like WW II Except. . . .
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"(let alone that our National Guard is spread thin)"
Here is yet another criminal failure of the entire Iraq debacle...the fact that the National Guard, which should be helping to protect the citizens of our nation, is spread so thin that American civilian lives may be lost in the chaos.
If defending the "homeland" is such a high priority, then why is the land so ill-equipped to be defended? If a natural disaster like this, one that we had advanced warning of (no matter how brief), could inflict this kind of damage, then what would happen if a genuine terrorist attack were to happen on our soil? After 9/11, New York City was locked down tight, to prevent chaos. Could we muster that now? Or would the aftermath of a terrorist attack be worse than the initial strike?
Opponents of the Iraqui war should point these things out...it's not just our military who's in danger because of it, it's us at home as well.
Posted at August 30, 2005 11:56 PM in response to The War on Katrina
