During the Thursday afternoon session (5/23/07) of the House Judiciary Committee (HJC) hearing on the US Attorneys' firing, Monica Goodling made a particularly interesting comment.

Of course there are so many points of interest in Goodling's testimony, but what I perceive to be one small "slip" may have gone unnoticed.

My curiosity was tweaked during Representative Robert Wexler’s (D - FL) portion. There was an exchange of questions and answers regarding the March 5th meeting called by the WH Counsel’s office. I think the attention was on the fact that Karl Rove was in attendance.

Using CSPAN's recorded version of the afternoon session you can see that at about the 9 minute, 30 second mark Wexler asked;

Wexler: "Was there any discussion about the termination of the prosecutors?"

Goodling: "Um, I remember at one point there was a reference to when, um, to when Tim Griffen's, ah, name was submitted to the President for approval and I, and I checked my book and said it was June. I think that was the only comment I made in the meeting... and I think that the only reference to a specific individual I remember in the meeting. ..."

What is of interest to me is Monica's admission of keeping a "book" which tracked the date/s when a name was submitted to the President.  What is also interesting is the ease in which she recalled / stated this fact of checking her "book" with no ambiguity.

This single comment raises many questions:

• Did she mean to speak about a book that tracked the dates "names were submitted to the President for approval?"
• Exactly how did she know when a name was submitted TO THE PRESIDENT?  By what method did she come by these facts: email, verbally, during a meeting.  And by whom did she get notified?  Seems ironic that she's in a meeting with WH Counsel and she is the one correcting the dates!!!????  Curious, no?
• In what document dump can we find this "book"?
• Did she previously disclose the existence of such a "book" to the HJC?
• Where is this book today?
• Does the HJC have possession?
• If the book is under DOJ "control" did the DOJ disclose the fact that they have it and it's relevance to Congress' request for ALL relevant documents.
• What other information related to this investigation is in the book?

Is there anything significant here or is this already known? It’s hard to keep track.

Go take a look and listen your self at C-SPAN's web site.  Under RECENT PROGRAMS you'll see: 

House Judiciary Full Cmte. Hearing on the U.S. Attorneys Investigation - PM Session <javascript:playClip(clip07)>

I’ve always been fascinated with society, psychology, and the human condition…especially from the perspective of what the future may hold. Don’t misinterpret that to mean that I think I can predict the future; rather I try to predict how the state of thought…what people believe, what they are saying, and how they are saying it today…will impact their experiences some time in the not so distant future.

Additionally, I love it when my musings can connect several disparate dots into a snapshot of what might unfold in that regard. Lastly, I adore words…how they are used, what they can and should mean, how they shape our hopes and beliefs, and how they can often be used to say one thing while intending or imparting another. Some say that we are what we eat…I say we are what we hear…which becomes what we say.

A couple of articles caught my attention this morning and allowed me to get lost in one of my moments of ADD induced speculation. First, let me offer the backdrop. Of late, I’ve spent a lot of time focused on the state of parenting and the messages today’s parents are giving their children which will influence how they will function in the world as adults. Add in the influence of religion and its tendency to support absolutist thinking, the preoccupation with being famous and being number one and you have a snapshot of the launching point for my contemplation.

The first article deals with the issue of climate change and the impact of global warming. According to a Washington Post article, the United States appears prepared to reject the proposal to be offered at the upcoming G8 Summit that would set limits on greenhouse gas emissions in order to cap the rise in global temperature.

Representatives from the world's leading industrial nations met the past two days in Heiligendamm, Germany, to negotiate over German Chancellor Angela Merkel's proposed statement, which calls for limiting the worldwide temperature rise this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit and cutting global greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Bush administration officials, who raised similar objections in April, rejected the idea of setting mandatory emissions targets as well as language calling for G-8 nations to raise overall energy efficiencies by 20 percent by 2020. With less than two weeks remaining, said sources familiar with the talks, the climate document is the only unresolved issue in the statements the world leaders are expected to sign at the June 6-8 summit.

"The U.S. still has serious, fundamental concerns about this draft statement," a paper dated May 14 states. "The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to…We have tried to 'tread lightly' but there is only so far we can go given our fundamental opposition to the German position."

As I’ve followed the global warming debate, a couple things stand out to me. One, the projections suggest that if the trends were to in fact proceed unabated, rising ocean levels would threaten some of this country’s major population centers. Two, those rising waters are apparently being taxed to absorb the rising levels of carbon dioxide and should they reach saturation, the problems will only accelerate. At some point the entire system goes awry and all hell breaks loose…think high waters and boats…perhaps Noah’s arc meets Poseidon Adventure.

I read the second article at MSNBC. That article, in its broadest terms, is a discussion of the state of the American Dream…the promise of advancing prosperity from generation to generation. Toss in the oft heard GOP theory that the rising tide lifts all boats and you’ll begin to see some rhyme to my reason.

The American dream has always held that each generation will enjoy a higher standard of living than the previous one, and that is still true, as measured by household income.

But the generational gains are slowing, and the increased participation of women in the work force is the only thing keeping the dream alive, according to an analysis of Census data released Friday.

A generation ago, American men in their thirties had median annual incomes of about $40,000 compared with men of the same age who now make about $35,000 a year, adjusted for inflation. That’s a 12.5 percent drop between 1974 and 2004, according to the report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Economic Mobility Project.

To be sure, household incomes rose during the same period, but only because there are more full-time working women, the report said.

"Today’s data suggest that during a 30-year period of economic expansion, a rising tide did not lift all boats," Morton said in a release accompanying the report, "Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?"

Of course, the men who run American companies don’t have too much to complain about. CEO pay increased to 262 times the average worker’s pay in 2005 from 35 times in 1978, according to the report’s analysis of Congressional Budget Office statistics.

Going back to 1820, per capita gross domestic product in the United States has grown an average of 52 percent for each 30-year generation, according to the report. But since 1973, median family income has grown only 0.6 percent per year, a rate that produces just a 17 percent increase over a generation.

"Thus, unless the rate of economic growth increases, the next generation will experience an improvement in its standard of living that is only one-third as large as the historical average for earlier generations," the report said.

Stay with me, I promise a big finish (wink, wink).

So when you take the words found in these two articles and factor in the issues from the backdrop, one can begin to see the images that will form a preliminary snapshot of our future human condition premised upon the existing and established social and psychological influences.

I’ll attempt to explain. Generally speaking, it seems to me that many of today’s parents are raising the expectations found in their children. Call it the American Idol mentality morphs with the Tiger Woods phenomenon…meaning mom and dad say to themselves, “My kid has star potential so I simply need to cultivate it from the outset”. My bottom line assumption suggests that a growing number of parents believe every child can, should, and will be coached such that they are eventually discovered and catapulted to their rightful position in the spotlight. Call it the American Dream juiced up on steroids (h/t to David Letterman for the steroids slang).

At the same time, we see the data from the study referenced above suggesting that the economic prospects are moving in a diametrically opposite direction…and we have yet to consider the unknown though increasingly predictable ramifications of climate change that could render all prior historical equations virtually useless. Oh, and did I mention the case of the missing honey bees?

I’ve previously argued that humanity has continued to move towards a construct of diverging identities…in other words there is a greater divide between the outward lives we live and the more obscure, though ever lurking in the background, state of hyper reality…those moments when the facade of the outer world identity is stripped of its accoutrements to reveal the starkness of our real identity.

A couple examples might be helpful. It’s the eighteen year old young woman that dad has convinced is destined to be the next Serena Williams who finds herself entering college without a tennis scholarship and void of other measures of self worth…though still convinced her exaggerated “manifest destiny” is just around the corner.

It’s the thirty five year old son who was handed success in the form of family instituted social security when he joined his maternal grandfather’s business as a vice president the day he graduated from college…now left to realize the day after grandfather has entered a nursing home with Alzheimer’s that sales have evaporated in direct relation to grandpa’s advancing disconnect and that what little is left of a fortune will now be needed to pay for round the clock care.

The reality is that this aquarium we call America isn’t big enough to hold the advancing expectations we have sought to institutionalize and that we have exponentially instilled in the next generation. Worse yet, we haven’t yet equipped that generation with the boat to survive the rising tide…no, not the rising tide of success that will raise all boats…but the rising tide of a global economy that will subject the United States to ever increasing global economic realities. In truth, boats be damned…people are going to need to know how to swim…and no, there won’t be any gold medals awarded.

At the same time, we have a government that is intent on borrowing money in order to spend its way out of each new economic setback. Simultaneously, they ignore the warnings of an ever advancing science that suggests an entirely new and ominous cash eating calamity in the form of global climate change is just beyond the rising liquid horizon.

The bright future that has become the staple of our private and political rhetoric (the words we speak) may be nothing more than the glow of an approaching apocalypse…no, not the one associated with the rapture that runs rampant in religious imagery and that promises an idyllic after life…the one that was there in full view for all to see and fully of our own human making…the one we chose to ignore because our best human attributes and identities had atrophied such that we lacked the will to right the ship before it succumbed to the weight of an endless burden of belligerence and betrayal…particularly that betrayal which suggested that god would save us…because we chose to conclude that that would be easier than saving ourselves.

The curtain falls.

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

The entire Fitzgerald sentencing memorandum is worth reading, but this sentence stuck out:

=== First, it was clear from very early in the investigation that Ms. Wilson qualified under the

relevant statute (Title 50, United States Code, Section 421) as a covert agent whose identity

had been disclosed by public officials, including Mr. Libby, to the press. ===

along with this one

=== Second, it is undisputed but of no moment that it was known early in the investigation

that two other persons (Richard Armitage and Karl Rove) in addition to Mr. Libby had

disclosed Ms. Wilson’s identity to reporters, and that Messrs. Armitage and Rove were the

sources for columnist Robert Novak’s July 14, 2003 column, which first publicly disclosed

Ms. Wilson’s CIA affiliation. The investigation was never limited to disclosure of Ms.

Wilson’s CIA affiliation to Mr. Novak; rather, from the outset the investigation sought to determine who disclosed information about Ms. Wilson to various reporters, including – but

not limited to – Mr. Novak. ===

Could we have another one of those 287 post discussions with input from certain parties who used to contribute here regularly on how there was "no crime", "Plame was not covert", and "Novak was the end of the investigation"? Or is the argument that Fitzgerald, with a security clearance and access to all the information from all parties including the CIA, was wrong about this?

Hey, that's it: Fitzgerald needs to be prosecuted for perjury as a result of this sentencing memorandum! That's the ticket.

sPh

Again, Deanie Mills has inspired a blog. I commented on hers and words began to spill onto the screen.

Memorial Day has a special meaning to me. Deanie has more of a right to speak than many on this site because she is so intimately involved in the daily fear this administration has inflicted on so many families in America.

I have seen "Georgie" and his cohorts for what they were since the beginning. I have no doubt, as I have said many times, that HE/THEY will go down in history as the worst in American history.

Yesterday I was having a heated discussion with two co-workers who are in the 29% who somehow still support "Georgie." I told one of them I'll never understand how someone who is as smart as he is can still say the things he says in support of these monsters. I've said that to the Lt. before and others. My co-worker said I was being condescending. Maybe I am. But it boggles my mind that ANYONE smart enough to function can still find ANY reason to support these guys.

Then, he gave me hope for the future. During the argument, he said, "You probably were a Lyndon Johnson fan! Lyndon Johnson KILLED a lot of my friends," he went on.

A LYNDON JOHNSON FAN! NO! But that statement gives me hope that this generation who are now losing THEIR friends, THEIR kids, THEIR Dads and Moms, will come to know how arrogant, corrupt, incompetent and completely evil this administration is/was.

Even though I was young and naive back then, I wasn't very political. Like many of these young warriors today, I thought my country would not allow politicians to do what we now know they did. There was more trust in those days of our elected officials. We The People still had faith that something like Watergate could never happen. We The People still thought the office of the President was a place to be respected and admired. We The People, though naive, thought we could trust our government.

I've spent many years studying history. Believe it or not, I don't consider myself a "Far Left" idealog. I think, like most Americans, I'm close to the center politically. Left of center, granted, but I'm still open to learn and grow when presented with FACTS which prove me wrong.

The problem with the monsters in power is: They have created an abyss between Left and Right which is difficult to bridge. The policies of Karl Rove have turned Americans against each other in a way I never thought possible.

Until we can communicate again, the abyss will widen and grow deeper.

Here is the comment I made on Deanie's blog this morning:

I always try to thank people I see in uniform. It is still a little thorn to me the way we were treated and I don't want those who currently serve to think they aren't appreciated.

I still haven't been able to go to the "Wall" yet. I'm a history buff and have been to many civil war memorials and WWII and other war places of remembrance. They are always moving and spiritual experiences for me but the "Wall" still affects me in ways I don't discuss with anyone.

I know some of those names well. I remember their smiles and the look in their eyes before they became statistics. I have blogged before trying to humanize the "numbers."

One of the reasons I am so passionate against "Georgie" and the rest of the COWARDS in his administration is because they pretend to be patriotic and to care about "The Troops." But they are insincere and have no souls. "The Troops" are beginning to KNOW what you and I have known all along, that these people aren't PRO-America, they are PRO-big business, PRO-defense contractors, PRO Haliburton! I'd love to see the off shore account balances for "Georgie", Dick "The Monster" Cheney, "Rummy" and the rest. I'd love to see how they have multiplied since they lied us into this quagmire in Iraq.

As I've said before, Hell is too good for them!

Remember this Memorial Day stands for something. Deanie is absolutely right! These are young Americans, not numbers. They are more than statistics. All the thousands who died in all America's wars were human beings with smiles and hopeful looks in their eyes before they became statistics.

Remember them. Thank them. Appreciate them. Honor them.

Guys, this is a Memorial Day message from Jon Soltz, chairman and co-founder of Vote Vets, an organization of veterans, their families, and supporters, originally begun by General Wesley Clark with the intention of putting as many veterans in Congress in the '06 election as possible, so there would be SOMEONE who would actually speak for the troops in regards to this war. 

Some of you may recall that, consequently, there were somthing like more than a dozen or more Iraq and Afghanistan vets, and Vietnam vets, running as Democrats in the '06 elections.  Many of them won their races.

The Republicans only had ONE, and he was defeated.

Vote Vets has continued to stay active in ending this war. 

Recently, they sponsored three 30-second commercials featuring retired generals--two of whom had commanded troops in Iraq--which made the case that Bush did NOT listen to his generals on the ground because THEY were the generals he ignored.  The ads were aired in vulnerable Republican districts whose congresspeople and senators had backed Bush, and ran repeatedly on YouTube with thousands of hits.

You can support Vote Vets, or look into their many activities--including lobbying Congress to end this war--at http://www.votevets.org.

The message from Mr. Stoltz, an Iraq vet himself, is a reminder of the true meaning of Memorial Day:

 

On Monday, our nation will observe Memorial Day - a day which is incredibly solemn and sacred, especially to those of us who served our nation with military service.

For one day, VoteVets.org, and our friends at WesPAC and the National Security Network, will put politics completely aside, and stand in solidarity with the rest of our nation to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice for the United States.  Whether you are a Democrat, Republican, or of another party or no party at all, we are all still Americans, and on this day, we should solely be focused on honoring those who died in service.  As a progressive troops' organization, we're also asking that people not protest at Memorial Day events.  We have 364 other days to argue policy and politics, but this day belongs to the fallen and their memories.

Today, please consider making a donation to the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund (http://www.fallenheroesfund.org) , which is dedicated to helping the families of those who died in service.  The Intrepid Fund has already provided $60 million in aid to families, but can only continue to do so with your support.

Above all, take a day to learn more about someone who died in defense of America.  If you're at a parade or prayer service and you see a veteran or military family member, ask him or her who they are honoring.  Learn more about that hero, so their memory can endure.  Too often, we talk about the fallen in terms of numbers.  We forget, each of those numbers were real people, with real lives, and real families.  The names on the thousands of memorials across America are more than letters etched in stone - they are lives lost with honor.  The best way we can honor those who sacrificed their lives is ensure that the memory of who they were as human beings is never forgotten.  Please, on Memorial Day, do your part to ensure their memory lives on.

Thank you for your support of our troops and veterans.

Sincerely,

Jon Soltz, Iraq War Veteran, Chairman and Co-Founder, VoteVets.org

Wes Clark

Rand Beers, USMC (ret.), National Security Network

"There is a false love of country, born of pride, which blinds one to her faults; and there is a loftier passion which will brave estrangement and denunciation to correct them."

~ G. A. Chadwick, The Book of Exodus, part of The Expositor's Bible series, ed. W. Robertson Nicoll, page 38

Well Karl Rove must be proud. ABC News began their broadcast tonight by saying that Clinton and Obama voted against funding the troops. Thanks so much for taking a complicated situation and framing it with a phrase right off of the Republican talking points list.

Tom

It's like LC Kilgore said, "Someday this war's gonna end..."

At some point, there will be enough votes. Probably now September, when "the surge" proves ineffective. That seems to be the date many have cited. And Bush will then say we need until January, and at that point there will probably be more ship-jumping, with enough votes to impose a timetable and stop payment on this Presidential blank check.

So now, what this last vote has done is turn the tables: it's now Congress waiting out Bush's surge, instead of Bush waiting out Congress.

How many more deaths in the next four months?

I don't see how this vote can sit well with anyone.

 

Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

This an entry in a series of blogs to keep people informed on current election reform and voting rights issues in the news.

Featured Stories of the Week:

Voter ID measure dies in Senate without a vote – Associated Press

Why the Right to Vote, Without and ID, Is Worth Fighting For - Houston Chronicle

Efforts to stop `voter fraud' may have curbed legitimate voting – McClatchy Newspapers

Why This Scandal Matters – New York Times, Editorial

Her first vote put her in prison: Woman is one of five from city convicted of voter fraud – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

The brouhaha caused by Texas voter ID bill, HB 218, brought the nation to attention when the Democratic minority in the Senate banded together to fight the bill at all costs, including risking the life of a Senator who suffered complications from a recent liver transplant. But neither this risk or the witch hunt for “voter fraud” stopped him for protecting the “'basic right to vote without undue pressure.'”

"That's not the type of publicity I wanted. I just wanted to be the 11th vote to block the bill," said Gallegos in this Associated Press story. Against doctor's orders, Gallegos set up a hospital bed near the Senate chambers until the bill was declared dead, Wednesday at midnight.

“The bottom line is that voter identification proposals are about politics, not fraud,” he wrote in the Houston Chronicle. HB 218, one of about “120 burdensome voter identification proposals” across the country, is a product of a partisan plan to suppress the votes of marginalized communities. Further, “no one has documented a single case of 'voter impersonation' that HB 218 would solve,” he said.

“When more people vote on 'American Idol' than vote for president, we should make it easier for people to vote, not harder,” Gallegos wrote.

Making it easier to vote is an unusual concept, especially to 43-year-old Wisconsinite Kimberly Prude who is now in prison for voter fraud after casting her first ballot, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Prude took a job as a poll-worker and voted, but later was told by her parole officer that her vote was illegal since state law does not allow felons the right to vote until completion of probation or parole. She then tried to revoke her vote, to no avail and testified in a three-day-trial that she had made a “terrible mistake.” She is now serving a two year sentence.

“At this point, I'm not interested in voting," she said. Another “felony offender” confused with his voting rights was charged with voter fraud. Derek Little registered and voted the same day with the only ID he had – his parolee card. “In big bold letters, it says OFFENDER, and they still let me vote," Little said. "I thought it was their job to know the rules."

Milwaukee U.S. Attorney Steven M. Biskupic was accused of “not being aggressive enough in pursuing voter fraud cases” and was on the “evolving list” or U.S. Attorneys to be fired. Biskupic “has repeatedly denied that his office prosecuted any voter fraud case because of White House pressure.” Little and Prude were two of 14 voter fraud cases Biskupic pursued in Wisconsin, a battleground state. Only five were convicted. One of them was Kimberly Prude.

“It is hard not to see the fingerprints of Karl Rove. A disproportionate number of the prosecutors pushed out, or considered for dismissal, were in swing states,” a New York Times editorial said.

“It is now clear that United States attorneys were pressured to act in the interests of the Republican Party, and lost their job if they failed to do so,”

While many have seen Rove’s fingerprints in creating the elaborate tale of voter fraud as a pretext for voter suppression, Greg Gordon at the McClatchy Newspapers shows some of how the politicization of the Justice Department was accomplished. In a Sunday report, Gordon shows how former Department of Justice official . Hans von Spakovsky spent much of his four years there “in a crusade against voter fraud.” Under a pseudonym, von Spakovsky wrote a law journal article about the importance of photo ID to prevent voter fraud, further saying there was “no evidence” that such ID was a burden on minorities. He has also been linked to controversial voter ID cases in Georgia and Arizona. Von Spakovsky then allegedly sped up the approval process for controversial voter ID bills in Georgia and Arizona, citing his own law journal article as support for the laws. He did this,despite objections by career staff “who believed that Georgia's law would restrict voting by poor blacks and who felt that more analysis was needed on the Arizona law's impact on Native Americans and Latinos.” He also attempted to influence the federal Election Assistance Commission's research on voter fraud and voter ID laws: “A House panel revealed last month that the fraud study's central finding - that there was little evidence of widespread voter fraud - had been toned down to say that 'a great deal of debate' surrounded the subject,” wrote Gordon. Von Sparkovsky has been given a recess appointment to the Federal Elections Commission and has a confirmation hearing scheduled for June 13th.

In Other News:

Florida Governor Charlie Crist signed two significant bills Monday, “eliminating electronic voting machines in favor of paper ballots and making Florida's presidential primary among the earliest in the nation.” The new law requiring paper records won't be in effect for the new Jan. 29 presidential primary, but is expected to be implemented for the fall 2008 elections, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Florida League of Women Voters called the bill mandating paper-based voting systems “deeply flawed” in Thursday's Palm Beach Post. The bill was inundated with numerous “objectionable amendments” just days before the end of session, including provisions that “stifle” voter registration drives by “grassroots organizations,” an issue that is “similar to prior years' legislation that the League of Women Voters is challenging in court.”

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner announced a new voter registration program to get young people to vote, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Under the pilot program that will reach 147 high schools in several counties, all graduates will receive a voter form and letter encouraging them to register. “The goal is to expand the program statewide next year, depending on the response, Brunner said,” hoping to register 10% or more graduates.

Wisconsin State Rep. Joe Parisi introduced legislation to fully restore voting rights of felons who have completed their sentence, a proposal Assembly Republican Scott Suder called “dead on arrival,” according to the Wisconsin Radio Network. Current law restores former felons' voting rights after completing probation or parole.

Erin Ferns is a Research and Policy Analyst with Project Vote’s Strategic Writing and Research Department (SWORD).

As of today, Friday, May 24, 2007 the day following the vote to postpone voting on Iraq until General Petraeus's much-vaunted report in September--at which time, if he says things are as bad or worse then as they are now (which they are highly likely to be)--a new vote will go before Congress to end this war...I am going on record today to post that nine more servicemembers died today and six died on the day Congress voted on the war-funding bill, bringing the total number of men and women dead in Iraq as of today to 3,431.

On the day in September when Congress casts a REAL vote to end the war, I will post how many troops have died up to that point, and we'll do a little basic arithmetic to figure out how many men and women died from vote to vote.

This does not count the amount of Iraqis who will have died, because, for the most part, they are now killing each other, and their government is hiding the true number of deaths.  We will just accept that it will be bad.

Nor does it count the number of wounded, because the way the Army and Marine Corps counts its wounded is not entirely accurate, because many who are "blown up" are returned to duty without hospitalization, only to develop brain-trauma injury symptoms months later. 

We will, conservatively, multiply by ten. 

For every dead soldier or Marine, we will assume ten more were wounded, although the true figure is likely to be much higher.  It will have to do for our purposes.

Check back with me in September and we will do the grim math.

This is not, of course, to assume that no one would have died if by some miracle we'd've established a timeline for re-deployment, nor do I think yanking everyone off the battlefield and loading them onto super-sonic jets bound for mom and apple pie is the solution either.  I like the term "phased re-deployment" and will stick to that for now. 

Whenever that day does arrive, people will still die during that time.  Any time troops withdraw, there are casualties.  That is a given, sadly.

But by postponing a real reckoning--and in this instance, as much howling as is going on in the Democrats' direction, I believe most of our anger has been mis-placed.

For one thing, as John Kerry points out, we don't have a majority in the Senate anyway when it comes to Iraq, thanks to the Republican mole in our midst:  Joe Lieberman.

No, the person who spoke the clearest truth, to my mind, was George Stephanopolous, who was commenting on ABC News about the meeting of moderate Republicans with the president back a week or so ago.

Nowhere did I see anyone else make this point, but this is a guy who knows how these kinds of meetings go.  He said--and I'm quoting from memory and don't want to take the time to dig it up over on abcnews.com--but what he said was:

"I'm sure those moderate Republicans from the House and Senate went before President Bush, and they said, 'WE'LL GIVE YOU THIS VOTE, BUT IT'S YOUR LAST ONE.'" (emphasis mine)

In other words, they basically told him that if Petraeus has bad news in September, they will no longer be able to rubber-stamp him because their constituents would have their hides if they did.

Soon after that little meeting, Bush starts talking about how casualties will go up, and just yesterday, made a point that in August, it will be real bad because those bad guys in Iraq, those "terrorists" will want to influence the American government.

So he is already trying to manipulate how the expected bad news from Petraeus will be accepted by the American public and reported in the media.

So, basically, you have Republican moderates (don't forget disgruntled conservatives who secretly agree with Dems) who were large enough in number to GIVE THE DEMOCRATS A VETO-PROOF MAJORITY, and DELIBERATELY postponed having to do so in order to GIVE BUSH ONE MORE VICTORY.

The Democrats knew that without those moderate Republicans, there was no way they had enough votes to over-ride a veto.  Don't you think they'd have fought harder if they thought they had a shot?

But because of the moderate Republicans, who pretend one thing in front of the cameras and say something else behind closed doors, the TRUTH is that THIS BLOOD WILL BE ON THEIR HANDS. 

THEY are the ones who forced a postponement of this vote.

Not that the Dems are without blame--don't get me wrong, and it is not my wish to unleash a diatribe against them, but in all fairness, we have to consider what they had to work with, and if those guys really did go before Bush and say, "This is your last vote," then it is THEY who bear most of the responsiblity--them and Lieberman, of course.

They lacked the backbone to do what they knew was right, and chose to wait until the good general could come in and give them ammunition, so to speak.  They wanted to hide behind him when they finally broke with their fearless leader.

So we'll do a little body count of our own.  We will add up exactly how many brave men and women had to die over the summer because moderate Republicans and disgruntled conservatives like John Warner and turn-coats like Joe Lieberman and all the rest who failed to back the Democrats when they KNEW they were right...

Were cowards.

I want someone to ask President Bush this question:

Mr. President, if we maintain our forces in Iraq, is Iraq the only place terrorists will attack us?

I know the answer to my question is "No - al Qaida, or many other terrorist organizations, will seek to attack the United States and its interests world wide."

The Scary Answer

The truly scary answer from President Bush would be "Yes."  This is the answer he implies when he argue that if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will "follow us home."  If he really believes that, in fact, he must answer "Yes".

But if he believes that staying in Iraq makes that the only place we'll be attacked, he is by definition malfeasant.  There is no need to protect anything else as long as the only place we'll be attacked is there.

POTUS BOGUS

Of course, the fact is that Mr. Bush seems to know that we need at least some protections for places other than Iraq.

That means he must know his argument is bogus.  It means he knows that the US presence in Iraq is immaterial to whether terrorists will try to attack us here.

The "breathing room" for a political solution in Iraq that the Ponies!!! crowd believes the surge will provide will not happen. Nothing in Iraq will change while we occupy their country.

Democrats, seeing how their strategy of fighting the White House and the Republicans on the field of "funding the troops" only resulted in another blank check, should perhaps start talking about Iraq as an occupation.

In the last Democratic debate, the word "Iraq" was spoken 40 times. The word "occupation"? Once. (Kucinich.)

Try it. What's to lose? More blank checks?

 

 

Imagine, if you will, a young man, aged 29, driving down the road. He hits another vehicle and dies and now his dad wants to sue people. OK.

But wait. The son was drunk, with blood levels TWICE the legal level for intoxication, and just for kicks there was also marijuana in the car. Oh, and he was speeding on the interstate. Oh, and he was talking on a damn cell phone. Oh, and he wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

So I wonder quite what the rationale is for suing the tow truck company that owned the tow truck this young man hit. And for suing the driver of a car who's car was stalled on I-64 and was getting help from the tow truck driver. And for suing the restaurant that served the driver.

Anyhow, that's what Dean Hancock, father of the late St Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock, is doing. But he should be more creative in his lawsuits -- after all, there are PLENTY of entities that had some connection to the accident.

First, he should sue the manufacturer of the driver's stalled car because if that car had been made better it wouldn't have stalled and Josh Hancock wouldn't have hit that tow truck in his speeding, drunken, seatbelt-scorning cellphone wielding stupor. Then for good measure he should sue the manufacturer of the tow truck itself because if it had been made out of Nerf-style foam the impact wouldn't have killed the drunken, speeding, cell-phone using, seatbelt-ignoring Josh Hancock. He should sue the maker of Hancock's SUV for not installing technology to lock the ignition to prevent somebody who is completely bombed out of his mind from being able to operate the vehicle. He should sue the maker of whatever booze Josh Hancock was drinking for supplying booze in the first place.

Finally, he should sue the corpse of President Dwight Eisenhower for authorizing the construction of the Interstate Highway System because without I-64, there could have been no wreck on I-64 to kill drunken Josh Hancock.

I tend to feel sympathy for the father of somebody who has died in an accident, even if the person who died was clearly completely irresponsible in his behavior, and clearly completely responsible for his own death. But such mass-blast lawsuits tend to erode the sympathy pretty quickly. Leave Eddie's Towing and the other victims of this legal shooting spree alone.

In Oregon, Stanislas Meyerhoff was sentenced to 16 years for arson and related crimes. There appears to be no dispute that he committed the crimes he is accused of: setting fire to an SUV dealership, a tree farm and a police station. Meyerhoff is a member of the Earth Liberation Front, and with his co-defendants, he perpetrated a series of arsons targeting businesses that they contend harm the environment. No one was ever harmed, and defendants contend that their actions were carefully planned to minimize the risk to human life.

There is not much question that Meyerhoff is guilty of arson. There is no question that he engaged in criminal activity to further his political beliefs. But is he a terrorist?

Prosecutors in the case successfully argued at the sentencing phase that Meyerhoff should be given a longer sentence under “terrorist enhancement” policies (he got 16 years). They argued that his actions, undoubtedly illegal and violent, "were clearly calculated to influence the conduct of government by intimidation, coercion and retaliation."

As I understand it, this is part of the fairly loose definition of the crime of “domestic terrorism” under the USA PATRIOT Act and other anti-terrorism laws. Under the PATRIOT Act, the crime is defined as any illegal action that could endanger human life that is intended to influence the government. Arguably, a sit in that blocks an ambulance, under this definition, could lead to terrorism charges against demonstrators.

Meyerhoff is perhaps closer to the real thing. I am not entirely certain how to cut the definition – but I feel that calling conscientious environmental arsonists terrorists gets it wrong. A terrorist act is one that is intended to do harm to human beings – or at least wantonly disregards the possibility of harm – to induce fear in a population. Often, it seems to me, terrorism is only loosely connected to a political agenda. From what I’ve read, members of this group went to great lengths to ensure that their actions harmed no one – they easily could have done so anyway, but I have to think that when we lump together those who seek to minimize the risk to human life with those who seek to maximize that risk, something fundamental in our understanding of the threat of terrorism is lost. More importantly, when we allow expansive definitions of something as fearful as terrorism to ensnare a much larger group of individuals, we lose some fundamental part of our civil liberties.

Is this terrorism, or is it just crime?

After 37 years as a registered Democrat, today is my last day. I quit. I will no longer staff voter registration tables, canvas neighborhoods, staff phone banks, attend precinct meetings, or donate my hard-earned wages.

I will no longer associate myself with the party that is known as the "Liberal Weenies." I have endured humiliation and ridicule only because I believed that label was nothing more than name-calling. In my heart, I believed that given the right cause, Democrats would rise to the occasion and do what was right.

I was wrong.

Today, I witnessed this Democratic Congress sell out the lives of our children, a fraction of their constituency, to raise the minimum wage and provide cheap labor for the majority of Americans who do NOT have to make any kind of sacrifice in this war.

I am now ashamed to say I worked in Sen. Reid's office in Nevada, canvassing neighborhoods for his district.

I'll be sure and tell my son, who is serving in Diyala, that the seven friends he saw blown apart this month died so that Jose and Maria can become American citizens and get a $2 an hour raise.

At least now I know what value this Congress has placed on a soldier's life: cheap labor; cheap oil.

I'm registering as an independent for the next election.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070524/ap_on_re_mi_ea/lebanon_violence

TRIPOLI, Lebanon - Lebanon's prime minister vowed Thursday to wipe out an Islamic militant group barricaded in a Palestinian refugee camp, raising the prospect that the army will either storm the camp, in what would likely be a bloody battle, or dig in for a long siege to force its surrender.

I'm waiting any minute now for heads of state,the UN,EU,international human rights groups and the global media to hysterically accuse the Lebanese army of using disproportionate force, of war crimes and massacres. Oh yes that's right, only Israel is required to exorcise restraint, only Israel is required to sit by, do nothing and allow its citizens to be targeted for mass murder by terrorists. Every other country in the world is free to do what it deems necessary in the name of self-defense. Tell me again that Israel isn't a victim of an international double standard.

I’ve yet to comment on the recent immigration debate, though I have previously shared my thoughts on the topic at Thought Theater. Having recently spent some time ruminating on the relevnt issues, along with today’s reading of George Will’s latest commentary, I’m ready to take another swipe at the subject.

There seems to be a movement to characterize the tepid across the board voter polling as an indication that the new legislation is generally unacceptable...or in the extreme, as Minority Leader John Boehner described it after meeting with the president, it is “a piece of shit”. While I can comprehend Will's rationale, I’m inclined to disagree with his subsequent conclusions.

In fact, I view the poll numbers and the lukewarm reactions to this pending legislation as an egg that won’t hatch because it’s been sat on for far too long by an impotent brood of “banty” roosters who have repeatedly placed partisan objectives ahead of pragmatic and prudent policy. What we are witnessing is simply the acknowledgment that reality has come home to roost…and it has been forever altered by the proverbial practice of “head in the sand” hegemony and hypocrisy.

Let me attempt to explain what I mean. First, let’s look at some of the arguments being advanced in George Will’s op-ed piece.

Compromise is incessantly praised, and it has produced the proposed immigration legislation. But compromise is the mother of complexity, which, regarding immigration, virtually guarantees -- as the public understands -- weak enforcement and noncompliance.

In 1986, when there probably were 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants, Americans accepted an amnesty because they were promised that border control would promptly follow. Today the 12 million illegal immigrants, 60 percent of whom have been here five or more years, are as numerous as Pennsylvanians; 44 states have populations smaller than 12 million. Deporting the 12 million would require police resources and methods from which the nation would rightly flinch. So, why not leave bad enough alone?

Concentrate on border control and on workplace enforcement facilitated by a biometric identification card issued to immigrants who are or will arrive here legally. Treat the problem of the 12 million with benign neglect. Their children born here are American citizens; the parents of these children will pass away.

Were I living in the civil war era, I might conclude that The Reconstruction had commenced…though this time in the form of rewriting history to mask the motives that allowed the 1986 policy to morph into an illegal immigrant incubator. Ask the owner of any small business in operation during this period and they will gladly confirm that the process of worker verification had been given a virtual vasectomy…rendering it harmless, helpless, and hopeless.

Here’s how the Center for Immigration Studies describes the enforcement of the 1986 law:

Enforcement of this measure, intended to turn off the magnet attracting illegals in the first place, was spotty at first and is now virtually nonexistent. Even when the law was passed, Congress pulled its punch by not requiring the development of a mechanism for employers to verify the legal status of new hires, forcing the system to fall back on a blizzard of easily forged paper documents.

And even under this flawed system, the INS was publicly slapped down when it did try to enforce the law. When the agency conducted raids during Georgia's Vidalia onion harvest in 1998, thousands of illegal aliens — knowingly hired by the farmers — abandoned the fields to avoid arrest. By the end of the week, both of the state's senators and three congressmen — Republicans and Democrats — had sent an outraged letter to Washington complaining that the INS "does not understand the needs of America's farmers," and that was the end of that.

So, the INS tried out a "kinder, gentler" means of enforcing the law, which fared no better. Rather than conduct raids on individual employers, Operation Vanguard in 1998-99 sought to identify illegal workers at all meatpacking plants in Nebraska through audits of personnel records. The INS then asked to interview those employees who appeared to be unauthorized — and the illegals ran off. The procedure was remarkably successful, and was meant to be repeated every two or three months until the plants were weaned from their dependence on illegal labor.

Local law-enforcement officials were very pleased with the results, but employers and politicians vociferously criticized the very idea of enforcing the immigration law. Gov. Mike Johanns organized a task force to oppose the operation; the meat packers and the ranchers hired former Gov. Ben Nelson to lobby on their behalf; and, in Washington, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.) (coauthor, with Tom Daschle, of the newest amnesty bill, S.2010) made it his mission in life to pressure the Justice Department to stop. They succeeded, the operation was ended, and the INS veteran who thought it up in the first place is now enjoying early retirement.

The INS got the message and developed a new interior-enforcement policy that gave up on trying to actually reassert control over immigration and focused almost entirely on the important, but narrow, issues of criminal aliens and smugglers. As INS policy director Robert Bach told the New York Times in a 2000 story appropriately entitled "I.N.S. Is Looking the Other Way as Illegal Immigrants Fill Jobs": "It is just the market at work, drawing people to jobs, and the INS has chosen to concentrate its actions on aliens who are a danger to the community." The result is clear — the San Diego Union-Tribune reported earlier this month that from 1992 to 2002, the number of companies fined for hiring illegal workers fell from 1,063 to 13. That's thirteen. In the whole country.

So when Will states that the problem was “weak enforcement and noncompliance”, he is only offering a superficial view of the problem. The law was sufficient…but the will of the government (executed by elected officials)…tempered by the economic concerns of important constituent groups and the politicians who needed their votes…didn’t exist for long, if at all.

What resulted was a confluence of competing interests that enabled the unbridled and unchecked flow of immigrants into the country. Republicans satisfied their corporate supporters and Democrats tallied the numbers of a rapidly expanding voting block. Keep in mind the relevant dates…from 1986 to 1992 we had a Republican in the White House and from 1992 through 2000, we had a Democratic president…all followed by the seven years of festering and fractional concerns that have plagued the Bush administration’s tenure. So if it wasn’t solely Republican or Democratic malfeasance that defined these years, what was it? Perhaps politicians of all flavors were savoring the perceived spoils?

The beauty of history is found in the limited degree to which it can be altered…though I realize efforts to flummox are attempted with rampant regularity. With that said, it is necessary to acknowledge that George Bush and his minions, cognizant of his years as the governor of Texas and the data from the elections in 2000 and 2004, thought that they could have their cake and eat it too. By all indications, they concluded that they could facilitate an already substantiated shift of Hispanics voters to the GOP. Given the Bush teams preoccupation with establishing generations of GOP dominance, should anyone be hesitant to conclude that they were salivating at the prospects that immigration reform might afford?

Step forward to 2006 and the obvious Democratic shift…especially in middle class Middle America and one can easily explain the divergent positions found primarily in the GOP, and to a lesser degree amongst Democrats…especially in labor laden districts and regions. Add in the unique considerations and perspectives found in Border States as well as an indeterminate amount of garden variety bigotry and one might well agree with Will that the immigration conundrum fits the premise that “compromise is the mother of complexity”…but when he concludes that complexity leads voters to expect “weak enforcement and noncompliance”, that simply provides politicians a ready made excuse for what they have already failed to do along with a rationale for the continuation of failure.

To be fair to Will, we agree that the public is coming “to the conclusion that the government cannot be trusted to mean what it says about immigration”. Beyond that we diverge as he goes on to suggest that the government should focus on “border control and on workplace enforcement” while treating “the problem of the [existing undocumented immigrants] 12 million with benign neglect”. I’m not sure if Will wants us to focus on the “benign” or the “neglect”…but it’s certainly a doozy of a double entendre.

I do understand Will’s rationale. He believes that any path to citizenship for the existing illegal immigrants would eventually afford them the benefits that come with citizenship and therefore tax entitlement programs at a time when we are approaching the retirement bubble of the baby boomer generation. By ignoring them, we avoid the potential cost considerations while still benefiting from the cheap labor they will continue to provide. With the borders sealed, we halt the continuing influx and, by law, the children of the existing illegal immigrants become citizens…time passes and the 12 million illegal immigrants die off without becoming a worsening financial burden.

Now I’ve heard of sweeping ones problems under a rug…but what Will is suggesting is that we sweep an entire generation under the rug…but not before we let them nanny our children, harvest our crops, clean our toilets, and contribute to our entitlement programs…without the prospect of ever participating in any of those benefits.

Hey, I haven’t trusted politicians for a number of years…but if George Will is suggesting that we entrust him and his ilk with resolving the complexities of this and other issues, then he, like the politicians he chastises (wink, wink), not only wants his cake and eat it too…he already has his eye upon the lowly cooks that will bake it. The one ingredient he lacks, and the one he clearly seeks through his tortured treatise, is for the rest of us Americans to turn our heads and close our eyes while he puts the proverbial squeeze upon what’s left of our commitment to dignity and decency.

If that’s the best America has to offer, I’m gonna have to pass on dessert. That’s one convoluted cake I can’t swallow. I keep thinking that our politicians and their emissaries will someday realize that the voting public, almost without fail, eventually sees through the charades that have become the staple of the political pabulum they ask us to ingest. Perhaps its time we serve them a heapin’ helpin’ of some good old fashioned humble pie?

Cross-posted at Thought Theater

You know how, when you get so discouraged and frustrated and down and you think nobody nowhere has any answers for what you're going through, and you're in a funk, and mad at the world, and ready to quit...and then something falls into your hands that says just the right thing...so right, that you think, Maybe there is a God.

When I wrote the essay about the death of Andrew Bacevich's son, and his quote that, what difference does it make to speak out if nothing changes--I was so deeply distressed over this endless war and the endless Congressional wrangling that I truly considered giving up altogether. 

It didn't seem as if my little blogs, either here or over at http://deaniemills.com, were making a damn bit of difference anywhere for anything, and I know a lot of you guys must have been feeling the same way.

But back on May 13th, (Mother's Day, ironically, and the day Mr. Bacevich lost his son), I had printed up an essay from the New York Times (part of its magazine, I think), called, "Writing in the Dark," by David Grossman.

Had printed it up, but hadn't read it.  I'd simply added it to the stack of stuff I'd printed up but hadn't read, until yesterday, when I realized how ridiculous the stack looked and how I'd best read the damn things or throw them out.

It may sound like a cliche to say that it was as if Mr. Grossman were writing to me and me alone, that a Jewish writer living in Israel could type down words that would touch the heart of a Marine mom in Texas and give her hope, but that is what happened--especially when I came to understand what had happened to Mr. Grossman.

As if living in a tiny country surrounded by enemies and enduring bombings and other daily nuttiness were not enough, Grossman's own son joined the Israeli army four years ago, and he said: "A sense of urgency and alarm washed over me, leaving me restless."

I had no problem understanding that.  He was talking about his writing, and how he wrote about things completely unrelated to what he was going through at the time, as much as a coping mechanism as anything else, and I could understand that, too, having done it myself for a very long time.

But when his son went to war, he found he could no longer do so.

(I wish I could hand this essay over to the next person who asks me  when my next book is coming out or what am I writing now?  So when I say, "I'm writing a political blog; I'm trying to help end the war," they wouldn't stare at me like goldfish gaping out of a round glass bowl, all bug-eyed and stunned.)

And then.

Israel went to war with Lebanon last summer.

And his beloved son Uri was killed.

"I can also tell you about the void that is growing ever so slowly between the individual human being and the external, violent, and chaotic situation within which he lives," Grossman wrote. 

"And this void never remains empty.  It is filled rapidly--with apathy, with cynicism and, more than anything else, with despair...Despair of the possibility of ever changing the prevailing state of affairs, of ever being redeemed from it.  And the despair that is deeper still--despair of what this distorted situation exposes, finally, in each and every one of us."

I took a pen and drew a circle around the word despair.

He went on to talk about how people withdraw from that despair by trying not to think about it, what he called, "the shrinking 'surface area' of the soul that comes in contact with the bloody and menacing world out there."

He says that when people go numb themselves, the language of those people grows shallower, becoming "a sequence of cliches and slogans...a collection of superstitions and crude generalizations."

Although he blames "the institutions" of the army and the government and mass media, he refers to them as "linguistic scoundrels and language rapists," on both sides of a given debate.

But when we write, he says, we re-take the language and make it our own, to "give me back the person I used to be, me, before my self became nationalized and confiscated by conflict, by governments and armies, by despair and tragedy."

And so, what is the point of it?  What difference does it make if we write, we bloggers, we out-speakers, we truth-tellers, we word-warriors?

"I write.  I give intimate private names to an external and foreign world.  In a sense, I make it mine.  In a sense, I return from feeling exiled and foreign to feeling at home.  By doing so, I am already making a small change in what appeared to me earlier as unchangeable."

And by so doing...by making "a small change" in what seems "unchangeable," Grossman says:

"We writers go through times of despair and times of self-devaluation.  Our work is in essence the work of deconstructing personality, of doing away with some of the most effective human-defense mechanisms.  We treat, voluntarily, the harshest, ugliest and rawest materials of the soul.  Our work leads us time and again to acknowledge our shortcomings, as both humans and artists."

This laying bare of the soul is something that I even have trouble explaining to my husband sometimes.  Call it internalizing, call it what you will, but the same gifts that make some of us good writers also make it hard for us to exist in the same world as everybody else--we feel everything as if it were our own burden.

I am a Marine mom, and whenever a soldier or Marine dies in Iraq, I grieve.  They are all my sons and daughters.  I can't step back and view this war as a political debate or a defense strategy or anything else other than a massive tragedy on a wholesale scale.

In some of the photographs taken by my son when he was deployed in the Anbar, they would be humping it for days, living off of MRE's and sleeping in abandoned buildings and houses.  There would be this room scattered about with sleeping bags, exhausted Marines spread-eagled as they fell...and my eye would be drawn to the walls, to the family pictures, to the pink curtains at the window, and my heart would ache for that Sunni woman who had lost her home to war.

It's just the way some of us are made.  We feel EVERY DAMN THING--there is no FILTER, no ESCAPE, and that makes the despair over this bill before Congress or that debate or whatever so wrenching to some of us.  So PERSONAL.

I wondered how Mr. Grossman could go on, wondered how he could write one more word, enduring as he is this terrible loss of his son.

He talked about it:

"And I write also about that which cannot be brought back.  And about that which is inconsolable...Many times every day, as I sit at my desk, I touch on grief and loss like one touching electricity with his bare hands, and yet I do not die."

In the final analysis, he writes, he says, because to do so is to engage our demons in hand-to-hand combat and wrestle them to the ground.

"In a sense, as soon as we lay our hand on the pen, or the computer keyboard, we already cease to be the helpless victims of whatever it was that enslaved and diminished us before we began to write.  Not the slaves of our predicament nor of our private anxieties; not of the 'official narrative' of our country, nor of fate itself."

It does truly seem sometimes, to those of us who "lay our hand on the computer keyboard," that we are sending our words out into the void, and that, as Mr. Bacevich despaired, "Our voices have been lost."

But Mr. Grossman says that we are making a small change in that which appeared unchangeable, and that if for no other reason, we do it for ourselves, so that we "cease to be helpless victims" even of fate itself.

I will change what I can, small though it may be.

I will not be a victim.

I will write.

Chopra concluded his good "piece on peace" of Huff Post with "there is room for cautious optimism"

I would posit that the ONLY path to lasting peace is to provide healthy early childhood education to all the world's youth -thus wresting it from the mind poison of ALL fundamentalist ideologies.

David Boulton's work found at www.childrenofthecode.org may be our best last chance?

Also I agree with Chopra that the internet may be an excellent global "peace-pipe" or should I say "peace-pipeline?"

Dr. Rick Lippin

Southampton,PA

http://medicalcrises.blogspot.com

The democratic majority in congress simply needs to send Bush a bill that funds the troops and sets up a timetable for withdrawal. This will force the Iraqi government to get their act together and also fulfill the wishes of the American people.

If Bush doesn't want to sign it that is his decision. Congress doesn't need a veto proof majority. They only need to create a piece of legislation that meets the requirements put forth by the voters and allocates the money to keep our troops supplied in their efforts. Send it to Bush this way and keep doing so until he signs it. Place the responsibility for funding the troops on Bush. That is where it belongs. Bush has created a foreign policy nightmare and this is the way for congress to assert itself to help change that. The democrats need to show some spine if they really expect to get elected in 2008. So far it isn't happening and the voters will react to that lack of spine negatively at the polls.

Let's assume the whole Iraq funding fight for Congress was just "political foreplay," as a "Democratic leadership source" told CNN on Tuesday (emphasis added throughout):

A senior Democratic senator said late last week the last-minute attempts by Democrats to get a withdrawal timeline was "political foreplay."

A Democratic leadership source told CNN some two months ago that Democratic leaders knew they would have to send the president a war funding bill without a timeline, and that would likely mean a bill with significant Democratic defections and GOP support.

The maneuvering over the past several weeks has been a Democratic attempt to show their anti-war base that party leaders were trying until the 11th hour to stand up to the president, the source said.

Okay, that's bad enough, but my question for blogland is, "Was Dailykos in on the political foreplay?" Because it's pretty damn disturbing that Dailykos was virtually mum on the cave in from May 15 to 21 while it was being put together.

Yes, in case many of you didn't know, Progressive Democrats of America found out about the deal on May 15 and shouted about it:

ACT NOW: CONTACT THE SENATE OVER IRAQ

May 15, 2007, Washington, DC

Your Senators will vote today on a plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. They will vote next week on the $95 billion war funding bill. ...

Next week, the Senate will vote on a new version of the supplemental war funding bill. We don't know the details yet, but it looks like the Senate will give the President $95 billion for the war without any fixed timeline for the withdrawal of our troops. Call your Senator today, and next week to tell them to vote against the supplemental war funding bill, which amounts to a blank check for Bush/Cheney!

Me, my little pip squeak voice (since I've been banned from dailykos (no reason, or check my diaries and comments and you tell me) it's even pipsqueakier), I was shouting as loud as I could about the PDA revelations (look at my diaries here, here, and here) but I was ignored of course. Obviously such would not have been the case if front pagers at kos had blogged repeatedly about this betrayal before it came down. Why didn't they?

So yeah, we've seen the whining outpour on May 21 and after by illustrious dailykossacks Meteor Blades, mcjoan, and devilstower, but what were they doing when it mattered? What were they doing -- from the time a reliable 'deal' rumor came down and up till the betrayal was finally hammered out -- to sway the powers that be by warning and rallying antiwarriors everywhere, speaking from the big megaphone dailykos site? A grand total of one post, by mcjoan, late Friday, May 18.

Time out for reassuring words from Greg Sargent, by way of mcjoan on May 18:

... the Dem leadership insists it's committed to not giving Bush a blank check, and it has consistently hung much tougher than anyone expected and has steadily defied expectations in the process.

Meteor Blades and devilstower wrote nothing May 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21 on the unconditional funding sell out. Mcjoan wrote nothing about impending Iraq capitulation on May 15, 16, 17, 19, and 20. Why not? Those three are supposed to be big time 'liberal' members of the dailykos frontpage. Don't tell me they probably weren't aware (not the 'stupid and incompetent' excuse again), or that such a deal -- in flux and still influence-able by us outsiders -- wasn't important. No, just tell me they were being good, cautious insider boys and girls. That rings most true, based on my experience there.

There are days I wish I wasn't a news junkie, and yesterday was one of them. I read several articles that, separately, were unsettling, but when strung together, like ellipses trailing off the end of an unfinished sentence, what wasn't said was more important than what was. And connecting these stories, just as stars are linked by invisible lines to form constellations, may point to signs that our messianic leader is turning the war in Iraq into a personal crusade to save his presidential legacy, with consequences almost biblical in scale.

The first news item reported Bush had authorized the CIA to use covert action to create "unrest" in Iran, using a plan "blessed" by Elliott Abrams, who was convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal and later pardoned by "Papa Bush," clearing the way for Abrams to work for “Baby Bush” as his deputy assistant and deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy, "one of the nation's most senior national security positions."

A former CIA official (friend of Abrams?) tried to down play the story, saying, "Vice President Cheney helped to lead the side favoring a military strike" against Iran, but thinks "they have come to the conclusion that a military strike has more downsides than upsides."

Oh, really? How does that square with nine US war ships in a "show of force" off the coast of Iran? Why was the last branch of America's military might Bush hasn't broken parading up the Staits of Hormaz in broad daylight, poking a stick in Iran's eye much the same way he stepped up air strikes in Iraq leading up to the war?

This “largest daytime assembly of ships since the 2003 Iraq war” sailed along the coast of Iran and set off a chain of calls to the state department wanting to know what the hell was going on, belying the Navy’s claim that the ships were conducting "exercises as part of a long-planned effort to reassure regional allies of U.S. commitment to Gulf security."

What kind of diplomatic "exercises" was Bush conducting by sending war ships out to intimidate a country suspected of trying to build nuclear weapons? How would Bush respond if Iran pulled up in front of Galveston, Texas, with nine war ships? I bet Sheriff Dubya wouldn't be in any mood to sit down for a little "chat" about hanging up his guns.

Meanwhile, Bush was strong-arming Iraq's prime minister to convince tribal leaders in joining U.S. forces in the fight against "foreign terrorists" through the formation of “salvation councils.” Which White House merry prankster is credited with spinning "death squads" into "salvation councils?" Rove?

As most of the violence in Iraq is "homegrown" and funded by smuggled Iraq oil, Maliki's call to action sounded more like a bone tossed out by Bush's propaganda machine to congressional lapdogs that need to go home to their disenchanted constituents with tails held high after passing a war funding bill without a timeline for troop withdrawal. The "benchmarks" placed in the bill may sound tough, but analysts say they are "toothless" and just the same conditions put out there for the Maliki government all along.

In short, the Democrats blinked, trading our troops' lives for a new minimum wage, Bush got his open-ended war and a blank check, and Maliki got benchmarks without consequences. It's just more of the same strategy we've seen since this war began.

Looks like Maliki’s government is getting a lesson from the White House of how to spin bad news into political propaganda.

Speaking of propaganda. In “Buying the War: Part Two,” Bill Bunch at the Daily News says the White House story that "Iran is secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces” is "the biggest load of crap."

But maybe it isn't "crap" that Bush is preparing for a "summer showdown" with Iran. Why else would he need a surge of troops in Iraq and a fleet of war ships in the Gulf? Has anyone checked into what the Air Force is doing these days? Is it stockpiling planes, munitions and pilots in Kuwait, Pakistan and Turkey – just in case they’re needed to back up “the surge” in Iraq?

Speculation that Bush has his own private “mission” is supported by his own comments in yesterday’s Coast Guard commencement address and again today in the Rose Garden, “America will not relent in the war against global terror. We will hunt the terrorists in every dark corner of the earth. … We will not permit terror networks or terror states to threaten or blackmail the world with weapons of mass destruction -- as we have shown in the battle of Iraq. … they are seeing our intentions: we will press on until this danger to our country and to the world is ended.”

So, apparently our show of force in Iran was NOT to reassure our allies but to show Iran Bush's determination to eliminate danger -- just as we did in Iraq -- worldwide.

This kind of reckless talk would be laughable, coming from a swaggering dime store cowboy in a B-grade movie, but this was the President of the United States. And he is speaking to a worldwide audience. Was his real purpose to scare the crap out of the 70 percent of Americans that disapprove of his leadership? Or to bully the heads of state in his "axis of evil?" This kind of talk is dangerous and makes our military look only slightly less terrifying than al-Qaeda to the people living in Iraq and the Middle East.

But Bush's hubris and reckless behavior doesn't stop there.

In the covert CIA action article, it cited a news story that ran on Iranian television claiming the U.S. was funding a terrorist group inside Iran, the Jundullah, whose members were caught smuggling $500,000 in cash into Iran from Pakistan. Could this cash be part of the $5.6 billion we tax payers forked out for Bush to give to Pakistan to fight "terrorism"?

In a speech to Congress on September 20, 2001, Bush said, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." Which terrorists, Mr. President, theirs or ours? I guess the answer depends on which part of the planet American’s boots are standing on.

And right now there are lots of American boots on the ground in Iraq. By September, it's estimated there will be more than 200,000 American troops deployed in Iraq, with several brigades very near the borders of Iran.

This story hits home for me, as my son is part of "the surge" stationed in the Diyala province where our troops are “taking the fight to the enemy.” He has been through hell the last 11 months, watching his friends blown up by IEDs the Army told him were likely provided by Iran. Or is this just more propaganda?

Miraculously, my son recently escaped death from an explosion this month, escalating our anxiety for him to come home. He was scheduled to re-deploy next month, but because of this so-called "surge," his unit will be in Iraq until October -- unless this president sufficiently provokes Iran into direct conflict this summer, thereby canceling all troop movements out of Iraq.

Presidential candidate John Edwards said on CNN yesterday, this president "has got to be stopped." And he’s right. Giving Bush the power to go to war was like giving the Flintstones cartoon character, Bam Bam, a huge club and turning him loose upon the world.

But how can he be stopped? The power vacuum we call “Congress” has shown us how ineffective it is at stopping this administration from ending the war in Iraq. This Democratic Congress has dropped its insistence on an Iraq withdrawal timeline; instead, its relying on the Iraq government to make or break our deal to keep troops there. So, if Congress can't even get our troops home, how is it going to stop Bush from escalating Iraq into a bigger, more lethal war with Iran?

Even the American people have lost their voice in this government. The recent exercise of democracy by We the People demonstrated our disapproval at the ballot box, sending a message to this president and Congress that appears to have gone unnoticed to the president and has been silenced in Congress.

So, what will happen should Iran or al-Qaeda take the bait and strike back at America with something bigger than an IED? The answer to that should make every American afraid, very, very afraid, because "Bush anointed himself as the insurer of constitutional government in case of an emergency.

That's right, folks. Should America experience a "catastrophic emergency" or “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government function” -- including "localized acts of nature -- Bush “shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.”

Bush will appoint himself America’s de facto king and keep himself in power as long as the “catastrophic emergency” keeps this country in a state of “disruption” perhaps even long past the expiration of his term.

Bush’s Iraq strategy seems to be that if you’ve made a mess and can’t clean it up, then you make an even BIGGER mess and convince everyone that someone else created it. Bush is going to start -- and believes he can win -- World War III, and he needs to have all the firepower of America’s military and the cooperation, if not the will, of the people to get the job done right -- this time.

Americans need to be afraid, be very, very afraid for this president believes his mission is to save the world.

No commentary from me, just a slideshow from the NYT.

Call it impeachment according to Palermo. Citing Italian social theorist, Antonio Gramsci, Joseph Palermo explains over at Huffington today why impeachment is necessary and why a Democratic victory in '08 is insufficient.  Gramsci's argument is that the dominant ideas of the ruling elite create a kind of "cultural hegemony" because they have so much weight behind them from the rich and powerful.

The Democrats in the Congress are making a fatal error by playing nice with Bush and his gang of bandits. They are sacrificing the long-term interests of the progressive movement for short-term electoral gain, (just like Clinton did in the 1990s). Our body politic must be cleansed with a long bath in hot sudsy water. And the only way to do so is to impeach Bush now! Start the water, and grab the soap!

Full article here.

More soon,

Ticia

I. At her testimony before the House Judiciary subcommittee, Monica Goodling said she "crossed the line" in using political criteria to hire professional, civil service lawyers at the de facto Bush Administration's Department of (In)Justice. To be clear folks, when she says "crossed the line" she actually means to say "broke the law."

II. Alberto Gonzales, whose initials are probably the only quality he has that resembles a qualified Attorney General, clearly tried to influence Goodling's testimony. Or else why would he turn a meeting with her into a session where he describes HIS recollection of the Great US Attorney Massacre in some detail and then asks how she remembers it? That is known as tampering with a witness. And that is illegal.

III. I'm so glad to hear House Republicans Dan Lungren and Tom Feeney praise Goodling for having shown why she was worthy of her DOJ job, and for making people "proud" of her service. She was worthy of her job at the Rove-Bush-Gonzales DOJ because she was willing to put politics ahead of public service and the law. Feeney is "proud" of somebody who willingly and knowingly broke the law while in the service of the American people in the Department of JUSTICE for crying out loud, to further Karl Rove's strategy of using voter suppression (his so-called "voter fraud" initiative) to cement a permanent Republican majority, by hook or (mostly) by crook.

IV. Goodling was hilariously underqualified for her job. That's not really her fault, but it shows again how loyalty and ideology trump any other qualification for this Administration.

Just when you thought things could not get any worse in Iraq, we get this bit of news from The Independent. The report states that farmers in Diwaniya (southern Iraq) have begun shifting from the cultivation of rice (which the area is known for) to the cultivation of poppies. According to the article, while cultivation is in its early stages, there is little the central government, U.S. or British forces can do because Diwaniya is controlled by "Shia militias and their surrogates in the security forces."

To continue reading, please click here.

Just a quick thought....

I am left wondering if GOP-mouth-piece Matt Drudge's posting of this story regarding a supposedly racist remark by a showy third party Texas Gubernatorial Candidate might be a weird attempt to provide a little cover for George Felix "Macaca" Allen.

Why else would this odd twist make the national radar?

Kinky Friedman has been singing, saying and writing rather politically incorrect stuff for years and years. Much of it is hysterically tongue-in-cheek or snarky commentary. (Anybody who is familiar with his work got the joke in question.) His candidacy is just another episode in the Kinky Show. (Then again, nobody predicted Jesse Ventura in MN, YIKES!)

If this is, in fact, some kind of hamhanded "they're racists too" attempt to blur the Macaca Affair, is Drudge so stupid as to think that the band leader of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys is the appropriate way to juxtapose the two?

Oy....

That is the proposal being put forth by the newly elected President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. The proposed union would consist of sixteen southern European, Middle Eastern and North African countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea: Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt, Lybia, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco. The union though primarily economic, would also involve member countries in discussions over controversial issues such as Turkey's EU membership, illegal immigration, counter-terrorism, energy security, the Israel-Palestinian conflict and would provide another forum where Israel and its Arab neighbors could participate together. Sarkozy has said that he wants the countries ringing the Mediterranean to form a council and hold regular summit meetings under a rotating presidency and envisions it as being a bridge between Europe and Muslim world.

To continue reading, please click here.

Six Things that trouble me:

1.I am sorry that that Republicans and many Democrats venerate their party more than their country. Blind faith in any political, or government system is rarely healthy.

2.It appears that President Bush and the Republican Politicians have almost succeeded in convincing the American People that war is a good thing. How sad it was that our President chose to use our 9/11 tragedy as a tool for instilling fear and hatred in the American people.

3.I am saddened by the political division which has fallen on America due to the years of Presidential and Republican arrogance, dishonesty and failure to adhere to Democratic standards of conduct from 2000-2006. The Republican Party has even effectively used God to denigrate those who do not follow their precepts; making God, the creator of the universe, nothing more than a political supporter of the Republican Party. It will take some time to restore the damage caused by the Republican Party in their reckless quest for power and control of America. The Republican Party, led by the President, tried to keep us afraid. They failed.

4. President Bush has sold the lie that we are free because we are strong. He is wrong. Greater freedom will manifest greater strength. We are strong because we are free! Our forefathers, the authors of our precious Constitution, knew the power of a free person, a free mind and a free country. I am saddened in the knowledge that most of America may agree with the President that we are too free. A terrible consequence of the President Bush leadership has been the popular notion that liberty and freedom can and should be pared in America for security sake. I pray America will not step into the “security” and “might makes right” mental trap. It is our freedom which secures us. There is no greater security.

5. I am dismayed by the ease in which Americans dismiss the validity and authority of our U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. This disregard is partially responsible for diminishment and partial dissolution of our personal rights and liberties under the Republican controlled Government between 2000 and 2007, via the “Patriot Act”, the “Detainee Bill” and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. (My goodness: When did we start calling America the “homeland”? That is what the Nazis called Germany).

The capitulation of the Democratic representatives in Congress and throughout State governments to the “McCarthy” like tactics of the Republicans, during that time, was very unfortunate and did not serve the best interest of the United States relative to the strength of our system of government which, until recently, was considered a cornerstone of liberty, personal rights and freedom throughout the world.

6. I am heartbroken over the profound change in what was once considered resolute characteristics of American nature. Although having struggled through two World Wars, a Korean conflict, Vietnam and several minor conflicts without resorting to the barbarian practice of torture, our President now has announced to the world that the United States will now torture those who fall into our custody.

Today, because of President Bush, our enemies are validated and within their own rights to do the same to our American soldiers. We are becoming like our enemy in order to defeat him. Where is the victory in this path? America is greater than this!

Six Things which assure me:

1. I find comfort and reassurance in the fact that our American Democracy has a historical resilience against occasional radical adherence, by our government, to social and political trends which tend to diminish the rights and liberties of it’s citizens. Those who practice “McCarthyism like” behavior among us usually last for a season and are eventually realized and vanquished from the pulpits given to them by the very democratic system they sought to defile. They are always overcome by sound reason of citizens and the resilience of the democratic spirit.

2. America is scarred with the history of those who would undermine our free society. The strength and purity of liberty itself either assimilates them or leaves them in the road of depravation they sought to bring to the rest of us. The freedom our Bill of Rights calls “unalienable” is the insult and a barrier to those who seek dominance and power over the citizens of our great Democratic experiment. Freedom sends them running even as an insect runs when exposed to light. The scars caused by those seeking freedom’s demise were once the wounds that taught us wisdom and patience in the face of our adversaries. Resolve is born this way. Today America is more resolve than it was yesterday. The Republican leadership has wounded our freedom, but America is overcoming and this long suffering has taught us well. Our sense of urgency to defend Liberty is great. Republican domination has seemingly awaken us. Perhaps we will one day thank them.

3. I can get in my car in North Carolina and head West to California and along the way, chances are, nobody will ask where I am going, or why I am going there. Wow. Only in America. Most countries of the world reserve the right to freedom of movement to the government only and those who have the permission of the government. I have seen this in so many instances in my travels throughout the world. I love my country for what it is, a Bastian of hope to the rest of the world longing to be free. As I have traveled in the world, I have often shared Americas virtues with those less fortunate who still, after 260 years, dream of living free as Americans live. I have told them that America really is the place they have heard about, where the streets are paved with something even more valuable than gold; Liberty and Freedom!

4. I am assured by my own and many other Democrat’s resolve to continue to fight the good fight of faith in what is right. We know the consequences of allowing the Constitution and Bill of Rights to be relegated to “reference documents” with no real authority. This is exactly where Russia is this day. A constitutional government ruled by one man who determines the utility of a constitution which was intended to secure the liberty of the Russian people. Clearly, President Bush and Vice President Cheney tried and failed to do the same. In November 2006 America was the clear victor. All of us, regardless of political affiliation. In 2008 America will further ensure that margin of safety against tyranny.

5. I am grateful that America is so very large in it’s scope and breath. The diversity we are made of is what makes us unique in the world. In fact, the whole world lives here and we call ourselves Americans, from here or there. The richness of having all the culture of the world here, makes us the perfect example to the world that hope and peace can reign among very different peoples. That we live together in peace and harmony is a testimony to democracy and freedom. Our differences, however obvious, always put behind us as we share a place under the same flag we all call our own, and a great country we all call our home. I really love this place. I really do.

 

About the Author

Marshall Adame served in the U.S. Marine Corps for 22 years as an Aviation Logistician and retired in 1991.

Marshall became an aviation management/logistics consultant in 1992.

He worked in the Kuwait recovery of 1992-93 and was the senior aviation logistics manager for Kaman Aerospace in their Egypt US Government Aviation assistance programs for four years. From 1998 until late 2002.

Marshall came to Iraq in 2003 where he was the U.S. Coalition Airport Director for Basrah International Airport.

Later he was VP for Aviation development with The Sandi Group Int’l in Iraq where he lived and worked in the “red Zone” of Baghdad. In 2005 Marshall was awarded a U.S. Department of State Diplomatic Appointment in Baghdad, Iraq where he served as a US Advisor for logistics to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.

Later in his Diplomatic assignment in Iraq, Marshall was promoted to Department of State Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT) where he was on the staff of the National Coordination Team (NCT) in Baghdad, Iraq.

Marshall returned to the States in August 2006 and became a Senior Analyst for a DoD contractor.

On April 6 2007, Marshall resigned his position to become a full time 2008 Democratic candidate for Congress for the 3rd District of NC.

Marshall and Becky Adame reside in Jacksonville, North Carolina where Becky is a 3rd grade teacher in a local Christian School.

Marshall and Becky have four children, Paul 37, Veronica 35, Billy 28 and Benjamin 26. They also have eleven grandchildren.

Billy and Benjamin are presently serving in the US Army and are both Iraq veterans. Billy was wounded in Battle about 20 miles North of Baghdad on July 2, 2006.

http://marshalladame4congress.com

The excerpt below is posted with the full knowledge and permission, even encouragement, of the author, who wants his essays to be read by as many people as possible.

Post a comment about this essay at The Hill’s Pundits Blog, and it may be read by your senators and congressman! From The Hill’s Pundits Blog:

The Gore Book: Sweeping Indictment, Rousing Challenge, Massive Best-seller

Brent Budowsky

The real presidential campaign begins now with the publication of Al Gore’s sweeping, passionate and uncompromising indictment of Bush, Bushism and American politics in the Bush era.

This book will be a massive and gigantic best-seller as Americans vote with their book-buying bucks. This book will have dramatic impact on the presidential campaign by setting the gold standard for what a Loyal Opposition should stand for…

Gore challenges the surrender of major media to false notions, unreason, misunderstanding and dishonesty that drove America to disastrous war.

Gore challenges the onslaught against the Bill of Rights and fundamental freedoms by an administration seeking to monopolize its power in ways reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984…

What is striking and powerful about Gore’s book is the sweeping and comprehensive indictment of Bush and the Bush years, and the passion, reason and intensity of his challenge…

Gore is saying that these are deadly serious times that demand highly serious leaders and that our democracy, too long put to shame by shallowness and deceit, must be reawakened by a people who say, “No more.”…

Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and to Bill Alexander, then-chief deputy whip of the House. He is a contributing editor to Fighting Dems News Service. He can be read on The Hill’s Pundits Blog and reached at brentbbi@webtv.net.

Click the title, above, to read more.

Carolyn Kay

MakeThemAccountable.com

The recent Pew survey of Muslims in America has the news media up in arms over what was said about suicide bombings. I personally think it’s a bunch of hot air, and let me explain why.

The problem everyone has seems to be that when asked if there were ever circumstances under which they would support suicide bombing in defense of Islam, 26% of Muslin youth said yes. Now all the talk shows are talking about this “problem” and how we can “fix it”.

Before I discuss the merits of the answer, I would like to talk about the question itself and the problems it poses. The real problem with this question is that it is loaded. It asks specifically about suicide bombings, a tactic associated with Islamic extremists, or as I will refer to them… them. This is specifically to contrast with our notion of acceptable versus unacceptable violence. In America, due to the phenomenon known as American exceptionalism (we’re better than them, what we do is moral, what they do is not, etc.) we assume that there is something fundamentally wrong when a suicide bombing happens, but ok when it is dropping bombs or launching missiles from afar. But the facts are that we have the most advanced and far reaching military strike capability of any nation in history. We can target anyone we want, anywhere on Earth, and attack them within an hour or so. From our Tomahawk cruise missile, to our aircraft carriers to our long range bombers, we have the ability to engage any target we deem necessary. In stark contrast to that, the people we are so afraid of have virtually no long range military strike capability except for suicide bombings.

Just to be clear I am not justifying them, but I am saying that they are no different from our way of killing people in that the intention and result is the same, even if the methodologies are not identical. So really what we are saying is that our way of violence is fine, and theirs is in some way immoral and to be feared more than ours. This is a laughable sentiment when you ask all the countries we have devastated which is worse. They will all say ours because the difference is between one isolated incident of violence or a sustained long-term campaign meant to cripple a nation.

Now what is my point here? Well if we want to be accurate the question should have been are there any circumstances under which you would support the use of violence to defend Islam? Now I don’t know what the answer would have been from Muslims, but I do know that it probably would not be much different from the answers you would receive from Americans (remember, if you will, how many supported our use of force in Iraq and they hadn’t done anything to us) or Jews, of whom I am one, and many of whom support Israel’s use of violence against Palestinians and the use of suicide bombings by Jews in their attempt to get the state of Israel. Indeed there has been much violence in the name of Jesus, and even Hindus engage in violence and sometimes suicide bombings in India and Pakistan. So really the answer you get is not so different among different demographic groups. Everyone thinks its ok when they do it.

The fact of the matter is that it is only because they are doing the suicide bombings that we are afraid and think it’s a problem very different from our violence. But it isn’t. It’s exactly the same. We believe in violence, at least as a culture, so why are we so surprised when another culture believes they have the right to do the same thing?

So to get back to the point, the real problem here isn’t the answer, it’s the question. The answer really needs very little analysis if we simply replace the words suicide bombing with the word violence because fundamentally what this is about is us being better than them and our violence being better and more acceptable than their violence. That is wrong, and indicative of the bravado and arrogance that have defined us these past few decades and especially during the Bush administration. We are the same; our violence is the same, and to pretend anything else is simply foolish.

"Georgie" and his cohorts have taken the reputation of the United States of America to a new low:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070523/ap_on_re_eu/britain_human_rights

Dick "The Monster" Cheney and Donald "Kill 'em ALL" Rumsfeld, by pushing their neo-con agenda and abusing executive branch power to the breaking point, have not only perverted our constitution... They have taken our reputation around the world to the deepest pit of shame.

Impeachment is too good for them! Hell is too good for them!

A long long time ago, before W became president, the right wing used to advance the idea of a meritocracy.

Since Bush became president in 2001, this term has gone away.

I wonder why?

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

"NEW LONDON, Connecticut (CNN) -- President Bush is expected to use declassified intelligence about Osama bin Laden to defend his Iraq war policy during a commencement address Wednesday.

...

The president ... is expected to mention in the speech declassified intelligence that says bin Laden planned in 2005 to use Iraq as a base from which to launch attacks in the United States, according to White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

...

The speech will be aimed at defending a key part of the president's war strategy -- the contention that the United States cannot withdraw from Iraq because al Qaeda would fill the vacuum in the Middle East.

"This shows why we believe al Qaeda wants to use Iraq as a safe haven," said Johndroe. He added the president will talk about al Qaeda's "strong interest in using Iraq as a safe haven to plot and plan attacks on the United States and other countries."

..."

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

Let me get this straight. Bush hoodwinks the Country into his personal war in Iraq, as a supposedly proactive component of the War on Terror. And because Mr. Bush didn't bother to develop an exit strategy prior to starting the war, we now can never exit since the chaotic vaccuum would be filled by terrorists if we did.

Or:

"We're going there to prevent terrorist attacks.

Oops.

We're staying there to prevent terrorist attacks."

What's wrong with this picture?

"What good does it do to speak out if nothing changes? Our voices have been lost."

Those words are made all the more wrenching by the fact that they were spoken in tears by retired officer Andrew Bacevich, Vietnam vet, graduate of West Point, freqent and outspoken critic of the Iraq War, on the death of his beloved son, Andrew, a 1st Lt. killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq on Mother's Day.

The interview was done on NPR's "Morning Show" yesterday. (I had trouble downloading the audio and so am quoting from memory, but the words, "Our voices have been lost," were burned into my brain.)

I could identify quite powerfully with Mr. Bacevich, who now teaches at Boston University. For one thing, his family has a long and proud tradition of military service, as does mine. He is a combat vet who has spoken out against this war from the beginning, and while I'm not a vet, I'm in a family surrounded by them, and I, too, spoke out even when it caused problems within my own family--even my own marriage. And yet, his son went to that same war, as did mine.

I understood exactly what Mr. Bacevich meant when he mentioned that he never did "burden" his son with his views on the war while he was in uniform and especially while deployed, because "he had enough on his mind." I am quite sure that his son was just as aware as mine on how his dad felt, but they respected one another deeply, as do my son and I.

When these guys are deployed, they don't need to hear about how badly the war is going--they can see it up-close and personal. They don't want to hear how badly the administration is handling strategy and tactics--they deal with it every day. As my son said once from a quick sat-phone call home from the Anbar, "We're fighting an unconventional war with conventional tactics and it's not working."

When they call home, they're under unimaginable stress and are so exhausted they can hardly speak, frustrated and angry and depressed, and all they want to hear is how their old dog is doing, how the family is, whether the bluebonnets are yet in bloom.

It is a terrible, awful feeling to hate this war and to love our warriors who go fight it.

We are wracked each and every day by the same terrors and anxieties as those who support the war, but we can't comfort ourselves with the platitudes that our loved ones are fighting for our freedom, or "fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here"--because we just don't believe it.

Our deepest, most profound fear is that we will lose our loved one for a wasted cause.

And it happened to Andrew Bacevich. I am devastated for him and for his family, and his words haunt me.

Yesterday, the San Francisco Gate ran a story I have yet to see on mainstream media:

The Bush administration is quietly on track to nearly double the number of combat troops in Iraq this year, an analysis of Pentagon deployment orders showed Monday.

The little-noticed second surge, designed to reinforce U.S. troops in Iraq, is being executed by sending more combat brigades and extending tours of duty for troops already there.

The actions could boost the number of combat soldiers from 52,500 in early January to as many as 98,000 by the end of this year if the Pentagon overlaps arriving and departing combat brigades.

Separately, when additional support troops are included in this second troop increase, the total number of U.S. troops inIraq could increase from 162,000 now to more than 200,000--a record high number by the end of this year.

The Army spokesman acted as if this were no big deal, just an overlap of troops, like how my son's unit would remain in-country for two weeks or so after the replacement unit arrived in order to break the new guys in and show them what their biggest problems were likely to be.

It is, of course, another smooth lie. Yes, there will be overlaps, but if those "overlaps" go on for months; if the in-place troops have their tours extended for months longer after the new guys have arrived, then you've got an escalation.

I got the impression from the Army guy's comments that he believes we are finally sending the troops to this war that were needed from the beginning and basically, finally fighting it the way it SHOULD be fought.

That's all well and good, maybe, four years ago.

But it's too late, now. Stand in the middle of a fire ant bed and try to stomp out all the ants. When you are stung nearly to death, call over some friends and see if they can help you. You can kill a lot of ants, but you will not destroy that ant bed.

Congress seems so incapable of working around a deaf, dumb, and blind commander-in-chief that my active-duty son has actually said he's so frustrated at all the Congressional arguing accomplishing nothing that he's beginning to understand those people who wanted to move to another country when Bush was elected.

I get really angry at those on the left who assume that all the troops support this war. THEY DON'T. More and more of them WANT IT TO END, and they are counting on us--civilians, and Congress--to do what their commander-in-chief and generals won't do.

Because if we don't, more of them are going to die, and nobody knows that better than those in the military and their famiies.

Just ask Andrew Bacevich.

My son's own Marine Corps unit was promised that they would not have to return for a FOURTH deployment, but that promise was broken and now they're scheduled to deploy on the same day that Dustin is due to get out of the Marines. We have no way of knowing if they will actually LET HIM GO or not. After all, he's a combat-hardened NCO and those are increasingly becoming in shorter and shorter supply.

In the meantime, his buddies, and the sons of my friends, are facing another tour in hell. And there is not a damn thing they can do about it if they don't want to go to jail.

Bush is bound and determined to maintain the current so-called "strategy" until he leaves office, and he does not care how many more men and women are massacred over there.

We speak out, our voices grow to a thundering chorus, we exercise our power to make change at the ballot box and bring in those we have entrusted to end this war...and nothing changes.

I'm looking for hope. I'm DESPERATE for hope.

If any of you think there is any, I'd like to hear it.

We'd ALL like to hear it.

An excerpt of the Congressional Daily Record from May 10, 2007 provided as errata a current topic posted by Congressman Adam Schiff at TPM Cafe, titled: "Pulling the Plug on Warrantless Eavesdropping of Americans"

Representatives Adam Schiff's and Jeff Flake's comments at the introduction of their jointly sponsored amendment, H. AMDT. 182, for H.R. 2082: Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, which was Introduced and Approved May 10, 2007. Representatative Wilson's (NM) dissent, which occured between the statements made by Wilson and Flake is also published.here

Data Source: The Congressional daily Record May 10, 2007; Pages H490-H4905; Government Printing Office DocID:cr10my07pt2-22

 

|--begin Congressional Record excerpt--|

Amendment No. 10 Offered by Mr. Schiff

The Chairman: It is now in order to consider amendment No. 10 printed in House Report 110-144.

Mr. Schiff: Madam Chairman, I offer an amendment.

The Chairman: The Clerk will designate the amendment.

The text of the amendment is as follows:

Amendment No. 10 offered by Mr. Schiff:

At the end of subtitle A of title V (page 48, after line 5), add the following new section:

SEC. 503. REITERATION OF THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT OF 1978 AS THE EXCLUSIVE MEANS BY WHICH ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE MAY BE CONDUCTED FOR GATHERING FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE INFORMATION.

(a) Exclusive Means.--Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.) shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance may be conducted for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence information.

(b) Specific Authorization Required for Exception.-- Subsection (a) shall apply until specific statutory authorization for electronic surveillance, other than as an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq.), is enacted. Such specific statutory authorization shall be the only exception to subsection (a).

(c) Definitions.--In this section:

(1) Electronic surveillance.--The term "electronic surveillance" has the meaning given the term in section 101(f) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1801(f)).

(2) Foreign intelligence information.--The term "foreign intelligence information" has the meaning given the term in section 101(e) of such Act (50 U.S.C. 1801(e)).

The Chairman: Pursuant to House Resolution 388, the gentleman from California (Mr. Schiff) and a Member opposed each will control 5 minutes.

The Chair recognizes the gentleman from California.

Mr. Schiff: Madam Chair, I yield myself 3 minutes.

Madam Chair, today I offer an amendment with my Republican colleague Jeff Flake from Arizona that would respond to the President's unilateral assertion of power with regard to the electronic surveillance of Americans on U.S. soil and reassert that our existing statutes govern the operation of such surveillance.

Madam Chair, the Federal Government has a duty to pursue al Qaeda and other enemies of the United States with all available tools, including the use of electronic surveillance, to thwart future attacks on the United States and to destroy the enemy.

While the President possesses the inherent authority to engage in electronic surveillance of the enemy outside the country, Congress possesses the authority to regulate such surveillance within the United States.

When Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it intended for this statute to provide the sole authority for surveillance of Americans on American soil for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence information. Our amendment reiterates this important principle.

The President has argued that the authorization for the use of military force provided him with the authority to engage in warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans.

It is hard to believe that any of us contemplated, when we voted to authorize the use of force to root out the terrorists who attacked us on September 11, that we were also voting to nullify FISA. Our amendment makes clear that in the absence of explicit statutory authority, FISA is the exclusive authority for the conduct of domestic electronic surveillance of Americans. While the administration appears to have finally agreed that electronic surveillance occurring as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP, should cease to operate without the approval of the FISA court, the administration has not conceded that it cannot conduct such electronic surveillance of Americans unilaterally outside of FISA with no judicial oversight either now or in the future.

While we have been told that surveillance in this program was limited to phone calls where one of the parties is outside of the United States, there appears to be no limiting principle to the Executive's claim of authority provided by the military force resolution. In fact, when we questioned the Attorney General on this point in the last session, he would not rule out the proposition that the Executive has the authority to wiretap purely domestic calls between two Americans without seeking a warrant.

No one in Congress would deny the need to tap certain calls under court order, but if the government can tap purely domestic phone calls between Americans without court approval, there is no limit to executive power. Congress cannot be silent in the face of this assertion of authority.

In working to meet the real national security needs of the country, we must also ensure that Congress does not abdicate its responsibility to ensure that fundamental liberties are not compromised. Absent congressional action, law-abiding U.S. citizens may continue to have reasonable fear of being the subject of extra-judicial surveillance.

Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mrs. Wilson of New Mexico: Madam Chairman, I rise to claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

The Chairman: The gentlewoman is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mrs. Wilson of New Mexico: Madam Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

When the President acknowledged the existence of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, he claimed the inherent authority, under article II of the Constitution, as the Commander in Chief to be able to conduct that surveillance. Now, whether you agree or don't agree with his interpretation of the Constitution, this amendment, and a bill with this amendment in it, does not change the Constitution.

I will admit to the gentleman from California I personally believe that the legal arguments that were presented in favor of the Terrorist Surveillance Program were not strong. They weren't strong at all. And that is why I demanded more rigorous oversight to the program and proposed legislation to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act so that we can listen to our enemies and protect the civil liberties of Americans.

The sad thing is that the bipartisan leadership of this body, Democrat and Republican, knew for 5 years this program was going on and did nothing to update the laws or even propose that perhaps this was wrong to do this this way. They remained silent. The failure is in the Congress.

We now know that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as it is currently written, is not getting us critical information about our enemies and also, frankly, not protecting the civil liberties of Americans. It is broken and not working.

The Director of National Intelligence testified last week in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, saying that we are missing important information because this law is trapped in 1970s technology.

In January of this year, the Attorney General wrote to the Congress and said that we now have innovative orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. By "innovative" what he really meant is that we are on very fragile legal ground. I describe it as putting a twin-size sheet on a king-size bed, and everybody on the Intelligence Committee knows exactly what I mean. We have one judge, in a nonadversarial proceeding, in secret session, who has approved some innovative orders. He is way out on a legal limb. So what will the next judge do? And after this amendment passes saying, by golly, we are determined to stay in the 1970s, the Congress is happy with a 1970s law governing 1970s technology, what is the next judge going to do? And how does that compromise our national security? We have a problem.

In 1978 almost all local communications went over a wire and almost all long-haul communications went over the air. The statute sets up different regimes for what to do for over-the-wire communications that you need a warrant for to collect foreign intelligence information. Over the air the sky is the limit. We now, in the 21st century, have things completely reversed. Now almost all local calls are over the air. 230 million Americans have cell phones, and yet almost all long- distance calls are over wires. The information that we critically need is on the wires.

This law is outdated, and we are stuck with our heads in the sand in 1970s law. And your amendment insists that we stay there.

I will oppose this amendment and urge my colleagues to do the same.

Madam Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Schiff: Madam Chairman, as my colleague from California (Ms. Harman) points out, FISA has been amended 12 times, and, moreover, we have proposed to amend FISA to modernize it at present, and Mr. Flake and I propose to amend it as well.

The argument of my colleague seems to be that FISA needs to be amended,it hasn't been amended yet; so we should allow the President to simply ignore it. That, I submit, is not constitutional and not desirable.

Madam Chairman, I yield 1½ minutes to my colleague from Arizona (Mr. Flake).

Mr. Flake: Madam Chairman, I thank Mr. Schiff for yielding, and I appreciate working with him on this important amendment and on this issue for a long time.

Madam Chairman, this amendment would reiterate that FISA is the exclusive means by which domestic electronic surveillance can be conducted for the purpose of gathering foreign intelligence information.

As has been stated before, we have, on the Judiciary Committee, for years been asking the administration what can we not do within FISA, do we need to change FISA in order to be able to conduct surveillance we need within FISA. We have never been given compelling information or evidence why we can't do what we need to do within FISA. As Mr. Schiff mentioned, if we do need to change FISA to update it again, as it has been changed and updated multiple times, then we should do it. However, we simply can't say FISA is insufficient; so go around it, and we don't want to know what goes on outside of it. Go ahead with the Terrorist Surveillance Program. We will have no congressional oversight. That is simply unacceptable. If we do need to change FISA, if we do need to modernize it, let's modernize it again, again, and again. But let's make sure that Congress maintains its prerogative to regulate the surveillance that goes on to make sure that it is done with civil liberties in mind. That is what this amendment seeks to do, and I am pleased to work with Mr. Schiff on it.

|--end Congressiopnal Record excerpt--|

I know people here are too sophisticated for this stuff, but, dammit, I'm not!

After tonight, I gain two hours back a week. On Idol, we cheer on Jordin as she wins America's Most Coveted Title. And on LOST, hopefully they'll tell us *something* about what the hell's happening on that island.

Two hours...I guess I can start watching all those movies I keep saying I'm going to watch.

I'm a Californian. At issue is a 2002 California law requiring automakers to cut emissions by 25 percent from cars and light trucks and 18 percent from sport utility vehicles starting with the 2009 model year. California officials estimate this would lead to an 18 percent reduction in global-warming emissions from cars here in my state by 2020.

But the law can't take effect unless California gets a federal waiver. Pressuring the Bush administration yesterday to allow us and 11 other states to impose our own regulations on vehicle emissions, State Attorney General Brown appealed to the Environmental Protection Agency for a waiver so California can impose rules on car and truck emissions more stringent than federal regulations.

 Brown told the Senate panel Tuesday, "This is bigger than Iraq. It is bigger than immigration. It's not tomorrow but it's coming around. The stakes have never been higher."  He said that California is prepared to sue the EPA if the waiver is blocked. "This is a worldwide crisis," Brown said. "There's no excuse any longer."

More soon,

Ticia

 

 

Who would ever think that Bush's Job Approval on Rasmussen would be "beautiful"? Before May, his lowest average monthly score in that ever so biased poll was 39 points. So far, in May, he has only once scored as high as 39 and today his score is yet another new low, 33.

A score of 33 is below is lowest average monthly score ever on all polls. If we keep in mind that Rasmussen is not becoming less biased, Bush's job approval in all polls (something we cannot check until the end of the month because they are published irregularly) is taking a severe hit right now. James Comey's testimony is the likely reason. Bush is losing the Republican base.

Here's an article from the Stanford Magazine that includes a bit of background on Zimbardo and an interview with him. Since he's been mentioned a time or two around these parts, I thought it might be of interest.

In a new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House), Zimbardo makes the case that “bad apples” aren’t to blame for evils at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere: he argues that extreme situations and the systems that create them—“bad barrels”—lead ordinary people to behave in horrid ways.

On March 7, roughly coinciding with his golden teaching anniversary and the publication of the book, the psychology professor gave a farewell Stanford lecture. In the packed auditorium, the veteran showman’s presentation combined psychological research with real-world politics, leavened a heavy message with personal history and popular culture, and elicited both despair and optimism about human nature. The centerpiece: a series of snapshots from Abu Ghraib.

It’s easy to loathe the soldiers gloating over their atrocities—Zimbardo calls the photos “trophy shots,” likening them to fishermen’s poses with their big catch. But when Zimbardo describes the hellish, decrepit prison—in which the guards lived in conditions little better than those for the inmates—the soldiers’ actions gain new context. Under frequent attack by mortar fire, enveloped in desert heat and urine stench, the guards worked 12-hour shifts for weeks without respite, with insistent but vague orders to “soften up” for interrogation their prisoners of war.

 Amazon reviews of the book here.

On May 21 a Qassam rocket fired from Gaza killed a 35-year old Israeli woman in Sderot. No doubt, this will mean a further escalation in Israeli fire into the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that this seems unlikely to stop or deter the Qassam fire.

These events are exposing the yawning gulf of leadership on all sides. Israel, rudderless under Ehud Olmert, vacillates between a silent response to Qassam fire while maintaining the economic blockade that fuels misery and rage in Gaza, and military responses that are targeting areas far from where the rockets are being fired. Meanwhile, Olmert speaks vaguely of “political horizons”olmertperetzinsderot424_0.jpg and the preconditions the Palestinians must meet before he would even engage in talks (preconditions such as forgoing the issues of the refugees, the Temple Mount and the 1967 borders).

But the leadership vacuum among the Palestinians has been demonstrated even more starkly. Commentators often used to say that it was crucial to strike a deal with Yasir Arafat because, like him or not, he was the only one that could possibly make a deal stick. Indeed, since his death what little organization there was to both the PLO and the Palestinian Authority has frayed or even shattered. This has been due in significant measure to the occupation, yes, but also to Fatah’s mismanagement and corruption, increasing sectarianism both within and between Palestinian factions and the submergence of government behind family and local affiliation in importance.

Ironically, it has been the fact that Israel has resumed its shelling of Gaza that has diminished the infighting there, something both the Hamas political leadership and PA President Mahmoud Abbas had tried and failed to do. Despite the Mecca Agreement brokered by Saudi Arabia in March, the Palestinian government has been anything but unified.

Hamas continues to defend its turf as the legitimately elected governing party. They’re quite right, of course, in that they have had to defend what was rightfully won by a clean election. Nonetheless, their own rigidity and inexperience have made governance difficult. Their refusal to recognize Israel leaves them with no plan or vision as to how improve conditions for the Palestinian people, much less end the occupation. In this, they have abdicated their authority to Abbas, with the sole caveat being a referendum on any agreement struck. The divisions in Hamas’ own leadership between factions in Gaza, the West Bank and outside the Palestinian Territories entirely confuse decision-making and lead to, if not contradictory statements then certainly a wide variety of tones and implications.

Hamas has fallen prey to many different conditions. One is surely their own lack of experience in leadership and governance. Another (and in fairness, this is certainly the biggest factor) is the global boycott that has clamped down on the Occupied Territories since their election. But yet another is Hamas’ inability to transition from a revolutionary fighting force to a governing political one.

This is terribly evidenced in the cease-fire brokered with Israel in November. Since that time, Qassam fire has been quite steady from Gaza. True, the Israeli economic blockade in Gaza as well as ongoing operations in the West Bank have aggravated the situation. But the terms of the cease-fire didn’t include those things. One might argue that the PA should not have agreed to those terms. I certainly think they should not have. But the fact is, they did. And Qassams continued despite it, and despite the fact that Israel, for the most part, held up its end.

Hamas didn’t directly violate the cease-fire, at least not at the level of the political leadership; other groups did. But Hamas made no attempt to enforce the cease-fire and stop the Qassams. This is where the dearth of leadership comes in, and it undermines any further attempts at diplomacy.

For example, we now hear from the PA leadership that they can stop the Qassams if Israel agrees to a “quiet” in the West Bank as well as Gaza. The logic does make sense–a general cessation of Israeli operations would be something the various Palestinian factions would see as sufficient victory to suspend the rocket attacks. But from the Israeli point of view, why would they believe the Palestinians now, when the same promise offered for a quiet in Gaza was broken immediately and consistently? Even if Israel’s leadership was willing to give it a go, the populace, enflamed by the constant shelling of the Western Negev and even more angry in the wake of this week’s fatality there, would be up in arms. The Olmert government is enjoying a respite from the unrelenting criticism in the wake of the Winograd report, condemning the leadership’s failures last summer in Lebanon. Any hint of agreeing to a cease-fire offer like this one would reverse that respite immediately.

Fatah’s failure to govern, which grew much worse after the death of Arafat, cost them control of the Palestinian Legislative Council. Hamas’ failure to govern is becoming more and more apparent. The inability of the two factions to work together, greatly aggravated by the United States’ active and visible military support for Fatah, has produced a deadlock which renders any possibility of substantive negotiations toward a resolution of this conflict hopeless.

The Arab League recognized this when they resuscitated the dormant 2002 Beirut Peace Plan. That plan makes a clear statement of Palestinian demands and offers the basis to begin negotiations–it juxtaposes what Palestinians want with what Israel has, frames the conversation and gives Israel a basis for a counter-offer. The Arab League never intended, nor will it allow the offer to become, a means to allow Israel to negotiate these issues with anyone other than the Palestinians. What it did was to offer what would be an Arab consensus which could allow for brokered talks, whether bi-lateral or involving multiple parties, to take place between Israel and the Palestinians.

That needs to be followed up on. More than that, it needs to be replicated on the other side. Although things are very different on the Israeli side, the nature of Israeli coalition politics has always dictated that small group, including fanatical ones, have disproportionate power. The strangest bedfellows are made in Israeli coalitions. One need only recall the deep dependence the elitist, Ashkenazi Labor party under Ehud Barak had on the religious, working class, Sephardi Shas party only a few years ago to see this. There are legions of such examples in Israeli political history.

Very powerful leaders can sometimes take the reins of government and steer it in spite of the political pressures. Yitzhak Rabin was one example of this. Yet even Rabin, who led an Israel still smarting from being hit by Iraqi missiles and angry over the first Palestinian intifada to the Oslo accords and, from all accounts, very close to peace with Syria, had to mollify the right with the massive increase in settlements which would eventually undermine the very process Rabin sought to pursue.

In a different way, Ariel Sharon was also such a powerful leader, yet even he had to bolt the party that he defined as much as any Israeli figure in history to do so. This is simply the reality of the Israeli political system. It works against the Right at times as well–Benjamin Netanyahu was unable to escape the Oslo Accords as he had promised on his campaign trail. In general, major turning points in Israeli history have been the result of outside actors in wars or of a dynamic process where Israel worked in concert with the US and its interlocutors (such as at Camp David I and the completion of the Jordanian peace treaty).

There is no hope that the failed Olmert government could possibly be capable of the leadership required to act substantively on the Arab League overtures. As a sovereign state, and given its own fierce sense of independence, Israel would never, of course, be willing to see any country, even the US, speak for it in any way. Still, direct US involvement, in conjunction with the European Union, is needed. This would need to take a similar form as it did with Carter at Camp David, with Clinton when he came up with the Clinton Parameters to bridge the two sides and bring them “closer than ever to an agreement” at Taba, or the Madrid Peace Conference of 1991.

That configuration both pushes Israel into a diplomatic posture and gives its political leadership more leeway domestically. Israelis understand very well that Israel must cooperate with a broad international consensus when that consensus is exerting real pressure, and this allows an Israeli leader, even one as weak as Olmert, to act in pursuit of peace when he could not do so on his own.

The days of waiting for Israelis and Palestinians to find solutions themselves are over. That kind of bilateralism is simply not realistic under today’s conditions. Some day, should truly capable leaders emerge on both sides who could accomplish something significant, the idea might be revisited. But in the here and now, people are dying and despair is the overarching mood of the day. Meanwhile, neither Israel nor the Palestinians have the kind of leaders needed for progress, nor are any on the horizon. The US doesn’t either, obviously, but the opportunity for progress is here nonetheless. The consequences of missing it will include a third intifada, likely to be bloodier than the last, as well as the real potential for more war beyond the borders of Israel and the Occupied Territories. If that comes, let no one say it was unavoidable.

Junkie Rush attacked the “elites” again today. But why??

Tell me Junkie Rush, when the state government came after you for your illegal drug use, did you take a public defender, or an “elite” defense attorney?

Tell me Junkie Rush, when you want to shelter your huge salary, do you take any tax attorney, or do you employ an “elite” attorney.?

Junkie Rush, your entire life depends and/or revolves around elites.

Grow up and tell the truth.

But then, that would put you in a special elite group. Is that why you lie so much?

Rudy's claim to fame is that he can coordinate the clean up after a devastating terrorist attack.

Is this what we want in a president? The ability to clean up after an attack?

Not me

Bush failed to act when warned on 8-6-2001. Do we want more of this?

According to TPM Muckraker, Bush's Monica (Monica Goodling), said, while sobbing:

"All I ever wanted to do was serve this President and this administration and this department,"

Too bad that Bush's Monica never thought that she was employed to serve the country.

This explains so many Bush and right wing scandals.

The people involved, who were given positions of great importance, responsibility, and power, forgot their primary job was to serve the best interests of my beloved republic, the United States of America.

Dear Mr. Kerrey,

Saddam didn't comply with the U.N. because he didn't want Iran to know he had no weapons. Bluff, I believe it's called.

And, if Saddam was not a risk to us before 9/11, and he had nothing to do with 9/11, then, using logic, he could not have been more of a risk to us after 9/11.

And, "the terrorists" are a very small part of what's going on in Iraq. It is a civil war.

Thank you for your time.

May 20th was Cambodia's Memorial Day for the Khmer Rouge genocide. 

Pol Pot declared 'Year Zero' when Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. He immediately directed a ruthless program to "purify" Cambodian society of capitalism, Western culture, religion and all foreign influences. He wanted to create Cambodia into an isolated and totally self-sufficient Maoist agrarian state. Anyone who opposed were killed.

Foreigners were expelled, embassies closed, and the currency abolished. Markets, schools, newspapers, religious practices and private property were forbidden.

Members of the Lon Nol government, public servants, police, military officers, teachers, ethnic Vietnamese, Christian clergy, Muslim leaders, members of the Cham Muslim minority, members of the middle-class and the educated were identified and executed.

The country's entire population was forced to relocate to the agricultural labor camps, the so-called "killing fields". Inmates lived in primitive conditions. Families were separated. Buddhist monks were not allowed to practice their religion and were forced into labor brigades. Former city residents were subjected to unending political indoctrination and brainwashing. Children were encouraged to spy on adults, including their parents.

An estimated 1.5 - 3 million worked or starved to death, died of disease or exposure, or were executed for committing crimes. Crimes punishable by death include not working hard enough, complaining about living conditions, collecting or stealing food for personal consumption, wearing jewelry, engaging in sexual relations, grieving over the loss of relatives or friends and expressing religious sentiments.

Vann Nath is one of three living survivors of Tuol Sleng.  There were only seven known survivors to begin with, out of the 15 to 20 thousand who were imprisoned there.  He is in his 60s now and suffering from kidney disease.  Will he live to see a functioning war crimes tribunal bring the surviving perpetrators to justice?

Here's to hoping.

What's with the preponderance of Daddy Issues on TV these days? On 24, Jack's Dad, Philip Bauer, is the Bad Guy. On Lost, there's been a rash of Daddy killings, including Locke and Ben this season, in addition to the conflicts we already knew (Jack, Kate...).

Of course, Father issues have long been part of story-telling, from Oedipus to Darth Vader. And, also of course, in real-life, we have a President who may be playing out his Daddy issues on a global scale.

I just wonder if this is the normal ebb-and-flow of TV story-telling, or is there something the teevee is telling us here?

 

 

Josh Marshall: "If you're interested in reading a good run-down of the Republican party's deeply immoral campaign to suppress minority voter turnout with bogus 'vote fraud' allegations, read Richard Hasen's article from Friday in Slate. All the key points, the phony American Center for Voting Rights, the front group to spread the bogus stories, the inherently ridiculousness of the claims of vote fraud, the ringleader of the scams Mark "Thor" Hearne. All the crap. It's really enough to make you sick."

In "The Fraudulent Fraud Squad - The incredible, disappearing American Center for Voting Rights", Hasen gives a lot of credit to Brad Friedman of The Brad Blog for covering the American Center for Voting Rights story from its inception in early 2005.

I took a look at the 2005 990s filed by the American Center For Voting for Rights (AC4FR), a 501(c)(3) and the American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund (AC4VRF), a 501(c)(4). The AC4FR and the AC4VRFL are under common control, according to the 990s.

The 2005 990s for both organizations are online at the Foundation Center's 990 Finder.

The AC4VR mission statement: "The advancement and protection of the constitutional rights of all citizens to participate in the electoral process on an equal and meaningful basis, and to promote and protect the integrity of the election process."

The AC4VRLF mission statement: "To further the common good and general welfare of citizens of the United States of America by educating the public about the importance of our election process and to support efforts to increase participation in elections and increase public confidence in our election process."

Officers and directors listed in the 2005 990s:



AC4VR
PO Box 10594
Newport CA 92658

Ann Browning
2511 Back Bay Lo
Costa Mesa CA 92627
Director

Brian Lunde
1020 N Potomac
Arlington VA 22205
Director

Thomas Lawson
250 Widener DR
Winchester VA 22603
Director

Whitson Robinson
PO Box 203
Warrenton VA 22603
Director

AC4VRLF
13807 Beechwood Point Road
Midlothian VA 23112
www.ac4vr.org

Brian A. Lunde
1020 N. Potomac
Arlington VA 22205
Chairman

Pat Rogers 
PO Box 2178
Albuquerque NM 87103
Director

Eric Kayira
3945 Hartford Ave
St Louis MO 63116

AC4VR appears to have been registered twice. Here are the corporate registrations for both the AC4VR and AC4VRLF:

#1
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA DEPARTMENT OF CONSUMER AND REGULATORY AFFAIRS

Company Name: AMERICAN CENTER FOR VOTING RIGHTS

Type: CORPORATION (NON-PROFIT)

Status: DISSOLVED

Filing Date: 1/24/2005

Date of Incorporation/Qualification: 1/24/2005

State or Country of Incorporation: DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA

Registered Agent: C T CORPORATION SYST

Registered Office:
00
WASHINGTON, DC

Filing Number: 250198DNP

#2
VIRGINIA STATE CORPORATION COMMISSION

Company Name: American Center for Voting Rights

Business Address:
PO BOX 10594
NEWPORT BEACH, CA 92658

Type: CORPORATION

Status: ACTIVE

Status Date: 3/3/2005

Filing Date: 3/3/2005

Duration: PERPETUAL

Date of Incorporation/Qualification: 3/3/2005

State or Country of Incorporation: VIRGINIA

Registered Agent: CT CORPORATION SYSTEM

Status: ACTIVE

Creation Date: 3/3/2005

Registered Office:
4701 COX RD STE 301
GLEN ALLEN, VA 23060

Additional Information: INDUSTRY: GENERAL

Filing Number: 632955

Officers, Directors:
LAWSON, THOMAS
TREASURER

LUNDE, BRIAN
CHAIRMAN

ROBINSON, WHITSON
PRESIDENT

BROWNING, ANN
SECRETARY

#3
VIRGINIA STATE CORPORATION COMMISSION

Company Name: American Center for Voting Rights Legislative Fund

Business Address:
13807 BEECHWOOD POINT ROAD
MIDLOTHIAN, VA 23112

Type: CORPORATION

Status: ACTIVE

Status Date: 6/30/2005

Filing Date: 6/30/2005

Duration: PERPETUAL

Date of Incorporation/Qualification: 6/30/2005

State or Country of Incorporation: VIRGINIA

Registered Agent: CT CORPORATION SYSTEM

Status: ACTIVE

Creation Date: 6/30/2005

Registered Office:
4701 COX RD STE 301
GLEN ALLEN, VA 23060

Additional Information: INDUSTRY: GENERAL

Filing Number: 640543

Officers, Directors:
ROGERS, PATRICK J
DIRECTOR
SECRETARY

LUNDE, BRIAN
DIRECTOR
PRESIDENT

James Mann had a piece this past weekend in the Washington Post, titled  "A Shinning Model of Wealth without Liberty." In the piece he basically followed the contours of the arguments I outlined in an earlier post. He also made an even more radical claim, that China won the Iraq war. Thomas Barnett responded to this article in his own post.

Mann's argument:

Mann's argument for his contention that China has won the Iraq war is this. The U.S.' popularity and influence around the world have ebbed as a result of the Iraq war. This at a time when China has been emerging as an alternative to US power. Echoing my earlier post on Iran, but ending at with the opposite conclusion, Mann asserts that China serves increasingly as a blueprint for authoritarian leaders around the world, both our enemies and allies and that's bad. For Mann, this poses a challenge to the model of liberal democracy espoused by the U.S. and the West because China has proven that you "don't have to choose between power and profit; they can have both." For Mann, this outcome has come about as a result of two trends in the international arena. First, the U.S. failed foreign policy symbolized more than anything by the Iraq war. Secondly, Mann argues is "the staying power and economic success of the Chinese Communist Party." Mann again challenges the notion that as China's middle class grows, that they will challenge the party for more of a say in the governance of the country. He argues, that because the party is responsible for their newfound wealth, these elements are less likely to challenge it so long as economic growth continues. To buttress his point, Mann points out that China is not a free-market system, but rather despite its capitalistic tendencies, remains a largely state-owned and controlled economy with a very small stock market.

Mann argues that in order to address this problem we need to move beyond the notion that "every policy dispute involving China as a choice between engagement and isolation." This, while at the same time accepting that our trade, investment and interactions with china will do anything to change its political process. Mann argues that once we get beyond these two illusions, we should focus on our national interests, which include not just security and prosperity, but also the promotion of open political systems which allow their people the freedom to dissent.

To continue reading, please click here.

The U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service has reportedly sought extradition of Russian citizen Andrei Lugovoi (Lugovoy) to be tried in Britain for the Polonium-210 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

The Russians probably won't grant the U.K.'s extradition request, according to initial comments by the Moscow Prosecutor General's Office. However, would they grant it in exchange for Boris Berezovsky's extradition to Russia from the U.K., which has been denied by U.K. judges more than once? It would be an interesting thing if they sold out their assassin for access to a much hated Putin opponent.

That is a passing political question about Russian Federation deal-making.

The fundamental question is which governing system delivers the more rigorous standard of fairness, legal ethics, impartiality and rules of evidence: the U.K. justice system or that in the Russian Federation of Vladimir Putin? For most who are not in the Putin regime itself, this is a NBR.

The dueling extradition requests force us to the question: would Lugovoi get a fairer trial in Britain than Berezovsky would in Moscow? Is there even enough evidence to try Berezovsky in Russia? Would that evidence hold up in an evidentiary examination hearing?

It seems that Andrei Lugovoi was once the head of Boris Berezovsky's private security detail. The tie to Berezovsky is not coincidental. One would think that for someone sent from Moscow to have an audience with Alexander Litvinenko, it would have to be someone somewhat trustworthy in Litvinenko's or Berezovsky's eyes, considering that the latter is the former's benefactor. Would it make sense to send Berezovsky's former security chief?

Some in Russia allege that Berezovsky hired Lugovoi to kill Litvinenko to discredit Putin. However, the Putin government could quickly figure out via a process of elimination whether or not someone within its extensive network in the underworld had sanctioned Litvinenko's murder.

And if Lugovoy had hired out to Berezovsky to help discredit Putin, that would be enough for his arrest, or at least his surveillance by Russian security forces. Apparently, he is snugly ensconced in his country's citizenship now. Lugovoi's involvement suggests another link to Moscow in addition to the smoking gun of weapons grade Polonium-210 access for the assassin.

The fact that a Litvinenko murder would make Berezovsky vulnerable to an extradition deal, Lugovoi for himself, makes his role in Litvinenko's murder less likely.

In portraying a caring, unorthodox, in many ways effective inner-city high school history teacher with a drug problem, Ryan Gosling does about as good a job of acting as anyone I've seen in a long time. He completely sold that character to me.

Gosling played a very different character as the male lead in the film adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks love story, The Notebook.

The edginess of his role and the movie remind me somewhat of Edward Norton (another actor I like) and the provocative 1998 film "American History X" in which he stars.

As an aside, one of the deleted scenes has his character remarking, in his characteristic offhanded way, to a group of neighborhood guys playing cards that he is feeling "hotter than George Bush on Judgment Day" (if memory serves).

Am interested, of course, in reactions of those who've seen it...

I think Kevin Drum (via Joe Klein) is on to something.

This modern-day Flight of Icarus known as the Bush Administration seems genuinely confused about the nature of power. In Iraq, they harbor a strange, ahistorical delusion that people give up power voluntarily. Thus, this or that Shiite faction is supposed to share power with these or those Sunnis and everyone will all just get along with the Kurds, and there'll be a functional, stable democracy in the Middle East.

 

But nobody ever gives up power voluntarily. It always has to be taken and domestically, Bush understands this perfectly well. Everything Bush has done serves the goal of increasing his and his people's power. The Iraq occupation is the linchpin of the whole effort, but there are many examples:

 

Illegal wiretapping. Suspension of Habeas Corpus. Torture. Voter purges. Deployment of U.S. Attorneys as partisan hit men. Support the troops. War on Terror. All in the name of keeping Republicans in power.

 

Bush is exactly right about something. Democrats' planned "no confidence" vote against Alberto Gonzales is, in fact, pure political theater. They ought to stand up, TAKE power, and impeach the S.O.B.

Granted, no one is more reptilian at the fine art of blurring the boundaries between truth and fiction and passing it off as an emotion-laden fact than the neo-con wing of the Republican party.  They're experts at pulling out a single piece of a jigsaw puzzle and claiming it's the whole picture.

But the left wing of the Democratic party is not without its own slanting of the truth in order to provoke a gut-reaction, and that is every bit as destructive to those who respect truth as it is when it comes hurling out of the right wing.

An informed citizenry cannot make clear-headed pragmatic decisions, whether in activism or in the voting booth, if they allow themselves to be emotionally manipulated by ANYONE.

Over on Huffingtonpost.com, a blog by Michael Shaw, called Reading the Pictures: Exhibit #1 Why the Military Wants to Keep Our Boys Off YouTube.  does just that.

Pictured beneath the title is a split-screen photograph: on the left, a mosque minaret; on the right, the same photo with a big red X drawn through it.

Click on the title, and it takes you to a video.  Beneath a video is the comment, "Can't decide what's more 'striking'--the audio or the video."

The video last less than 30 seconds.  Framed is a mosque minaret in the distance and the sound of gunfire in the background.  The minaret gets hit by either artillery or airstrike--I'm guessing artillery because you can't hear a jet--and after the explosion, a male voice cries, "We got the whole mosque!"

Then: laughter.

The response in commentary was immediate and visceral:

"No doubt a lot of the troops like to shoot people and destroy things. They are the same guys that condon torture and think that might makes right. When they were younger they were bullies. Now they have a gun and the freedom to be the assholes they can be. Yet everyone is supposed to "support our troops".

"After four years isn't it time to question why these people continue to sign up to fight in this ill-concieved and mismanaged war, and seriously consider if they do in fact deserve our support. Maybe we are continuing to support out and out assholes. "

"These are the same kind of losers that end up getting hired into law enforcement once the wars are over.

"They are unsophisticated and lacking in marketable skills but are considered well suited to "serve and protect". They have inferiority complexes and look to gain respect by bullying others rather than through intelligent dialog and diplomacy. "

"Thanks for keeping this video in the information stream of consciousness. The first few times I watched that piece, I was horrified. That reaction continues to increase. The audio is definitely more telling than the video.

"What scares me is what has been done to those kids to make them so insensitive to the plight of fellow humans...and what they might feel free to destroy once they are returned to this country. "

"Explosions are cool....hehehehehe..shutup Beavis...no you shutup Butthead hehehehe.

"Beavis and Butthead have taken over the Military. "

"I betcha dollars to donuts that the people of that community feel the same way about their mosque being brought down as New Yorkers felt about the World Trade Center Towers being brought down - with horror."

 "The reaction of the Amerikan soldiers who did this demonstrates that they are idiots who have no grasp whatsoever of the morality of their behavior and the consequences of it.I have satisfied myself up to this point with the notion that I do not support these 'troops'. Henceforth I will regard them as dunces and terrorists, as I also do the people who seized control of the US government in 2000 in a staged, fake 'election'.

The outraged commentary goes on for five pages.  Soldiers are compared to apes, among other things, and by the end of page 5, tempers are pretty hot.

And see, this is what propaganda is meant to do.  It is meant to show one jigsaw-piece out of 500 pieces that make up the puzzle, and it is always the most gut-wrenching piece.  The reaction is of course immediately emotional and usually angry.

And in this case, ignorant as well.

Now, by "ignorant," I do not mean to imply "stupid," even though the people posting these comments had no problem referring to all soldiers as stupid.  (The Beavis and Butthead comparison gained quite a bit of traction.)

No, by "ignorant," I mean "uninformed."

Those whose righteous indignation was provoked made broad assumptions based on 29 seconds of video.

Many commented about a "holy religious shrine," and compared it to cathedrals in the West, others even brought up the certain--and completely unqualified--belief that "women and children" had been killed.  Some felt it necessary to mention that they had friends who had returned from Iraq shockingly prejudiced against the Iraqi people--which, they believed, explained how they could so callously destroy a holy place.

ALL ASSUMED THAT THE MOSQUE WAS A PLACE OF INNOCENCE AND WORSHIP AND THOSE WHO LAUGHINGLY DESTROYED IT WERE MINDLESS AND EVEN EVIL.

Ah, but 29 seconds can be most misleading.

Here are some comments from active-duty military who also viewed the video and read the commentary:

I'd bet a year's worth of paychecks the minaret taken down was being used by snipers. It's common practice for militias, terrorists, fedayeen or whatever the hell you want to call them to use religious buildings as places to meet, to store arms, to garrison themselves in, and to fight from. The instant they do the building is no longer off limits but a legitimate target.

The insurgents we are fighting are masters of the media and they know pictures like this one help them win the war in the street.The best way to counter their propoganda is to reinforce via the media waves how their practices violate the law of armed conflict. Show the videos where they've used mosques as places to torture their enemies. Show the video where that minaret was being used by a sniper before the F-18s took it down. And be consistent. Anytime a mosque is used for other than religious purposes, level it.

 As someone who is active duty military I'm glad to see there are some on the left that understand the inherent dangers and difficulties of a war zone...and are giving the military the benefit of the doubt. Obviously I wasn't there during this incident but I'd bet  that that mosque was being used by terrorist/insurgents to conduct attacks from--at which point it becomes a legitimate military target. Make no mistake about it, the insurgents are very media savvy and are aware of our rules of engagement, thus the use of hospitals, schools, mosques to store weapons and/or launch attacks from. The decision to destroy this type of target always presents a dilemma for military commanders: if you take out the target you save the lives of friendly forces and deny sanctuary to the enemy but you run the risk of alienating the local populace and provide propaganda points for the enemy; do nothing and you risk more of your soldiers going home in a coffin.

A lot of factors are weighed when making the decision on how to deal with this type of threat--immediacy and lethality of the threat, civilians in the area, etc. The point is that it's a tough situation and our men and women are doing a heck of a job given the circumstances they are in. For all you armchair generals and war "experts" who deem it necessary to criticize the actions of our military from the comfort and safety of your homes thousands of miles away from the danger zone, may I suggest you try walking a mile in their boots first. If you think you can fight this war any better, I say put your convictions where your mouth is: strap on some body armor and pick up a weapon.

And of course, I had to weigh in--and I did so before the active-duty military, so when one referred to "some on the left who understand the inherent dangers," he might have been referring to yours truly:

If you are going to read the pictures, you ought to read them RIGHT, and in context of the whole. I have sent three family members including my son to SIX combat deployments to this godforsaken war, and if you are unaware of the fact that mosques are THE place used by insurgents to store munitions, hide terrorists, and launch attacks on American and Iraqi troops then you have not been paying attention to this war as it has been really fought.

The troops do all they can to be respectful of these mosques--for one thing, Americans no longer search them, they leave that up to their Iraqi counterparts, but make no mistake about it, the haters of Americans use their own religious shrines to launch rocket, mortar, and sniper attacks on American and Iraqi troops, and to store vast amounts of arms and munitions.

If that boy was laughing, it was no doubt because that building was infamous for causing the deaths of many Iraqis and Americans.

Let us not forget, either, how many OF THEIR OWN MOSQUES they have BOMBED and how many times they have gone into mosques and dragged out the imams and slaughtered them.So before you get all righteous, you'd do well to study the facts.Or go over there and fight this war your own damn selves and see if you can do it any better.

Yeah, I was pissed.

But I think, too, it is necessary to understand that such decisions--to take out a building--are not made by 20-year olds.  When squads, teams, and platoons go out on daily patrols and come under fire repeadedly in one area, their platoon leader takes it to the company commander, who checks with their Intelligence unit.

Working IN CONJUNCTION WITH IRAQI ARMY COUNTERPARTS, and drawing on various intelligence reports, they may then conduct a search.  American troops do not search mosques.  Iraqi army troops do.

If--as is often the case--they come upon vast weapons caches, explosives, ammunition, and other things ROUTINELY STORED IN MOSQUES, the company commander then confers with the battalion commander and with their Iraqi counterparts.

THEY MAKE THE DECISION TOGETHER.

The artillery or airstrike is called in--not to wickedly destroy a sacred site, but to destroy munitions that might otherwise get into the hands of those who would use it to kill American and Iraqi troops.

And yeah, that 20-year old off at a distance, watching the artillery fire or the jet flyover DOES feel giddy, because by God, they have taken one more step in destroying weapons that have been destroying them and their buddies.

IT IS THE IRAQI BAD GUYS who deliberately choose to store bombs and such things in places such as mosques, hospitals, and schools.

Recently, on an NBC news report, horrified American troops who pitched in to help build a school discovered to their incredulity that DURING CONSTRUCTION, someone had deliberatly placed explosives at regular intervals IN EVERY CORRIDOR OF THE SCHOOL.

Thus, when the school would have been opened, it could be exploded, killing hundreds of children.  This is fact.  The NBC newscrew went to the school where American explosives experts had exposed the devices and were in the process of disarming them so the partly-finished school could be either rebuilt or destroyed.

Make no mistake about it--it is not American troops who are evil in these instances.

We don't hide behind women and children in our wars.  They do so, WHY?  Because they know that Americans are reluctant to attack such a place.

THEY ARE NOT.

Even so, you can be sure that when the mosque was destroyed, it was empty--it's not like the Americans said, Gee, let's pick prayer service and BLOW 'EM ALL TO HELL!!!!

This is guerilla warfare, folks.  It is nasty and dirty, and believe me, when my son described to me how his unit came upon insurgent torture chambers soaked with blood, and set free two hostages who had been kidnapped and tortured but were not yet dead...I was sickened.  I can't imagine what it was like for the young Marines who came upon the scene.

In another instance, he described walking into a regular house in a regular neighborhood--which was packed FLOOR TO CEILING with explosives.  He was damn lucky he was not blown to smithereens, and yes, they called in a precision airstrike to destroy that house.

Taking a jigsaw-puzzle piece of a 29-second video and throwing it up like this in such a way as to incite visceral, emotional, angry response is PROPAGANDA and it is destructive to all involved.

For God's sake, I beg of you, before making snap judgements about the horror of war--pro or con, for or against, right or left--PLEASE make it your duty, your responsibility, your sacred right--to educate yourself, to find out the truth.

To put all the pieces of the puzzle together so that you can see the whole picture.

And stop to think how one of those 20-year olds might have felt, logging on to Huffingtonpost when he had a day or two on a base large enough for access to a computer, to see video from a war he's fighting, where he's being shot at and blown up on a daily basis, watching his friends die, trying to stay alive and keep his sanity--only to see himself and all like him called ape, stupid, evil , asshole, loser, and so on.  For something he did not do, in the first place, and something he also knows is DELIBERATELY MISLEADING.

Which way do you think HE will vote next election?

Propaganda is propaganda.  And any way you look at it, it stinks.

This new book about John and Robert Kennedy says this on the inside jacket cover:

"Brothers begins on the shattering afternoon of November 22, 1963, as a grief-stricken Robert Kennedy urgently demands answers about the assassination of his brother. Bobby's suspicions immediately focus on the nest of CIA spies, gangsters, and Cuban exiles that had long been plotting violent regime change in Cuba. The Kennedys had struggled to control this swamp of anti-Castro intrigue based in southern Florida, but with little success."

I have been saying this since I met with Vincent Salandria (who is mentioned in the acknowledgments in Brothers and on p. 267 of the text) in the spring of 1971.

Tom

The excerpt below is posted with the full knowledge and permission, even encouragement, of the author, who wants his essays to be read by as many people as possible.

It’s time to stop whining and get cracking, friends. We’re the can-do nation, so let’s get going and fix the mess George Bush is leaving behind. From The Hill’s Pundits Blog:

American Dream Team: Draft Gore-Obama for 2008

Brent Budowsky

A ticket of Al Gore for president and Barack Obama for vice president would create an electricity and enthusiasm that would transform American politics and send shock waves of excitement throughout a world yearning for new American leadership.

With the release of Al Gore’s new book about reason and truth in politics, and the July 7 worldwide concert for global warming, the stage is set for a new era in American politics that would be more exciting than any event since the inaugural of JFK.

Al Gore would bring the most commander-in-chief qualities in the history of presidential candidates with a passion and depth that would lift the hopes and hearts of Americans ready to inaugurate the post-Bush era.

Barack Obama would bring an enthusiasm, idealism and spirit that would make the ticket soar above partisan politics, would rally young people into public service in ways reminiscent of John and Robert Kennedy, and would be the greatest worldwide boost to American leadership for freedom and democracy in many years…

Gore-Obama is about the future, about the kids, about the generations to come and about an America that would once again believe that it is our sacred obligation to leave a better world to the kids and to the generations that follow…

It is time to lift the country we love again, to join a call to conscience, a call to action, and a call to confidence based on who we are, and what we stand for.

Draft Gore and Obama, and we will have a dream team for the generations.

Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and to Bill Alexander, then-chief deputy whip of the House. He is a contributing editor to Fighting Dems News Service. He can be read on The Hill’s Pundits Blog and reached at brentbbi@webtv.net.

Click the title, above, to read more of this inspiring essay.

Carolyn Kay

MakeThemAccountable.com

Think Progress has an item on Jim Hoagland's May 20 column in the Washington Post titled "Beyond Saber Rattling."  In his description of a potential Bush-Cheney administration "Plan B" for Iraq, Hoagland writes about,

"[...]strong-arming the admittedly faltering government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki out of office and replacing Maliki with a U.S.-anointed Iraqi savior.

Arab allies are urging such a course on Bush and would not object to U.S. military action against Iran."

I find this an alarmingly irresponsible assertion.  For this assertion to be at all credible, readers should have the specific knowledge of which Arab allies are urging such a course.  Without that specific knowledge enough readers may be led to believe that actually implementing such a course would be multilateral, possibly leading to support in Congress and the electorate, only to be greeted by rounds of condemnation among the Arab establishment and obligatory conspiracy theories revolving around the Zionist Entity and its manipulation of US foreign policy should such insanity become policy.

 

David Swanson, co-founder of After Downing Street, muses:

It took 13 colonies to throw out the last King George. Thirteen state Democratic parties have now passed resolutions demanding impeachment, nine of them since Nancy Pelosi ordered the Democratic Party away from impeachment.

Little reported in the mainstream media, Swanson well summarizes the picture in his article at OpEd.

Look at this list: Nevada, Wisconsin, North Carolina, New Mexico, Vermont, Colorado, Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and New Hampshire. That's 10 state Democratic Parties demanding impeachment by June of last year, and seven of them after Pelosi ordered impeachment off the table, and before the elections. Predictably, these states did very well for the Democrats in the elections, as Nevada did in 2004 as well. And, of course, Wolfowitz is on his way out (though not yet prosecuted).

September 2006, still pre-elections, Washington State's Democratic Party called for Bush and Cheney to be impeached.

In March 2007, the Oregon Democratic Party did the same.

In April 2007, California called for "appropriate remedies and punishment, including impeachment," for Bush and Cheney.

On May 19, 2007, the Massachusetts Democratic Party passed a resolution calling on "the U.S. House of Representatives to investigate these charges and if the investigation supports the charges, vote to impeach George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney." 

For further reseach, visit the Impeachment Resource Center.

More soon,

Ticia

[cross-posted to Tikun Olam]

Since the end of the Lebanon war last summer, things have been relatively quiet between Israel and the Palestinians. It allowed some of us to hope that perhaps this lull would allow both sides to make progress toward final status negotiations. But as usual, the pessimists have been borne out. It only takes a week, a hail of Qassams and Hamas trouncing Fatah forces in the streets of Gaza for the entire delicate facade of the ceasefire to come tumbling down.

A few days ago the Cabinet gave the green light to the IDF to resume targeted assassinations (don't you just love the "precision" in that term, as if the IDF always hits its "target" and never kills innocent civilians in the process) against Palestinian militants. But publicly at least, those to be attacked were supposed to be members of Hamas' military wing:

The security cabinet on Sunday authorized the IDF to intensify air attacks on the Gaza Strip and targeted assassinations of senior Hamas activists. Government sources in Jerusalem said the cabinet decision called for assassinations of leaders of the military wing of Hamas, not the political wing.

With today's results of the first serious strike we can see how laughable that claim was. The home of the leader of Hamas' parliamentary faction, not a member of the military wing, was attacked by air and eight members of his family were killed:

The Israel Air Forces last night bombed the house of Hamas parliamentarian Khalil al-Haya in Gaza. He was slightly injured in the attack, but eight others including seven members of his family were killed, and 13 people were wounded.

He had just finished discussing a ceasefire proposal with Egyptian officials when his home was bombed:

Several family members and Hamas activists had apparently gathered in the yard of the home when the IAF struck, a little after 9 A.M. Al-Haya, who was lightly injured in attack, had just finished discussing a cease-fire with a Fatah leader at the Egyptian Embassy in the Gaza Strip...

Al-Haya, a former spokesman for the Hamas parliamentary faction in Gaza, is responsible for negotiations with Fatah and Hamas' future membership in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Haaretz mentions that its cabinet source declared that al-Haya's name was not on any list of those targeted for assassination. So how did he get attacked? Is it any wonder that no one with any sense of balance can believe a word coming from the IDF and intelligence agencies?

The toll of the dead:

Seven of the dead are members of the al-Haya family: Nimr al-Haya, 60; Abd al-Hamid al-Haya, 35; Bakhr al-Haya, 26; Ibrahim al-Haya, 23; Ala al-Haya, 22; Jihad al-Haya, 17; and Mohammed al-Haya, 16. The eighth man is Samakj Farauna, 27, a Hamas activist.

The IAF is killing old men and teenagers. Bravo! This is just more of that superb IDF execution which brought you last summer's Lebanon war in which the IAF seemed better at hitting civilians than hitting actual Hezbollah fighters.

Here is the IDF's "justification" for the bombing:

An Israeli Army spokeswoman, Capt. Noa Meir, said that according to the army’s initial findings, the army “identified and hit a five-member terrorist cell based on prior intelligence — they were the target of the attack.”

Does this sound like a "terror cell" to you?

Officials at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City said that the dead included seven members of Mr. Hayya’s family, including three of his brothers, and a neighbor. Mr. Hayya, 44, who arrived at the hospital surrounded by supporters shortly after the attack, said his brothers were “part of the Palestinian people” and had nothing to do with politics.

What was this? It was the Shin Bet and IDF saying (and pardon my langugage but I'm pissed) fuck the military wing--we're going after you guys where you live and we'll kill all of you if we have to. They deliberately picked a senior legislative leader to say: "we don't make any distinction between military or political. You're all scum in our book." This is yet another example of an Israeli war crime. You don't deliberately target civilian political leaders. Did this man have "blood on his hands?" Had he participated in a terrorist bombing? I don't hear the IDF making that claim. Nor can they reasonably do so. Unfortunately, the killing of innocent civilians who happen to be al-Haya's sons and other relatives is the price to be paid for the IDF sending a message to Hamas that there will be hell to pay unless they call off the current bloodbath in which they are devastating Fatah forces in Gaza. Why do the innocent have to die to make such a point??

And here is the much vaunted "brilliance" of Israeli military intelligence at work (here quoting from Jonathan Fighel, an Israeli intelligence analyst):

Israel should “hit the Palestinians in a different dimension, to restore deterrence.” Israel, he said, had other options such as cutting off electricity and water supplies to Gaza and killing high-ranking Hamas members, “including ministers,"...said Fighel, a colonel in the reserves who follows Palestinian movements at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya.

"Restore deterrence?" How would killing al-Haya have done that? More likely it would've speeded up the process of getting IDF officers into the dock at the Hague. And how will cutting off water to a million Palestinians "restore deterence?" I swear, sometimes I think these people are living on another planet than the one the rest of us inhabit. Are they for real? Do they really find these bankrupt ideas in the least credible? Woe unto Israel if this is the best its best minds can produce.

Why Do Babies Have to Die?

Gideon Levy writes another one of his heartbreaking profiles of Gaza suffering in today's Haaretz. This story concerns an IDF patrol that nightly invades a Palestinian refugee camp to shoot up the place. Snipers on a roof targeted the home of a Palestinian family when the mother arose to comfort her sleeping babies in the next room who were frightened by the firing:

Last Wednesday was an ordinary day in the Katouni household. The father [Rifat] went to work, the kids went to school, and in the evening everyone went to bed - the parents in their bedroom and the three children in their room in the third-floor apartment. Shortly after two in the morning, Maha [Katouni, the mother] was startled awake by the loud sounds of gunfire from the street. She didn't even manage to turn on the light when she got up to run to the kids' room next door, to reassure her three little boys and keep them from getting scared. The gunfire was very heavy. The window of her room was open and her bed was close to the window.

Maha got out of bed, took one step, and then the bullet struck her in the lower back. She fell onto the nightstand...Soldiers from the Nahal patrol battalion were standing on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. "Wherever we are sent - to there we go," the poet Yaakov Orland once wrote in "The Nahal Anthem," sung by the Nahal entertainment troupe, which also sang "The Song of Peace."

Rifat rushed to call an ambulance. The children, who had awakened, were hysterical, especially the youngest, 3-year-old Jad, at the sight of the blood trickling from the front and back of their pregnant mother, who lay wounded on the floor. The bullet had struck her from behind, passed through the fetus' head and the mother's intestines and exited through the abdomen...

One of her brothers somehow managed to cross the line of fire and get to her house; he tried to stanch the gaping wound in her stomach with a towel. Her husband, Rifat, was paralyzed with shock. Umm Ibrahim says that her son, who tended to Maha, could see through the hole in her abdomen that the fetus had been wounded in the head and was dead...

The hospital staff, so inured to suffering by all the previous deaths and wounds it has tended to, still manages to stir a sense of outrage at this latest travesty brought to you by the Israeli Occupation:

Memorial posters decorate the walls of the Rafidiya government hospital in Nablus, covering earlier posters of countless young people who have been killed. But this poster is like nothing we have seen before: a fetus covered in its own blood, its tiny head blown up by the bullet that struck its mother, and the caption - "Who gave you the right to steal his life?"

...The anesthesiologist, Dr. Iyad Salim, a resident of nearby Hawara, roams the hospital corridors. On his cell phone camera is a video of the operation and the removal of the fetus. So close to being a fully developed baby, with a bullet wound to the head. The memorial poster shows the fetus bleeding from the head. The image is unbearable.

We always tend to lose sight of the real people who suffer in conflicts such as this. What were their hopes and dreams? Lest we forget, this family had similar emotions for the new life they were about to bring into the world:

They were going to call him Daoud, after an uncle, and also after a resident of the camp who was killed. At home they had everything ready: new clothes, diapers and a crib passed down from his older brothers. Daoud was buried in the camp cemetery. Only a few close family members attended the funeral of the unborn baby.

At press time, no response had been received from the IDF Spokesperson's Office.

And what could they say that would mean anything and not make an even greater travesty??

Here follows an imperfect but essentially accurate history, and a sad and frightening prognosis and prognostication that I desperately hope is wrong:

Americans are pretty much like anyone else in that almost all of us like to think we’re Good People. We care about the things and people we should, we do “our part” to contribute to society, and although if people let us be we’d prefer to go our own way, bothering no one, we’re no one to mess around with. Honestly, that’s how most people seem to feel. Well, it would be fairly accurate except for a few little problems:

First, there are the Evangelistic Radical Rightists who believe, like the Puritans did, that they and they alone have the Right Way and a mandate from God Himself to enforce “right behavior” on everyone around them, except the neocons, Dominionists and Christian Reconstructionists are a truly VIRULENT breed: they believe that WHATEVER they have to do to usher in the Kingdom of God (nevermind the statement of Jesus that, “My kingdom is not of this earth”), no matter what they have to do to whomever, it’s The Right Thing To Do. To them it really doesn’t matter how many of whom die to accomplish their goals – as long as it isn’t them. As for suffering and poverty, well, they believe God decides on that, and they have no business stealing money from rich people (they mean taxes), who are, as shown by their prosperity, the Chosen of God, in order to feed the lazy, sinful poor who did nothing to earn that money. Again, the fact that they themselves set it up that way makes no difference. If God wanted it to be different it WOULD be, so God must want them to be poor and to suffer as punishment for their sinfulness. They also honestly believe that they earned the money they were born to – by being good Christians. Even if they aren’t. If they ever decide to convert or ever did, that’s that: they are “forgiven from the beginning of time” no matter what they do.

If all this means that they have to lie, cheat, steal, murder, whatever, then it’s God’s will, and they are forgiven any errors they might make before they even occur. Pretty handy. Not that they tell regular Christians all this, though; only the REAL ones - theirs. Meanwhile, if the 'apostate Christians", meaning all those NOT their own, assume they mean "We're just like you other Christians", the error is not their fault; people hear what they want to hear.

Add to this the corporations, now become Mega-Corporations, almost stateless countries.

The original construction of our society was set up so that large monetary interests – special interests – couldn’t get much of a foothold on those in government, and so that things tended to take time to do, but came out with the best and most reasonable compromises. It wasn’t perfect, but it kept both Big Business and Churches out of government. The Founders knew quite well that if one religion, or one denomination of one religion was in charge, it would try to destroy all of the others, and freedom to choose any and every other part of our lives, as individuals, could never be tolerated under such regimes. They knew their history, and they had seen religious zealots like the Puritans, and the Catholics versus the Protestants, tearing the country apart in the name of God – as they saw God. They were, most of them, Deists, or what later came to be called Free Thinkers. This meant that even if they believed in God, they didn’t think they had a monopoly on His favor or a hardline into His Mind. They knew that if ALL religions weren’t protected, NONE were, and they had also seen the results – over fifteen hundred years of them – of people who Had the Only Answers being in charge of countries. They also knew that industry, given power to rule or even undue influence, would destroy – people, the commons, everything. They sought to spare us this.

Big Business was patient, though. It took them over a century, but they managed to have enacted laws that gave businesses person-hood; that gave them most of the rights of individuals, but because of their size and wealth, power over and above the rights of mere individuals. Stealthily, over time, they also got laws enacted that arranged it so that it took great sums of money in order for members of Congress to get elected, especially to the Senate. That was their open door. In time, it took so MUCH money to get elected, only donations and other support from Big Business could get someone a seat in Congress. Knowing that Congress and would-be Congress knew this as well as they, to a great extent, they OWNED the Congress. Congress obliged as well as they could by passing laws favorable to their contributors, who also found other ways to reward them. Lobbyists became the go-betweens, and could get our reps high-paying jobs after they left congress, or really expensive vacations and other things while they were there. And they did.

After many decades of this, a new factor entered the equation: religion. Always before, it had been what everyone did on Sundays, except for the few strange ones, who were, nonetheless (except in some VERY narrow-minded places) admitted to have the right to choose a synagogue, a temple, or nothing at all. This was always imperfectly enforced by the narrow-minded, but it was always there.

The Founders had separated the legislature into two houses that could have as many parties as the People wanted, had separated them from the judicial branch, and had separated both from the executive branch precisely in order that no single person or even group would ever wield total, unaccountable power. That way lay the tyranny they had just defeated. To help protect it, they added later Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press, so that the media could sound the alarm if something were amiss in Washington without fear of prosecution or persecution by exposed wrongdoers. Special powers could be granted during a declared (by Congress) war, yes, but they were temporary, and their use must be accounted for. They simply never counted on Old Money elitists, which they did their best to place limits on as well, to combine forces with fanatic religionists, who were willing to lie their asses off ro do whatever else it took to “return the country to it’s Christian roots”, which is of course another lie: America was NEVER a “Christian country”, nor was it intended to be one. The killer, though, was what President Eisenhower called “the Military-Industrial complex”: a grouping of almost unimaginably huge businesses who made and sold ways for people to kill other people. They got very large and powerful during WWII, and they didn’t want to break apart into the relatively small businesses they had been before. They want POWER, and they wanted to keep it.

With all three of these, it was easy to take over, by mergers, hostile takeovers, buyouts and other little business tricks, and in time six or seven families who were in agreement with the Old Money neocons/theocons who were busy taking over the government ran virtually ALL of the means by which We the People stayed informed enough to decide what we wanted (and didn’t want) for our country and ourselves. Of course, once in power in the person of George W. Bush, a talentless, almost brainless, alcoholic-saved-by-God (who apparently became a personal friend afterwards) scion of money whose grandfather had made the family’s fortune banking for (selling arms to) the Nazi’s even as America was fighting them. A measure of how powerful they had become was that they weren’t indicted for anything; they were simply made to stop – take their money and go home.

George Bush’s backers are Big Business – ALL Big Businesses, from arms to pharmaceuticals to you-name-it, especially if they were contributors), and Big Religion; George owes them all, and he has been paying his debts. He has done so by cutting or removing taxes from businesses and the wealthy in general, by as much as possible giving away the commons and gutting environmental laws and labor laws that get in the way, then by encouraging the influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico who will live fifteen to a room and work for what seems to them a fortune: a few dollars a day sometimes. Skilled workers are paid minimum wage at best. Then his administration encouraged what had been illegal: offshoring. Accounts were sent out of reach of the IRS, jobs were sent to third world countries, from factories that could now pollute and poison the land, air and water as they pleased while paying a fraction of the wages an American would need, and no benefits to worry about either. Usually these companies go to countries run by dictators, so there are no unions to worry about. Their union-busting practices are very effective: life in prison or execution, often public.

George had gathered around himself people of no conscience, no (good) principles, and boundless greed, power-hunger and vindictiveness, people like Karl “Turd Blossom” Rove, who admires Machiavelli tremendously and follows his directions to the letter for stealing/taking over and running a country; “Uncle” Donald Rumsfeld, who never met a right he liked unless it belonged to just him; Dick Cheney, also called “Darth” Cheney, as he would clearly not hesitate to annihilate an inhabited planet – he does seem to be trying to – as an object lesson. I suppose it would be more accurate to call him “Grand Moff”, but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Anyway, the appointments came thick and fast, all demagogues or Bush loyalists, all in cabinet positions, on federal courts, in and usually heading regulatory agencies, and everyplace else Bush and Company could think of where they might be useful. In five and a half years, they have, together, obviated every “right” recognized by the Constitution of the United States so that it is essentially “just a piece of paper”, as Bush wanted. They have broken or removed us, unilaterally, from every treaty we’ve signed or helped write since WWII. They’ve stolen elections and blocked subsequent investigations for that and many other illegal activities. They almost have, as Elliott demanded, “…absolute power”.

There are internment camps all over the country built by a crony company, KBR, subsidiary of Halliburton (which our VP still gets money from) that almost no one knows about, and made dissent, protest, contributing to the wrong (as designated by Bush) charities a crime worthy of lifelong imprisonment without representation, trial or any other rights, torture, or simply “extrajudicial execution” (murder). They have lied to Congress repeatedly, blocked them with their bought-and-paid-for judges and others, so that even with a bit of a majority, the Democrats are all but powerless, those few who aren’t themselves corporate property. It’s gotten so that the Congress looks like an unfortunate eight year old saying, “Pretty please…” to an eight-foot werewolf in a bad movie when they want something. This was announced when a ringer became Speaker of the House, the woman to hold the position (likely for a very limited time), when almost the first words out of her mouth were, “Impeachment is off the table!” She might as well have said, “I’ve decided I’m actually a neocon, but thanks for electing me and making me Speaker – I’ll put it to good use.”

By himself, George Bush is a coward who would, oh, pull a Corporal Klinger and wave pom-poms in front of thousands of people before he’d risk himself actually SERVING his country. Oh, wait a sec… Well, you get the idea. With Daddy’s money backing him and protecting him, he hid where it was safest: in the military learning to fly in the knowledge he would never be called on to fly and fight. Just to make sure though, he went AWOL for a year. Daddy’s money bought him out of that, too. Now he has the entire power of the U.S. government to protect him, or almost all of it. Almost all who are left to feel or do otherwise is the citizenry, and perhaps, if enough generals and admirals and such realize that that their country has actually, literally, been INVADED AND TAKEN OVER by people who are as UN-American as it gets, a fed-up military, which would then have to disband into state militias, as the Founders intended anyway. Unless there IS a citizen’s or a military revolt, well, the President’s friends and family are behind the hardware and software of the voting machines that helped to give him two elections, with crony judges in place, but I suspect they won’t be needed in ’08. One bad problem, one emergency, one false-flag operation (perhaps I should have said, “…one more…”, and Mr. Bush can determine the problem to be a National Emergency, and declare martial law. And he’s already made it clear that he considers any threat to him personally or to his/Rove’s/Cheney’s plans a matter of National Security. So I figure late September or so. Waiting much longer would make it look too suspicious.

Then he will be King. Period.

Then it’s the American Revolution Part II, or Taliban America.

I see no in between, and Bush hasn’t the sense, much less the decency, to avoid it.

Ian MacLeod

Oregon

May 20th, 2007

I was watching Fox and Friends today.

They had a segment about closing costs.

Not too controversial, right?

But the Fox N Friends guest was a nice guy, but he had hair down to and past his shoulders.

Nobody on Fox said a thing about his hair.

You'd think they would have at least broken out in a chorus of "give me a head with hair".

No such luck.

Ok.

I wore long hair back in the 60s and 70's.

We "long hairs" were called so many names (names were the last of our worries). One of the names we were not called was "wave of the future".

At this point I suggest you all find the recording "Almost Cut My Hair", by CSNY. (sorry, no link)

How come, if the right wing says morality is not 'relative", FOX NEWS puts up a long hair as an expert today on money matters, but yet "long haired hippie" has been used as a swear phrase.

I know why, do you?

A letter from Guantanamo Bay detainee Juma Mohammed Al-Dossary was made public today; he says that, given the opportunity, he would kill himself rather than continue to endure his open-ended confinement. How strange:

The 33-year-old detainee, who has been held at the camp without charges since January 2002, has tried to kill himself at least 10 times at Guantanamo, according to the U.S. government.

In October 2005, Al-Dossary slashed his arm and tried to hang himself during a break in a meeting with his attorney, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan. The former chief medical officer at Guantanamo said in court papers filed a month after the incident that the detainee had undisclosed ''mental health issues'' and often refused to take medicine or cooperate with therapists. (My emphasis.)

I was talking to my wife today about how, under Dutch criminal law, prisoners are not penalized for attempting to escape. The reasoning is that it is natural to want to be free, and you cannot punish a person for doing what any normal human being would want to do.

In the United States (military anyway), we apparently think that wanting to be free from captivity is a diagnosable disorder.

The topic below was originally posted in my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal as well as The Independent Bloggers Alliance and The Peace Tree.

In 2006, Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos and Jerome Armstrong of MyDD published Crashing The Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. Ostensibly, they advocated for taking over the Democratic Party from inside the beltway K-Street corporate elitists who perpetually sell out their constituents for the almighty dollar. To the extent that ordinary citizens through the blogosphere or progressive "netroots" are more plugged into politics and empowered to become activists is all to the good.

Personally, I was an activist before I became a blogger and didn't need an account with Daily Kos to become one. If the blogosphere ceased to exist tomorrow I would remain involved. I'm sure that's true for many of us. That said, liberal bloggers have amplified the voice and impact of core progressive values in the ongoing debate-taking place.

Whether this amplified voice has the leverage to facilitate transformational progressive change inside the corridors of power remains to be determined. I hope so. Certainly retaking the congress as well as numerous statehouses in 2006 was an important step and the "netroots" were important to that effort.

I have my doubts though about the long term and believe "crashing the gate" of a political party is not an elixir for our democracy. Indeed, history is replete with examples of "gate crashers" or "revolutionaries" dethroning the previous order only to become corrupted themselves. As Orwell's classic Animal Farm illustrated, it didn't take long for the pigs to resemble Farmer Jones. The real gate to be crashed is as information brokers, fact-checkers and investigative reporters free of corporate influence and dedicated to preserving accountability on the citizenry's behalf.

The foundation for any democratic civil society is truth. Without it a civil society can't remain civil because the absence of truth translates into a loss of faith in the laws and institutions designed to promote opportunity and justice. Once a citizenry loses faith, either anarchy or oppression isn't far away. Hence, the importance of a free, independent press doggedly pursuing truth wherever it leads. Truth seekers are gatekeepers of integrity that preserve democracy's machinery.

For example, Carl Bernstein and his partner Bob Woodward, before he became co-opted by the very insiders he used to expose, relentlessly pursued President Richard Nixon's diabolical efforts to subvert the Constitution. In so doing they helped preserve our democracy's checks and balances. Congress initiated impeachment proceedings against Nixon and he resigned. The system worked.

We're dependent upon truth seekers to scrutinize the fine print and actions of those in power on our behalf. Since we have our own lives, families and jobs to look after -effectively seeking truth ourselves is a Herculean challenge. Most of us don't have the resources, ability to travel on demand or cultivate sources among the powerful.

Sadly, our country is at best ill served by the so-called free press. When I watched Bill Moyers report how the press covered the lead-up to the Iraq War, I was thunderstruck by their lame justifications for not doing their job. Walter Pincus, a national security reporter for the Washington Post actually admitted to Moyers that since the Reagan Administration,

"We stopped truth squading every sort of press conference, or truth squading. And we left it then-- to the democrats. In other words, it's up to the democrats to catch people, not us."

And there was this classic exchange between Moyers and Tim Russert from Meet the Press:

BILL MOYERS: What do you make of the fact that of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC and CBS nightly news, from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department?

TIM RUSSERT: It's important that you have a-- an oppos-- opposition party. That's our system of government.

BILL MOYERS: So, it's not news unless there's somebody-

TIM RUSSERT: No, no, no. I didn't say that. But it's important to have an opposition party, your opposit-- opposing views.

How the hell does any reporter justify allowing a political party to interpret the truth? Political parties are not about truth. Political parties are self-serving entities dedicated to obtaining and maintaining power. Since the Democrats were spineless and didn't provide an alternative dialogue, Pincus and Russert believe they should be excused from doing their jobs? Ridiculous. Yes, Republicans were feculent and irresponsible while Democrats were feckless and cowardly. All the more reason for the press to do their job and relentlessly pursue the truth.

I'm a loyal Democrat and support my party as a means to advance progressive causes I believe in. And Democrats such as Henry Waxman are doing a splendid job of investigating the Bush Administration's malfeasance now that they have the majority. It was also oversight by the Democratic controlled Senate Judiciary Committee that resulted in former Deputy Attorney General James Comey's dramatic testimony.

Nevertheless, I don't want the press to solely cede ground to Democrats about holding the Bush White House accountable. Nor do I want the press to curry favor with powerful Democrats and refrain from reporting on their transgressions.

Of course reporters such as Pincus and Russert merely reflect the will of their corporate bosses who curry favor from the powerful. Some reporters remain dedicated to their craft. James Risen of the New York Times, who first reported about the Bush Administration's domestic surveillance program in violation of the FISA framework is a fine example. However, the New York Times management didn't allow the story to surface prior to the 2004 election.

As I see it, the real gate being crashed is what people like Josh Marshall are doing at Talking Points Memo. It was reporting done for that blog that broke the bough on how the dismissal of US Attorney's were covered and exposed Attorney General Gonazales as a liar. And citizen contributors to Firedoglake were so effective as information repositories for the Scooter Libby trial that even mainstream press reporters relied on them for real time facts. Epluribus Media has also become an effective vehicle for citizen journalism.

Another example on a smaller scale is a good friend of mine who used to work for Kaiser Permanente, a health organization that claims to be a non-profit. She was a whistle blower and they responded by personally trying to destroy her. So she transformed her Corporate Ethics blog into a repository of information regarding Kaiser's harmful activities against their patients. Kaiser Thrive Permanente Exposed is another weblog devoted to serving the public by exhaustively covering Kaiser in a manner that the corporate media has resisted.

As the blogosphere continues to mature, it is the gate crashing of citizen journalists that has me the most excited. Hopefully citizen journalism from the "reality based community" will become more adept at keeping the corporate media, corporations and politicians honest.

My optimism however is tempered by two concerns. One is that the powerful elites among the corporations, mainstream press and politicians will pass laws that undermine the effectiveness of online citizen journalism. My second fear is that citizen journalists will at some point resemble Farmer Jones.

...The truth about (you name it) 9/11, Tora Bora, Iraq, etc.

I am particularly interested to know just what Ashcroft wouldn't sign off on. According to Comey, the "program" (of surveillance, presumably) was made acceptable to Justice and FBI after the hospital scene. meaning Justice determined a legal way to proceed. It does not follow that WH followed that prescription. (What's Russell Tice doing now?)

Consider the possible convergence of these programs---surveillance absent warrants, politicization of Justice, and multiple versions of vote suppression and rigging. How convenient that all three work together!

Some of us have wondered if Rove et al have the means of pressuring various important members of Congress--the DC Madam's phone list, perhaps? We have reliable reports that the US eavesdropped at the UN, for political purposes. Is it much of a stretch to think it occurred domestically?

Will Conyers and Waxman take no for an answer to their subpoenas?

Would love to catch up with everyone here, as well as invite you over (for just a very brief smidgen of an interlude :o) to Firedoglake.com at 5 pm ET.

The second half of today's Sunday Book Salon double-header is set to begin (Laura Flanders was a guest earlier this afternoon). For my interview with Taylor Marsh, we'll be talking about how our troops and military families are doing -- and what more the rest of us can do to help them.

Pics of this weekend's NYC Moving a Nation to Care signing at Flickr.

You may remember Taylor from last summer's Save 1-800-SUICIDE effort [ diaries 1 | 2 | 3 ].

She is an incredible force, and one of so many who have taken me under their wings and boosted the issue that I've been working on -- the reintegration of our troops dealing issues such as PTSD. The FDL invitation is just the very latest of a long line of kindnesses that have flowed my way from this lovely lady.

From TaylorMarsh.com:

[Moving a Nation to Care] is an amazing journey through stories of veterans and what the cost of war does to their lives and the lives of their families. I'm proud to host this event on Sunday. Please make some time in your schedule to spend time with Ilona. It will be an extraordinary discussion on PTSD, which I've talked about many times before.

It used to be called "battle fatigue." In fact, my uncle, who flew planes in WWII, ended up in a hospital a broken man. Flying mission after mission simply destroyed him. I'll never forget seeing him there with my mother when I was a very little girl. The once vibrant dandy of a man was no longer anywhere to be seen.

Ilona Meagher has captured the story of "battle fatigue," now called PTSD in her new book. Thanks to Jane Hamsher for having us in so we all could talk about Ilona's book and the important issues of PTSD, which some of us know so well.

It's long past time that we brought this soldier's disease out into the light. It could help save some lives and the heartbreak of family members who are blindsided by what the Iraq war, with its continual redeployments, as well as the lack of planning and even equipment, has wrought.

Join us at FDL after 5 pm ET.

Steve, over at TPM, wonders why Gingrich claims there is an anti-religious bias in this country.

Seems clear to me: Last December, someone removed Christmas trees from the Seattle airport. Around the same time, a school changed the lyrics to Silent Night.

Next time around, I'm actually not sure if they can pull Christmas off. It clearly hangs by a thread...

Actually, this claim is all about who's in and not in the reality-based community. Just like Suskind's unnamed White House Aid, the talk about America being anti-religion is Gingrich creating his own version of reality.

This is "say it enough times and it's true" politics at its best.

Democratic Presidential candidates Obama, Clinton, and Edwards have announced carbon dioxide emissions reductions targets of 80 percent by 2050, which is 2 percent reduction for 40 years starting from 2010. Richardson upped the ante, announcing a 2 and 2/3 percent yearly reduction - 80 percent by 2040.

Since the planet has heated up only in the last 25 years (by 1 degree in average global air surface temperature according to NASA Goddard Institute,) I think we should promote 80 percent reduction by 2020, which would be 8 percent per year reduction starting from 2010. Because another 1 degree warmer would double the problems we have had recently such as the melting ice, increase in hurricane strength, droughts, etc.

Most people replace their cars within 10 years as an average I would guess. So if average mile per gallon standards, assuming gas cars/trucks still dominate, double, the auto emissions could be haved in 10 years. Cars/trucks account for 20 percent of US CO2 emissions, so that would bring us to 10 percent reduction in 10 years (2020.)

Electrical power in the US is responsible for twice as much CO2 as cars/trucks. If we could cut the electricity use from CO2 emitting power plants in half in 10 years, that would bring us to 30 percent reduction in 10 years including a doubling of auto/light truck mile per gallon efficiencies. This could be done if half the electricity users switched to solar or wind power.

That would be a good start - 30 percent. How do we get the other 50 percent? Cars/trucks and all power plants going to *zero* CO2 emissions would still only be 60 percent. We would have to squeeze the other CO2 causes down to get to 80.

Commercial trucks in the US cause 13 percent. But it's hard to envision a hybrid 18 wheeler being able to haul a heavy load. Perhaps it's doable to shave off some from commercial trucks but this one sounds iffy. Hopefully there will be a new technology that works with commercial trucks.

"Buildings structure" causes 12 percent. Since this is different from power, I assume it is meant to be natural gas heating emissions.

If we can completely solve the heating in buildings emissions, by using electric heaters that use clean electricity, perhaps we can squeeze enough from commercial trucks and the miscellaneous sources of CO2 to get to 80.

Once we have clean electricity generation, natural gas should be outlawed, as you can do everything with electricity that you can with natural gas - electric furnaces, stoves, ovens, and space heaters. Fossil fuel should be outlawed whenever and wherever possible - we could have electric cars if the electricity that charged their batteries was clean. I think it's important to think of electricity as being the hero, not the villain, in the global warming problem. Zero emissions electricity generation that is - clean power.

80 should be doable. Within 10 years we should be able to get to 80 percent reduction if we *really* wanted to. That is 8 percent reduction per year over 10 years, starting from 2010. Then we would have more time to get the new technologies in place to address the remaining 20 percent - as in the long term 20 or 10 percent CO2 emissions still adds up - it takes more decades but it will still add up and heat up the planet another degree eventually.

We have to worry about 3rd world countries, but if the wealthy countries don't take a leadership position, how does that help to solve the problem?

My last comment, and getting to the title of my blog entry, is that in my opinion, the global warming issue is far graver than the issue of nuclear power plant waste. Therefore I think we should follow our priorities and promote nuclear energy plants as well as solar and wind. Because I am skeptical that we can get to 100 percent green energy production - I'd bet it would take half green energy generation and half nuclear. Partly because we need to view electricity as the hero in the global warming problem - we will be using a lot more electricity to replace fossil fuel energy.

It's an environmentalists' predicament - but it's obvious which of the two choices, global warming or nuclear waste, poses greater risk to the planet. We have met the enemy and he is us – environmentalists have prevented nuclear plants from being built in the past. Has this resulted in CO2 emissions? Probably. I will say that if we can have 100 percent electricity generation from green power (solar, wind, geothermal,) that would be peachy with me, but I am skeptical it could be done. There was one commenter on a TPM blog recently who promoted geothermal as being able to handle all our electricity needs. I hope he is correct. As I think environmentalists are too stubborn to make a decision where they would need to prioritize based on a "global warming or nuclear waste" dilemna.

What do others think regarding the realistic amount of electricity that can be generated from green sources? What do others think about replacing coal power plants with nuclear plants? Have environmentalists unwittingly been one of the contributors to global warming by preventing nuclear power plants from being built in the past? What is the best way to handle nuclear waste? What is the "new" nuclear power plant technology all about?

I think this may rank up there with the fluoridation and New World Order conspiracies.

I live in Austin, Texas, where Interstate 35, the major north/south artery in the state, runs right through the middle of my fair city. Parts of the highway have seemingly always been under construction. The exploding Sun Belt populations have required more lanes, bypasses, loops and alternative toll roads along its length in the state. Increased trade, partially from NAFTA, has added to the strain even more. I can remember safety concerns about Mexican registered trucks in the US and introducing tandem rigs on roads not built to handle them. But these seem like normal growing pains, no? So I thought until I stumbled upon the Great NAFTA Superhighway Conspiracy.

My first exposure came from Congressman Ron Paul, internet darling and Republican candidate for the Presidential nomination. On his official governmental site he warns:

This superhighway would connect Mexico, the United States, and Canada, cutting a wide swath through the middle of Texas and up through Kansas City. Offshoots would connect the main artery to the west coast, Florida, and northeast. Proponents envision a ten-lane colossus the width of several football fields, with freight and rail lines, fiber-optic cable lines, and oil and natural gas pipelines running alongside.

This will require coordinated federal and state eminent domain actions on an unprecedented scale, as literally millions of people and businesses could be displaced. The loss of whole communities is almost certain, as planners cannot wind the highway around every quaint town, historic building, or senior citizen apartment for thousands of miles.

Perhaps a little worrying, but where is the plot? The congressman elaborates:

The real issue is national sovereignty. Once again, decisions that affect millions of Americans are not being made by those Americans themselves, or even by their elected representatives in Congress. Instead, a handful of elites use their government connections to bypass national legislatures and ignore our Constitution-- which expressly grants Congress the sole authority to regulate international trade.

The ultimate goal is not simply a superhighway, but an integrated North American Union--complete with a currency, a cross-national bureaucracy, and virtually borderless travel within the Union. Like the European Union, a North American Union would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.

Ah, the dreaded North American Union. And the congressman is not alone at the barricades. Phyllis Schlafly at the Eagle Forum joins the fight by taking on the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SSP) and its murky part in the conspiracy:

In response to recent articles in conservative publications about the sovereignty, freedom and economic dangers that will result from President Bush creating the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) in Waco in March 2005, the SPP has issued an unconvincing rebuttal.

This SPP document starts by declaring that "our three great nations share a belief in freedom, economic opportunity, and strong democratic institutions." That's false; Mexico is a corrupt country where a few families control all the wealth while the rest of the people are kept in abject poverty with no hope of economic opportunity.

The document states that SPP's mission is to make "our businesses more competitive in the global marketplace." That's globalist doubletalk which means producing U.S. goods with cheap foreign labor, thereby destroying the U.S. middle class.

The document states that SPP wasn't "signed" by Bush at Waco. But when Bush went to Cancun in March 2006, he proclaimed the first anniversary of whatever he had agreed to in Waco in 2005, and he sent Michael Chertoff to Ottawa to take "an important first step" toward whatever Bush did or didn't sign in Waco.

The document denies that SPP's working groups are secret, but SPP won't release the names of who is serving on them. The document denies that SPP will "cost U.S. taxpayer money" because SPP is using "existing budget resources" (no doubt coming from the fairy godmother).

Even the grizzled conspiracy veterans of the John Birch Society, ever vigilant against traitors, weigh-in praising the efforts of the Texas Legislature to slow the Trans-Texas Corridor:

The Texas legislation has important ramifications for the rest of the nation as well. As the current special issue of The New American magazine thoroughly explains, the Trans-Texas Corridor is part of the physical infrastructure that is being built as part of plans to deepen the integration of Mexico, the United States, and Canada in a North American economic community that is a precursor to further union.

Stopping the construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor is an important step in the ongoing effort to keep America free and independent.

And of course, a simple Google search will turn up numerous other examples from the echo chamber. But if any of these concerned citizens had ever spent as much time in I-35 rush hour traffic jams as I have, perhaps they too would welcome our new NAFTA Overlords...

I guess it's a reflective weekend or something.  Here is another little bit of life from where I sit.

For four years or more, a pair of swifts nested in the corner of a friend’s carport.  Each spring, the pair would move in, build a nest, crap all over the place, continuously fly in and out, and raise their young.  Despite the copious amounts of droppings they deposited, they were a welcome sight as a harbinger of spring and just fun to watch, both the adults and the young ones jostling each other for a place in the nest.

This year, only one swift returned.  It perches where it and its mate used to perch, but there is no nest, and there will be no young.  Most all of us, and I’m a terrible offender, tend to take certain things for granted.  We think so-and-so or such-and-such will always be there, even though deep down we know they won’t.  I look at the lone swift and realize once again the impermanence of life, and I try to remember not to take anything for granted, but I know I will.

Let us insert the following quotations into a time capsule preserving today's historical moments:

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," President Carter said Saturday.

"I've always believed in separation of church and state," Carter said, "and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one."

 "We now have endorsed the concept of pre-emptive war...a radical departure from all previous administration policies," he said.

Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, criticized Bush for having "zero peace talks" in Israel.

Carter said the administration "abandoned or directly refuted" every negotiated nuclear arms agreement, as well as environmental efforts by other presidents.

Carter also lashed out at British prime minister Tony Blair, calling his support of Bush, "Abominable. Loyal. Blind. Apparently subservient."

Historian and Carter biographer Douglas Brinkley called the former president's remarks unprecedented. "Those are fighting words."

More on the story here, here and here.

Can Jimmy still run?

Tish

Two formerly politically prominent Georgians discussed religion on Saturday and came up with two different views.

Newt Gingrich, former GOP Speaker of the House and potential presidential candidate, gave an address to the graduating students at Falwell's Liberty University. And Newt, he of the cheesy science fiction novels with the steamy sex scenes, he of the multiple divorces, said "Basic fairness demands that religious beliefs deserve a chance to be heard. It is wrong to single out those who believe in God for discrimination. Yet, today, it is impossible to miss the discrimination against religious believers."

Apparently, it IS impossible to miss the discrimination against religious believers, because damned if I can see it. Last I checked, 534 of the 535 members of Congress professed to believe in various religions (all but Pete Stark who has publicly copped to being an atheist) ranging from Islam to Orthodox Judaism to Mormonism to a whole range of Christian sects, large and small. We get Christmas as a holiday. People can to go whatever church they want to. Televangelists are free to spout their lines on TV and radio.

Given the audience, what Newt REALLY meant was that fundamentalist Christians were being discriminated against in that they were not free to foist their religion upon the schools and government. But even THAT isn't discriminatory, since Catholics and Orthodox Jews and Mormons and snake-handlers are also not allowed to do so in most cases.

I doubt Newt really believes what he said. He's just shoring up his support among the theocratic wing of the GOP as he prepares a late run at the presidency.

Meanwhile, in a newspaper interview on Saturday former President Jimmy Carter, in addition to trashing the foreign policy record of de facto President George W. Bush, also criticized Bush's policy of giving federal grants to religious charities. In Carter's words, "As a traditional Baptist, I've always believed in separation of church and state and honored that premise when I was president, and so have all other presidents, I might say, except this one."

Gingrich sees discrimination against believers. Carter sees this de facto Administration not observing the separation of church and state. I see in Gingrich a person who wants to return to the political sphere and will say whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear to gain their support.

In her new attack-book Bay Buchanan, battle-hardened sister of Patrick Buchanan and long-time conservative Republican strategist, has diagnosed Hillary Clinton with a narcissistic personality disorder that would make her a dangerous president. This, despite the fact that Buchanan is NOT a medical professional and probably has NOT spent much time observing Senator Clinton in person. (On the other hand, I'd love to see Bay's diagnosis of George W. Bush, where we DO have 6-plus years worth of real evidence that he would be a dangerous president.)

As Media Matters points out, Buchanan was able to blather about her prognosis unchallenged on Hannity & Colmes AND on MSNBC Live. Buchanan isn't merely promoting her book (which I will not name here -- suffice it to say that it is published by right-wing Regnery Publishing and takes the attitude toward Hillary Clinton that you would expect), she is ALSO working in a senior role for the presidential campaign of right-wing anti-immigration GOP no-hoper Tom Tancredo -- which was not mentioned on either interview.

I too am not a medical professional. I know practically nothing about Bay Buchanan than what I've seen of her on TV. So I feel well qualified to offer my own personal diagnosis of Ms Buchanan.

She, like Charles Krauthammer, is afflicted with a severe case of hypocrisy, which is only manifested towards Democrats.

Prognosis: It will continue until her death, unless she decides she could make more money attacking Republicans (very unlikely).

I hope Krauthammer (who IS a trained medical professional, making his statements about Al Gore needing lithium when Gore was speaking out against invading Iraq even more insidious and underhanded) will publicly criticize Buchanan for her absurd, politically motivated assessment of Hillary Clinton's mental health, exactly as he did when writer Michelle Cotter offered her own diagnosis in the New Republic about Dick Cheney's mental state.

But you know, I suspect intellectual honesty and consistency on the question of non-professionals offering diagnoses of politicians' mental conditions will not be something Krauthammer is interested in. Come on Charles -- prove me wrong!

http://vaguelylogical.blogspot.com/