Arthur Cohen's Gristmill -- The Future Is Not What It Used To Be

THE TUCSON MASSACRE

2011-01-11T14:33:00.001-05:00

THE TUCSON MASSACRE

What changes can we expect in our society as a result of the Tucson massacre?

Over the last few days since the shooting, we've heard a lot of reporting and conversation about the ramifications of this latest gun massacre by a clearly mentally disturbed individual. it seems to me there are three issues at the center of this incident, only one of which has dominated the reporting--the violent rhetoric and the atmosphere it has created.

As for that, we've heard plenty.

One of the less reported issues is the easy access Loughner had to both a semi-automatic weapon, and apparently easier still, the 30-round clip magazine he bought at Walmart. A 30-round clip is larger than any police force standard issue, and is used by law enforcement agencies in rare cases; it is used only for killing lots of people, fast. As he did.

And almost no one is talking about the defunding of mental illness prevention and treatment in the US over the last decades.

The intersection of the last two raises the question of screening out potential buyers of guns or ammunition-- those that are deemed mentally unstable--especially of course semi-automatic weapons and high capacity clips.

The lack of mental health funding seriously impairs our country's ability to isolate, treat and/or quarantine those likely to commit violent crime. So in so many cases where an historical look back at the perpetrators' behavior indicates obvious mental health issues that were not either addressed or followed up on, we bemoan the fact the the perp fell through the cracks of our mental health network.

And since these sociopaths, psychopaths, or just unbalanced wackos are not in our system, they of course are not screened out at the Walmart gun counter. Many may have access to illegal products, but it appears most perps bought their weapons and ammo legally.

The only ongoing debate, three days after the shooting, is whether the "vitriolic rhetoric" can be a causal factor in Loughner's spree (and all the others), and regardless, who's responsible for the rhetoric.

Hardly a word about the other issues, and I expect there will be little to come.

So what changes in any of these three arenas can we expect?

Will the perpetrators of what Paul Krugman effectively calls "eliminationist rhetoric," have a mea culpa, admit it's not a good thing, and change their tone and style to comprise a more nuanced and intelligent debate on issues, stop the fear-mongering and hate speech, stop demonizing their opponents?

Will the USA see a teaching moment here and finally address the laws--or lack of them--that allow us to legally buy and own assault weapons (since the law against that was not renewed in 2004) and 30-round clips, that allow an old west trading market at gun shows?

Will we realize the defunding of mental illness prevention and treatment is not an invisible problem anymore, and has real serious consequences for our society?

Nah.

2010-12-13T16:05:00.003-05:00

YOU BROKE MY FRICKIN' HEART

Dear Barack,

Oh my love, I know you've accomplished a lot in two years, against the most intransigent and morally bankrupt opposition I've seen in my lifetime, and I know you are righteously peeved that you don't get no respect for all that. I feel your pain.

But I don't quite get why you and your party are so shy about touting all your accomplishments, like your opponents do just by breathing (if they had any—though that doesn’t seem to stop them). Like that tax break in the stim package? You know, the one that no one knows about? You could mention it a little more often, maybe, and get your peeps to make some sound bites that NPR could use, instead of letting them end segments with quotes from the Axis powers.

But no matter, because you, well, you broke my heart.

You had me at hello, and then you dumped me and started snogging with Gordon Gekko . And now I catch you in flagrante delicto with him. I know, you told me you were bi-partisan, but I thought you were just being hip.

I gave you every opportunity to show me that you still loved me, but you spurned me and changed your locks. My family says I should forget you and (you should pardon the expression) move on.

But I can't. Because if I don't love you long time, I'm going to get a Boehner in the butt. (And it's still sore from when you shoved that public option there--you naughty man.) I might also get spanked with a big Mitt, and you’re the only one I let do that!

So I’ll be waiting, my love. Now don’t take this personally, dear heart, but when your new paramour tires of your lousy loving and throws you out on those cute ears like last week’s Democratic House vote, I’ll be waiting; I’m used to lousy love from my POTUSes.

Kisses,
Your Base

2010-10-22T13:47:00.000-05:00

JUAN WILLIAMS, NPR AND LINOS

Juan Williams

Right wing extremists—basically, the entire Republican party-- refer to the few moderates that remain as RINOs: Republicans In Name Only.

Juan Williams is the counterpart—a LINO, Liberal In Name Only. He’s the (oh dear, don’t conflate this with race, but it’s the best analogy I can think of) Uncle Tom for the mouth-breathers on Fox. He makes nicey-nice with the O’Reillys, and accommodates their constant partisan ideological rhetoric by pretending to be a liberal who sees their point. What a useful tool for Fox.

NPR listeners are, yes, primarily liberal. It’s certainly not because NPR is a liberal propaganda organ. Far from it, they seem to be overcompensating in an attempt to forestall that accusation from the right, for whom NPR might as well be the anti-Christ.

NPR isn’t just paranoid. In 2005, former Corporation for Public Broadcasting board Chairman and GOP operative Ken Tomlinson resigned from the CPB board after delivery of an investigation by CPB Inspector Kenneth Kontz. Tomlinson was under investigation for hiring outside consultants to monitor perceived liberal bias on PBS programs like NOW with Bill Moyers and other shows. When Tomlinson’s term as Chairman was up, he moved to a regular board position, named Cheryl Halpern, a major GOP donor, as chairman, and tapped Gay Hart Gaines, also a prominent Republican, as vice chair. In addition, amid howls of protest, he earlier named Patricia Harrison, former Republican National Committee co-chair, as CPB’s president. There was no doubt that this team intended to either kill CPB or cleanse it of any shred of “liberal” programming, as defined by their own ideological parameters.

Since that time, even though this attempt at a takeover was foiled, CPB and NPR have, as far as I can see, been running scared—even though, at most, only 15% of their funding comes from the gummint—some reports state that figure is as low as 2-3%.

Pleasing the right? I don’t know why they bother; nothing they can do will soothe the rage of those who believe they are victimized by the press for being true Americans. Those delusions are not malleable—they are fixed in the brains of the believers. Truth is irrelevant.

I have progressive friends who can’t listen to NPR anymore, for its own accommodation of right-wing blowhards. More often than not, a news segment on an issue--controversial only because it is attacked as such by Republican demagogues--ends with a sound bite from Boehner, McConnell and other shining lights of the new Know-Nothings. Invariably, that sound bite will comprise lies, distortion, disinformation, or profoundly ignorant statements, and usually, all of that. And never does the content of that sound bite get challenged for truth or accuracy. Instead, it closes the segment, is left hanging there as if it’s the last word on the subject. As if it’s a valid commentary. As if it’s rational, logical, informed. As if it’s true.

Still, NPR can’t totally ignore its audience demographics, those who contribute the single largest share of its funding.

And that audience was increasingly frustrated with Juan Williams, who let his ideological blather reign all over his commentary on NPR. The fact that Williams was also a Fox commentator didn't endear him to that audience, let alone that that disqualifies him ipso facto from any credible role on NPR. It just does, dammit.

But Williams is also a hack, a fact NPR listeners were increasingly aware of. Steve Kornacki in Salon summed it up nicely:

“But I can't remember him ever advancing any kind of groundbreaking argument, or introducing some dramatically new and intelligent perspective on a major topic. What I can remember him doing -- a lot -- is using flawed, shoddy and easily debunked logic to make arguments that were (seemingly) designed to make conservatives say, "Ah, now there’s a reasonable liberal."

And he’s a bigot.

Williams now famously began his remarks thusly: "Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

As Andrew Sullivan said about that statement, “No, Juan, what you just described is the working definition of bigotry.”

And Fox added him to their roster of pinhead bigots with a $2 million contract. Any more proof needed?

NPR, what took you so long?

And so, good riddance Juan Williams. Juannie, we wish we hardly knew ye.

2010-10-21T20:03:00.000-05:00

Abstinence-Only States Have More Teen Pregnancy

A new CDC study concludes that the five states with the highest teen pregnancy rate are those with abstinence-only policies: Mississippi, Arkansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. That will surely come as no surprise to anyone except the fun-loving legislators in those states, who also think The Flintstones is a documentary.

Especially Texas, where Thomas Jefferson is replaced in school textbooks by John Calvin. Jefferson may be remembered for coining the phrase “separation of church and state.” (Everyone knows that, of course, especially senatorial candidates)

Calvin, famous for being both the church and the state, is also known for saying that The Bible says “that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust.” That sounds so familiar, so contemporary, doesn’t it? So in Texas, you can’t play with your own naughty bits, but you sure can play with someone else’s.

Of course, there may be another reason why the teen pregnancy rate is so high in those states.

After a night out mainlining moon pies, what else have they got to do?

The states with the lowest teen baby boom are Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. See--no moon pies, no big bellies.

Maine, unfortunately, is too cold for sex.

For more on this study, go here: http://bit.ly/b6NPX9

2010-10-21T13:04:00.000-05:00

ASK DR. OZZY

Ozzy Osbourne is writing an advice column for Rolling Stone. Yes, I know. But, as RS asks, “Why not?”

Question: I suffer from Vertigo. What can I do to cure it?

Answer from Ozzy: I thought I had vertigo for 40 years. I sent to the doctor, and he said, “Mr. Osbourne, the problem—as far as I can tell—is simply that you’re very very drunk.” So my prescription for you is to go to bed, drink only water, then get up and walk around in circles for a bit. If you’re still dizzy, let me know.

Can’t argue with that.

2010-10-19T12:54:00.000-05:00

SATs,THE FIRST AMENDMENT & MY VIDEO WITH BEAUTIFUL EYES

We note today that:

1)Professional Obfuscator S. Palin got a combined SAT score of 841. Who says SAT scores are not a predictor of ability?

2)Professional Putz Christine O'Donnell, in debate:
O'Donnell: "Where in the Constitution is the separation of church and state?"
Coons responded that the First Amendment bars Congress from making laws respecting the establishment of religion.
O'Donnell:"You're telling me that's in the First Amendment?"
Audience: "Gasp."

Nevermind that. There'll be plenty more where that came from, and for the rest of our lives.

Instead,watch this video I made of Malaguena Salerosa performed by 60's folk duo Bud & Travis, masters of the genre; a hauntingly beautiful rendition of the classic Mexican folk song.

2010-10-18T17:15:00.000-05:00

EMPATHY

By now you’ve probably heard about this story. A resident of Obion County, Tennessee, Gene Cranick, lost his home and pets to a fire because he forgot to pay the annual $75.00 fee for fire protection. Gene Cranick lives outside the South Fulton limits, therefore he must pay the South Fulton fire department the fee for protection.

He didn’t pay the fee, and he didn’t get service. A neighbor, who had paid the fee, called the fire department, fearing his own house would burn. Firefighters showed up, protected the neighbor’s house, but refused to save Cranick’s house. That’s right—they refused to help. Cranick and his family lost all of their possessions in the Sept. 29 fire, along with three dogs and a cat.

What do we make of this? Does it matter if Cranick actually did forget to pay the fee, or as some speculate, he just didn’t want to? What would the fire department have done if Cranick had told them there were people trapped inside?

The firefighters “did the right thing,” said Kevin Williamson of the National Review. “The world is full of jerks, freeloaders, and ingrates—and the problems they create for themselves are their own.”

Contrast that with what Eric Zorn said in the Chicago Tribune. “The unluckiest or most hapless among us” will sometimes experience disaster, and “it violates our collective sense of decency to stand by while others suffer.”

The Boston Globe last Sunday reported on a study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research that found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979.

The article goes on to say “According to the findings, today’s students are generally less likely to describe themselves as “soft-hearted” or to have “tender, concerned feelings” for others. They are more likely, meanwhile, to admit that “other people’s misfortunes” usually don’t disturb them. In other words, they might be constantly aware of their friends’ whereabouts, but all that connectedness doesn’t seem to be translating to genuine concern for the world and one another.”

Do a thought experiment,” said Mark Davis, a professor of psychology at Eckerd College in Florida who’s spent the last 30 years studying empathy. “Imagine if humans didn’t have the capacity for empathy. What would it mean if, in fact, we never gave a damn about what happened to other people? That’s an almost an inconceivable world.”

Imagine. And think about what Kevin Williamson said.

Which world do you want to live in?

HAD ENOUGH?

2010-10-18T16:05:00.001-05:00

This blog, and this writer, have been silent too long. After all, as we sink into a stew of social media, mobile madness and the basic irrelevance of truth, somebody's got to stand up and say, "So Near, And Yet...So What." Might as well be me.

Murder My Sweet: Bush, Stem Cells and the German Chancellor

2006-07-27T09:26:00.000-05:00

Astute Boston Globe reader George Yates writes to the editor last week:

"Why doesn't President Bush use the same logic toward fighting a war on various diseases that he does towards the war in Iraq?

He sent us to war in Iraq and knows real people are going to die for what he believes is a good cause.

But when it ocmes to medical research, he doesn't want to send embryos, potential people off to battle to save real people's lives."

Reader Yates, forgets, however, that logic, as most humans define it, including embryos, has little to do with the decisions made by Bush.

Bush massaging Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel's shoulders (others more kindly refer to it as "groping") at the GM Summit--now that's logic! Because he, of course, was clearing deadly brush he spotted on her shoulders--and Bush knows brush! He saved her furshlugginer life! Saving life is one of Bush's highest priorities, as he again illustrates.

As you watch the video (http://www.bild.t-online.de//BTO/news/aktuell/2006/07/18/merkel-bush-liebes-attacke/video/merkel-bush-attacke-neu,layout=2.html)
you can see Merkel throw up her shoulder and arms. Some say this gesture was done in either surprise, revulsion or anger. But look again--she's clearly grateful someone had the courage to remove that festering sage that perpetually plagues the Chancellor. Germans being a demure people, no one in her entourage risked gotterdammerung by even acknowledging its existence.

No such problem for the leader of the free world. Kudos again for his insight and swift reactions.

No Pun Intended

2006-07-05T15:12:00.000-05:00

Currently circulating the Internet, the "10 first place winners in the International Pun Contest":

1. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, "I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

2. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. The one turns to the other and says "Dam!".

3. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

4. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says "I've lost my electron." The other says "Are you sure?" The first replies "Yes, I'm positive."

5. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

6. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse.
"But why?" they asked, as they moved off. "Because", he said, "I can't stand chess-nuts boasting in an open foyer."

7. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a family in Egypt and is named "Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain; they name him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, "They're twins! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."

8. These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town to "persuade" them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close up shop. Terrified, they did so ... thereby proving that only Hugh can prevent florist friars.

9. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him a super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

10. And finally, there was the person who sent ten different puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

On the Bible and the Constitution

2006-03-14T11:23:00.000-05:00

On the Bible and the Constitution

On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the
proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie
Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify.

At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said:
"Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a
woman. What do you have to say about that?"

Raskin replied: "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you
placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution.
You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold
the Bible."

The room erupted into applause.

On being 'good Americans' in a time of torture

2006-02-28T18:51:00.000-05:00

Here's a terrific article from Zmag, reprinted in The Smirking Chimp: http://www.SmirkingChimp.com:

Fred Branfman: 'On being 'good Americans' in a time of torture'
Date: Tuesday, February 28 @ 09:52:40 EST
Topic: War & Terrorism

Fred Branfman, Zmag

"Gestapo interrogation methods included: repeated near drownings of a prisoner in a bathtub."
-- http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/triumph/tr-gestapo.htm

"The CIA officers say 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lasted the longest under waterboarding, two and a half minutes, before beginning to talk, with debatable results."
-- Brian Ross, ABC World News Tonight, November 18, 2005

"When President Bush last week signed the bill outlawing the torture of detainees, he quietly reserved the right to bypass the law under his powers as commander in chief. Bush believes he can waive the restrictions, the White House and legal specialists said."
-- "Bush Could Bypass Torture Ban," Boston Globe, January 4, 2006

As a teenager, I could not understand how the German people could claim to be "good Germans," unaware of what the Nazis had done in their names. I could understand if these ordinary German people had said they had known and been horrified, but were afraid to speak up. But they would then be "weak, fearful or indifferent Germans," not "good Germans." The idea that only the Nazis were responsible for the Holocaust made no sense.

Whatever the Germans as a whole know about the concentration camps, they certainly knew about the systematic mistreatment of Jews that had occurred before their very eyes, and from which so many had profited. And if they were not really "good Germans," I wondered, what should or could they have done, given the reality of Nazi tyranny?

The issue became personal for me in the summer of 1961, when I hitchhiked through Europe with a lovely German woman named Inge. Still in love after an idyllic summer, we visited Hyde Park the day before I was to return home. A bearded, middle-aged concentration-camp survivor was angrily attacking the German people for standing by and letting the Jews be slaughtered. I was moved beyond words. Suddenly the woman I loved began yelling angrily at him, screaming that the Germans did not know, that her father had just been a soldier and was not responsible for the Holocaust.

Our relationship essentially ended then and there. I understood intellectually that she was just defending her father and was neither an anti-Semite nor an evil person. But there it was. She on one side. The survivor on the other. A gulf between them. Whatever my head said, my heart knew that the world is divided into evil-doers, their victims, and those like Inge who do not want to know.

And that I had no choice but to stand with the victims.

I never dreamed at that moment that I, as an American, would a few years later face this same question as my government committed mass murder of civilians in Indochina in violation of the Nuremberg Principles. Or that more than four decades later I would still be struggling with what it means to be a "good American" after learning that a group of U.S. leaders has unilaterally seized the right to torture anyone it chooses without evidence and in violation of international law, human decency, and the sacrifice of the many Americans who have died fighting autocracy and totalitarianism.

Bush Embraces Torture

To ask what it means to be a "good American" is not to compare Bush to Hitler, or Republicans to Nazis. The question does not arise only when leaders engage in mass murder on the scale of a Hitler or Stalin, which Bush has not. It requires only that they engage in actions that are clearly evil, which Bush has.

Every generation or so an evil arises which is so monstrous, so degrading to the human spirit, so morally bankrupt, that even to debate it is a sign of moral corruption. Native American genocide, slavery, totalitarianism, and Jim Crow laws are evils so unspeakable that we cannot understand today how anyone with a shred of decency could have once supported them. Today torture, a practice far more degrading to us than to our victims, represents such an evil.

The issue has become urgent because Bush has chosen to demand the legal right to torture anyone he wishes. When torture was revealed at Abu Ghraib, the administration - falsely and shamelessly - attempted to shift its own responsibility onto foot-soldiers like Lynndie England. Since then, however, leaks have revealed that the CIA has tortured terrorist suspects all around the world, using techniques like "waterboarding." In response, Senator John McCain proposed an amendment, attached to the 2006 Defense bill, that would ban torture.

Bush's first response to McCain's amendment was to threaten to veto the Defense Bill if it passed. When it became clear that McCain's amendment would pass by an overwhelming majority (it passed in by a 90-9 margin in the end), Bush reversed course and said he would support the amendment. Yet when he actually signed the bill, Bush added something called a "signing statement" in which he reserved the right to do whatever he chooses as Commander-in-Chief to "protect the American people from further terrorist attacks." In short, even as he signed McCain's amendment, Bush let it be known that he intends to torture as he sees fit.

Bush's demand is unprecedented. No leader in all human history, not even Hitler, Stalin, or Mao, has publicly demanded the right to torture. All others have behaved as Bush did before the amendment when he secretly tortured on a scale unseen in American history even while saying he wasn't. Forced into the open by the McCain amendment, however, Bush chose to openly demand the legal right to torture. Most experts assume he will continue to torture.

It is important to understand what this means. Bush justifies his right to torture on the grounds of saving American lives in a global "war on terrorism." Unlike previous wars, however, this war will never end. On the contrary, Bush's bungling of the war on terror--including the increased Muslim hatred of the United States that the practice of torture has caused--makes it more likely that there will be another domestic 9/11, leading in turn to more demands to torture. Bush's assertion of his right to torture, therefore, would make torture a permanent and growing instrument of U.S. state policy.

Also, by opposing the McCain amendment, Bush took direct responsibility for the torture he and his administration have inflicted on countless suspects. As you read these words, people are screaming in agony from Gestapo techniques used in CIA and "allied" torture chambers around the world. Many or even most of the victims are innocent. The New Republic has noted that "Pentagon reports have acknowledged that up to 90 percent of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, many of whom were abused and tortured, were not guilty of anything.... And Abu Ghraib produced a tiny fraction of the number of abuse, torture, and murder cases that have been subsequently revealed."

"BEFORE BUSH, NO LEADER IN MODERN HISTORY, NOT EVEN HITLER, STALIN, OR MAO, HAD PUBLICLY DEMANDED THE RIGHT TO TORTURE."

Mr. Bush's statement that "we do not torture," even as he was threatening to veto the entire Defense bill because it limited his right to torture, is a dramatic example of how torture degrades the torturer even more than his victims. And it is a disgraceful commentary on our nation that no major church, business, or political leader, nor the fawning media personalities who interview him and his officials, has expressed outrage at this bald-faced lie. And one can barely mention an unspeakable Congress, which ignored his lying about torture after spending two years impeaching his predecessor for lying about sex.

The real question for us, however, is what this says not about President Bush and our other leaders, but ourselves. What are we, as citizens, as human beings, willing to live with? Are we willing to live with a President, Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and Attorney-General who either engage in or rationalize torture in our names, even as they shamelessly deny they are doing so?

If we are willing to live with this evil, the torture will continue. If not, it can be brought to an end. Who are we?

Becoming "Good Americans"

We are in some ways more morally compromised than the "good Germans" of the 1930s.

To begin with, we are far less able to claim we do not know. Our daily newspapers regularly report new revelations of Bush Administration torture.

Second, by opposing torture, we face far less severe threats than did Germans who tried to help Jews. Even the strong possibility that we could become targets of illegal spying by this Administration for protesting its torture is far less frightening than the death or imprisonment faced by Germans who helped Jews.

And, third, unlike the Germans, we cannot reasonably claim that it is futile to oppose our leaders. Creating or joining an organized effort to prevent torture can succeed because we possess one great advantage that human rights advocates in Germany did not have: the public is with us.

Most Americans abhor torture and can understand the argument that it does not protect American lives. This is why the McCain amendment enjoyed 90 percent majorities in the Republican-controlled House and Senate, and why it is possible to bring to power leaders who are not committed to torture.

If we can build a movement to limit and ultimately remove from power those who torture, and thus endanger our lives, we will be achieving other important goals as well.

We will be building support for international law, which is one of humanity's few frail protections against far greater violence. If we can implement international law against torture, perhaps we can extend it to preventing the murder of civilians or aggressive war. We will be reaffirming America's once strong commitment to building the kind of new international order that is required to reduce international terrorism, and fostering a world in which U.S. leaders would once again be respected as fighters for human decency rather than despised as threats to it.

We will bring the once-powerful but forgotten force of morality and nonviolent action-- for civil rights, for peace, for women's rights-- back into our politics. A false morality that claims to love Jesus while torturing and killing in his name will be replaced by an authentic morality that seeks to address the root-causes of terrorism and violence.

We will thus also join this renewed moral force with a practical strategy that can actually protect us from terrorism. Torture is only the most dramatic example of how Bush has endangered our lives by bungling the war on terrorism. He has also dangerously neglected Homeland Security, alienated world opinion, helped Al Qaeda grow in numbers and fervor, wasted vast resources in Iraq in ways that increase terrorist ranks, failed to build an effective democracy in Afghanistan, failed to bring peace to the Middle East, and failed to address the poverty that fuels anti-American terrorism. Ending torture is a necessary precondition to developing an effective strategy that will actually protect rather than endanger Americans.

And we will strengthen democracy at home. Nothing is more un-American and undemocratic than the idea that a small group of Executive Branch leaders should be free to torture, kill, and spy at will. This idea is in fact precisely what generations of Americans have died fighting against. Ending Bush's use of torture will be the beginning of restoring an accountable and democratic government to this nation.

Conservative Totalitarianism

Ending torture will have a major impact beyond torture itself for a simple reason: as slavery was the linchpin to the entire pre-bellum Southern social order, torture has become integral to today's conservative ideology. Conservative ideology was once a coherent set of ideas built around limiting state power over the individual. It has today degenerated into a rationale for expanding executive power over the individual, including not only the right to torture but the right to spy on citizens, wage aggressive war while lying about it, prevent gay people from marrying, deny a woman the right to an abortion, publish disguised government propaganda in the media, and even deny us the right to die in peace if conservatives decree that we must live as vegetables or in unendurable pain.

It is no coincidence that the executive's right to torture was defended not only by Bush and Cheney, but also by conservative ideologues at The Weekly Standard, financed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol, who published a cover story by Charles Krauthammer-- widely admired in conservative circles-- which declared that "we must all be prepared to torture" to save American lives. Or that The National Review opined that "if McCain's amendment becomes law ... we will then be able to apply only methods formulated to deal with conventional soldiers in a different sort of conflict than the one that faces us now. This is folly."

Today's conservative movement has been reduced to a set of impulses, above all a totalitarian impulse to support the expansion of autocratic power it was founded to restrain. Since its ideological blinders prevent it from developing sensible measures to reduce terrorism, it has turned to justifying only those policies that expand executive power and seek to rule through coercion, threats, and violence.

Whatever a movement to abolish torture will achieve for society, it is clear what participating in it means for each of us as individuals. It means above all that our children and grandchildren will not remember us with shame, that they will not one day have to try to justify to our victims our failure to oppose the torture being conducted in our names, and that the term "Good American" will mean just that, and not an excuse for fear or indifference, like the idea of the "Good German."

When we fight to end torture we not only fight for human decency, international law, democracy, and freedom.

We fight for ourselves.

Fred Branfman is a writer and long-time political activist. His email address is fredbranfman@aol.com and his website is www.trulyalive.org. He is writing a book entitled Facing Death at Any Age.

Source: Zmag
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=9802

Shall I Return?

2006-02-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

My last post was over a year ago, below this one, reprinting Greg Palast's article Oaf of Office. Since then the oaf's cabal's increasingly successful attempt to overturn the core principles of American democracy as developed over the last 70 years or so, and turn the country into a money machine for the plutocrats, has silenced me. It was just too damn depressing.

Outrage after outrage was ignored by most of the public, barely fought against by the wimpiest Democratic leadership I've seen in my lifetime, and emboldened the thieves to the point of absurdity.

While the Democrats ate their young, the goose stepping Republicans seemed to support every insidious action of the neocons, who are about as far removed from traditional conservative/Republican values as they could get. How could the conservatives be so acquiescent in the face of a band of radicals marginalizing even them? Did they buy into the daily barrage of propaganda that claimed to even disagree with their president was treasonous, despite the fact that the actions of the president are all that's really treasonous? Apparently, since they're inclined towards that paradigm anyway. Was Britney Spears their true spokesperson?

But at last there's room for optimism. I don't know if the America that continued to address its faults and excesses and at least made perfunctory if not real attempts to live up to its mandate can ever be restored. The damage is almost irreversible.

Grover Norquist's "starve the beast" philosophy has prevailed, and the transfer of wealth, ownership, and even freedom from the masses to the elite 1% is almost complete. It's always been true that the rich got richer on the backs of the rest of us, but good lord, the past five years have been supermarket spree for these pricks. Even the military has been victimized.
And the greatest tragedy is they didn't even have to hide what they were doing. They were so convinced of their power that they were never the least bit embarrassed over the exposure of their constant doublespeak; they simpy carried on or redoubled their efforts, while stealing power from every governmental institution created to check that power.

But it appears even the Republican loonies in Congress have had enough. Maybe it's self preservation over the exposure of their corruption, but regardless they've recently publicly and at times vociferously opposed the Bush steamroller. Bipartisan or even partisan congressional inquiries or committees have blasted the administration over Katrina, NSA, the failure in Iraq turning that country into the much-predicted abbatoir(70% of the soldiers in Iraq think it's time to get out of there now), and now Oobye Doobye Doobye.

And the public appears to finally be seeing that not only does the emporor have no clothes, but he's stripping them naked too. The oaf's approval rating has hit 33%. The Democrats are now more trusted than the Republicans for national security--by only a few percentage points, but it's still a major shift. In fact, it's an earthquake.

(It's interesting to note that after years of unrelenting bashing of Clinton--the famed right wing conspiracy was indeed real--that man had a 70% approval rating during his impeachment!)

The public appears, too, to be tiring of the constant barrage of extremist and intolerant religious blather and chastising, the continued empowerment of the fundamentalist American talibanny, and the emptiness of the right wing rhetoric, the impossible-to-miss hypocracy of it all. Fox News is still a ratings champ, but the extreme of the extreme--O'Reilly, Hannity, and their ilk--are continually losing ratings on TV and on radio losing them to Air America. By no means has the power and influence of the right wing media--that it to say, most of the media--shifted to the left or even the center. But it's movement in that direction, and that's the first time in 5 years we've seen that.

The odds of the Democrats taking back one or even both houses of Congress in 2006--only recently still a pipe dream--now seem worth considering. After all this ignominy on the side of the Republicans, the odds of a Democrat winning the White House are also enhanced.

It's still going to be a tough battle. The cabal is not going to simply roll over. But it's not unreasonable anymore to envision them not only playing dead, but truly mortally wounded.

Hope is not just the place where 10,700 FEMA trailers remain mired in the mud of incompetence and corruption. It's a word that now can be uttered allowed, without irony.

OAF OF OFFICE

2005-01-21T08:50:00.000-05:00

Greg Palast is Dr. Feelgood. After all the blather, bazzfazz and claptrap about the inaugural comes some writing to lift one's spirits. Wish I said that.

OAF OF OFFICE

Thursday, January 20, 2005

by Greg Palast

Watching John Kerry lip-synch the oath of office, I couldn't help wondering, 'what if.'

Here on stage in Washington was the winner-class warmed and protected by cashmere and tax cuts against the strange, nipple-chilling cold. Hell had frozen over.

Our President said, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation." Well, no, it isn't.

Our President said, "We will widen retirement savings and health insurance." No, he won't.

Our President said, "America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains." Yes, he will.

Our President said, "And our country must abandon all the habits of racism." Oh, sure.

He doesn't believe a single word he's saying. And all over America, everyone knows he's lying and America is truly relieved.

America doesn't want to give up the habit of racism. Karl Rove doesn't. Jeb Bush doesn't. If not for challenging hundreds of thousands of voters in Black precincts of Ohio and other swing states, if not for purging thousands more from voter rolls for the crime of voting while Black, you wouldn't be president now, would you, Mr. President?

You won't "pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains," unless they are chained by your buck-buddies in Saudi Arabia.

You'll "support democratic movements" so long as the citizens of Venezuela don't get carried away and decide that democracy means they can choose a leader you don't like.

And you'll "widen Social Security and health insurance"? Who are you kidding? I just got a doctor bill for $5,200 … should I send it to you at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

You said, "You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs." What you meant was, "Courage is fragile and real evil triumphs." Indeed your entire campaign was about American cowardice: "they" are coming to get us. Americans, scared for their lives, soiled their underpants and waddled to the polls crying, "Georgie, save us!"

Franklin Roosevelt said in his inaugural, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." But he didn't have Dick Cheney creating from his bunker a government which is little more than a Wal-Mart of Fear: midnight snatchings of citizens for uncharged crimes, wars to hunt for imaginary weapons aimed at Los Angeles, DNA data banks of kids and grandmas, the Chicken Little sky-is-falling social security spook-show, and shoe-searches in airports. Fear is your only product.

In another world, in which all votes are counted, J.F. Kerry would have gathered most of those arcane chits called "electoral votes" and would have taken that oath today.

But, dear Reader, there's one cold statistic Kerry voters must face. The fact that Republicans monkeyed with the votes in swing states doesn't wash away that big red stain: 59 million Americans marched to the polls and voted for George W. Bush.

If bin Laden doesn't scare you, THAT should.

Abstinence-Only Programs: Crimes against Humanity

2005-01-19T14:08:00.000-05:00

The following report is from the National Coalition Against Censorship. Along with PFAW, the ACLU, and a handful of others, these folks are about all that stands between us and the destruction of the first amendment, in spirit if not in fact. www.ncac.org

Join them. Fight this insanity.

Abstinence-Only: Short on Facts, Long on Fancy

Winter 2004-2005

Students enrolled in federally-funded abstinence-only sex education programs are misinformed about science, deprived of vital health information, and exposed to gender stereotypes and religious dogma, according to a Congressional study commissioned by California Representative Henry A. Waxman. Eleven of the thirteen most commonly taught programs are found to be severely flawed, yet the federal government has doubled funding over the past four years. $170 million has been appropriated for fiscal year 2005 to teach that abstinence-until-marriage is the expected standard of behavior and the only way to avoid pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases, and mental and psychological harm.

This federal program institutionalizes censorship in the nation's schools. Information inconsistent with the "abstinence-only" message is excluded. As a result, curricula omit or distort information about contraceptives, same sex relationships and abortion, and condoms are mentioned only to say they fail. According to the report, the most popular programs expose millions of young people to misinformation, such as:

A pregnancy occurs one of every seven times that couples use condoms;
In heterosexual sex, condoms fail to prevent HIV approximately 31% of the time;
Touching another person’s genitals can result in pregnancy;
Exposure to sweat and tears are risk factors for HIV transmission;
5% to 10% of women who have legal abortions will become sterile;
Premature birth, a major cause of mental retardation, is increased following the abortion of a first pregnancy;
Tubal and cervical pregnancies are increased following abortions;
While a man needs little or no preparation for sex, a woman often needs hours of emotional and mental preparation.

One thing that is not excluded from abstinence-only programs is religion. One course teaches that life begins at fertilization, and another that "a 43-day-old fetus is a thinking person."

For the full report, see Rep. Waxman's Website: www.house.gov/waxman.

In Louisiana, the ACLU has renewed its claims charging the state with religious indoctrination in a taxpayer-funded program that advocates abstinence-only to avoid pregnancy and STDs and "to please God." The ACLU claims the program violates a court settlement reached in 2002 over a similar religion-based program that used taxpayer funds to purchase Bibles and religious tapes.

NCAC launched its Sex and Censorship Campaign in 1999, condemning abstinence-only programs as government censorship, as an affront to the principle of church-state separation, and as ineffective and unnecessary. 45 national groups joined in a statement to members of Congress to object to government imposition of ideological views as a mask for education (see Censorship News 80).

Impugn Her Integrity. Please

2005-01-19T13:47:00.000-05:00

Twice in a matter of weeks Senator Barbara Boxer has shown she is one of the few Democrats left with balls, though Kerry found one of his as well. The other one is still stuck to his biking shorts, I guess. Now there's something I do know about.

Next time Boxer's campaign calls me for a donation, I'm there.

Anyway, I refer to the confirmation hearings of world class liar Condoleeza Rice. She took umbrage when Boxer confronted her with her own contradictory statements (we call them lies in the real world), asked Boxer not to impugn her (Rice's) integrity.

Too late. None left to impugn.

Worth noting, too, her unwillingness to admit any mistakes. As with other members of the neocon cabal, admitting mistakes is tantamount to child molesting. It's simply not done. Gods don't make mistakes. Especially those that see mandates the way some people see The Blessed Virgin in water stains on a dirty stucco wall in Tiajuana.

Here's a recap from the American Progress Action Fund:

RICE
Demur, Defer, Deter

In nearly ten hours of testimony yesterday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bush Secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice faced "pointed questions about her role in shaping U.S. policies over the past four years," especially America's strategy in Iraq and treatment of prisoners there and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But "throughout the long day, Rice said little that so much as suggested a pending departure from any of the Bush administration's present policies, toward Iraq or any other issue." Instead, on issues from whether the U.S. would stay the course in Iraq, to her feelings about torture, Rice substituted doubletalk and obfuscation for straight answers, refusing to take responsibility for any of the "serial disasters" that characterized President Bush's first-term foreign policy.

STILL NO PLAN: Refusing "to set any timetable for the withdrawal of American troops," Rice made it painfully clear that the Bush administration has no long term strategy for Iraq. Citing concern among Iraqi and American officials that the U.S. plans to cut and run in Iraq, Sen. Biden (D-DE) asked Rice if there was any "reasonable possibility that the United States would withdraw the bulk of its forces before the end of 2005." Rice replied, "I can't judge that," adding lamely, "I will say that we're going to try to help the Iraqis get this done." As Slate's Fred Kaplan pointed out, "This wasn't even a 'non-denial denial.' It wasn't a denial. [Rice] declined to assure the Iraqis or anyone else that the United States is firmly committed…The question that Biden said everyone is asking in Iraq—are we staying, or are we plotting to cut and run?—remains, remarkably, unanswered."

THE TRAINING GAME: On Tuesday, Rice once again exaggerated the progress of programs to train Iraqi soldiers. As recently as last September, Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised there would be 145,000 Iraqis "sufficiently trained and equipped" by the time of the elections. On Tuesday, Rice estimated the number was "somewhere over 120,000." Biden, who was recently in Iraq, sharply contradicted her: "I think you'll find, if you speak to the folks on the ground, they don't think there's more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces." According to figures released last week, about 53,000 police officers, 40,000 national guard members and 4,000 soldiers are 'trained and on hand.'" But "Mass defections of Iraqi troops are still frequent," with some guard brigades recording losses of up to 50 percent of their personnel. Committee Chairman Dick Lugar (R-IN) appealed to Rice to "come up with 'some measurement' to gauge progress on the issue."

RICE'S TORTURED RESPONSE: In one of the most dramatic moments of the hearing, Rice declined to make a clear statement against the use of torture. Citing instances of forced nudity and simulated drowning as interrogation techniques, Sen. Dodd (D-CT) asked Rice, "What are your views on that? Is that torture, in your view, or not?" Rice "declined to characterize" the abusive methods, saying such determinations were made by the Justice Department and that it wouldn't be "appropriate" for her to comment. "It's a disappointing answer," Dodd retorted, "with the world watching, when a simple question is raised about techniques that I think most people would conclude in this country are torture, it's important at a moment like that that you can speak clearly and directly."

RICE WANTS LIES RESPECTED: Rice refused to take responsibility for her misstatements in the run-up to the war in Iraq. On 9/9/02, Rice said, "We do know that [Saddam] is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon." And on 9/7/03, Rice said, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Later, after weapons inspector David Kay had determined Iraq's nuclear weapons programs were retired in 1991, Rice told PBS that "It was a case that said he was trying to reconstitute…Nobody ever said that it was going to be the next year." Rice did not admit any inconsistency in those statements, instead lashing out at Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) at her hearing for "impugning my integrity." But Rice impugned her own integrity: click here for more than fifty Rice misstatements about 9/11 and the war in Iraq during her four year tenure as national security advisor.

CLUELESS IN IRAN: According to an article by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, President Bush's "next strategic target" is Iran, where U.S. forces have for months been carrying out secret reconnaissance missions in preparation for possible air strikes. Questioned about the article by John Kerry (D-MA), Rice said it was "inaccurate." Kerry asked, "About Iran?" Rice replied, "It is inaccurate." This exchange was repeated a few times. "Finally, Rice said that hitting Iran with airstrikes was not U.S. policy. Kerry let it go. But it's worth pointing out that Hersh didn't claim it was policy, only that the top civilians in the Pentagon were pushing for it to be policy." Otherwise, Rice "broke no new ground in how the administration plans to deal with the nuclear threats posed by North Korea and Iran."

2005-01-16T16:11:00.000-05:00

Plus ca change

Trust

2005-01-16T15:59:00.000-05:00

"Most Americans still rank trust high on their list of virtues,
invariable citing it as the most important quality they seek in a
relationship. Indeed, to be able to trust fully is the single most
important criterion for a lasting, deeply satisfying relationship."

"Trust is the cornerstone of every relationship we have - an unspoken
assumption about how we will behave toward, as well as be treated by
others. And because it is unspoken, we assume everyone else operates
from the same reference point that we do. We expect those we trust
to be faithful, loyal and honest. With trust comes respect, personal
safety and intimacy. When someone deceives us, when they hide parts
of themselves or their actions from us, when they tell us only what
they think we want to hear, or when they put their needs above ours,
they demolish our dignity and shatter our self-esteem. The fallout
from broken trust remains astonishingly the same: the victims are left
with a gut-wrenching emptiness and hurt. They don't feel safe any
longer - emotionally, physically, spiritually, sometimes even
financially. Many victims discover that, while they can no longer
count on those who betrayed them, neither can they trust themselves.
Their judgment is now faulty, their lives paralyzed. Whey they fail
to acknowledge is that their own goodness and intelligence cannot help
them anticipate, or protect them from, the malice and dishonesty of
others."

The Tao of Arthur

2005-01-16T15:54:00.000-05:00

The Tao Of Arthur*

1) Start Slowly...Taper Off.

2) Everything You Know Is Wrong.

3) No Matter Where You Go, There You Are.
3a) But there's no there there.--G. Stein

4) So Near, And Yet...So What?
4a) It's a one-shot deal--no second chances.--William Burroughs

5) Give me the strength to change the things I can, the grace to accept the things I cannot, and a great big bag of money.

6)Paranoia is just having all the facts.--William Burroughs, again
6a) Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

7) If it ain't broke--break it.

8) If work were such a splendid thing, the rich
would have kept more of it for themselves.

9) “Things are more like they are now
than they ever were before.” --Ike

10)The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

11) I am not sincere, even when I say I am not.
(Alternate: You’ve no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself, and how little I deserve it.)

*Remember, this life is a test. This is not an actual life. This is only a test. If this had been an actual life, you would have been given further instructions on where to go and what to do.

And, remember the words of the prophet:
"I came to a fork in the road, and I took it."

A message from America Coming Together

2005-01-16T15:39:00.000-05:00

Some things haven't changed. It's time to ACT. Click here.

There are so many powerful images from our country's long struggle for racial and economic equality. Every history book has the same black and white pictures -- from places like Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

So, as we prepare to commemorate Dr. Martin Luther King on Monday, I'd like to share some equally powerful images of Election Day, 2004 -- from places like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

In honor of Dr. King and the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, please sign your name to our demand for electoral reform nationwide.

Join the fight. Send these images to everyone you know.

We're just beginning to understand the impact of the aggressive campaign of misinformation, repression and intimidation that was unleashed by corrupt Republican officials and partisans in 2004. Here are just a few examples (View the orginials by clicking here ):

In Lake County, Ohio, a fake letter appearing to come from the Lake County Board of Elections was sent to newly registered voters saying that registrations gathered by progressive organizations (including ACT) are illegal and those voters would not be able to vote.

The week before the election, flyers were circulated in Milwaukee under the heading "Milwaukee Black Voters League" with some "warnings for election time" including that anyone convicted of any offense, however minor, is ineligible to vote; that any family member having been convicted of anything would disqualify a voter; and that any violation of these warnings would result in ten years in prison and a voter's children being taken away.

A flyer designed to look like an official announcement from McCandless Township in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, was designed to misinform voters on a partisan basis. The flyer claimed that "Due to the immense voter turnout that is expected on Tuesday, November 2 the state of Pennsylvania has requested an extended voting period" encouraging people to vote on November 3rd.

So, with the dust settling on the 2004 elections, a much longer fight must continue on the streets and in the precincts where too many voices went unheard.
This petition and the strength of ACT's ongoing field campaign will oppose and defeat any corrupt federal, state, and local official who blocks common sense efforts to ensure fairer voting in future elections. Demand change today. Learn more here.

We will not win by sending emails and airing television commercials. We will only win by building strong organizations on the ground from coast-to-coast. This is what ACT is doing in 2005.

ACT TOWN HALL MEETINGS PLANNED
Over the coming weeks, ACT staff and volunteers will be organizing town hall meetings to review the elections of 2004 and discuss our plans for the future. This is your chance to help shape ACT's future and build the volunteer organization needed to win in 2005 and beyond.
Currently, we are making plans for meetings in the following cities.

Columbus, OH - TBD Los Angeles, CA - January 22
Milwaukee, WI - TBD
New York, NY - January 18 (*Capacity reached. More events soon.)
Philadelphia, PA - TBD
Phoenix, AZ - TBD
St. Louis, MO - TBD
More cities to be announced soon!

If you are involved with a volunteer organization in another city that worked with ACT in 2004 or looking to work with us in the future, please let us know how we can support your continued efforts in 2005. Email volunteer@act4victory.org .

Sincerely,
Steve RosenthalCEOAmerica Coming Together

PS. From National Journal's Charlie Cook, printed on January 11, 2005, on what went right in 2004:
"Democrats, chiefly through America Coming Together, mounted what was not only the most sophisticated get-out-the-vote operation in the party's history, but it was probably the best field work by a factor of at least 10. Merging the latest in technology with old-fashioned shoe leather, Democrats not only met, but surpassed, their vote total targets in key states such as Ohio and Florida. With voter turnout unexpectedly climbing from 105 million in 2000 to 119 million in 2004 and a parallel effort by the GOP that took them to startling heights of organization as well, the Democratic GOTV operation was not quite good enough to win, but it was awfully close."

15 Things to do at Wal-Mart while your spouse/partner is taking their sweet time

2005-01-16T15:32:00.000-05:00

1. Get 24 boxes of condoms and randomly put them in peoples carts when they aren't looking.
2. Set all the alarm clocks in Housewares to go off at 5-minute intervals.
3. Make a trail of tomato juice on the floor leading to the rest rooms.
4. Walk up to an employee and tell him/her in an official tone, 'Code 3 in housewares..... and see what happens.
5. Go the Service Desk and ask to put a bag of M&M's on lay away.
6. Move a 'CAUTION - WET FLOOR' sign to a carpeted area.
7. Set up a tent in the camping department and tell other shoppers you'll invite them in if they'll bring pillows from the bedding department.
8. When a clerk asks if they can help you, begin to cry and ask 'Why can't you people just leave me alone?'
9. Look right into the security camera; use it as a mirror, and pick your nose.
10. While handling guns in the hunting department, ask the clerk if he knows where the anti- depressants are.
11. Dart around the store suspiciously loudly humming the "Mission Impossible" theme.
12. In the auto department, practice your "Madonna look" using different size funnels.
13. Hide in a clothing rack and when people browse through, say "! PICK ME!" "PICK ME!"
14. When an announcement comes over the loud speaker, assume the fetal position and scream "NO! NO! It's those voices again!!!!"
15 Go into a fitting room and shut the door and wait a while; and, then, yell, very loudly, "There is no toilet paper in here!"

OK, It's A Litte Dated

2005-01-16T15:29:00.000-05:00

"Free speech exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where people are themselves free."
Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

"The truth is found when men are free to pursue it."
Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." George Orwell, 1945

"Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them."
Dwight David Eisenhower, 1963

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant."
Robert F. Kennedy, 1964

"Go fuck yourself."
Dick Cheney, 2004

Lexy Con

2005-01-16T15:16:00.000-05:00

The next time you're washing your hands and complain because the water temperature isn't just how you like it, think about how things used to be....

Here are some facts about the 1500s:

Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor. Hence the custom today of carrying a bouquet when getting married.

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women, and finally the children -- last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

Houses had thatched roofs (thick straw piled high), with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the dogs, cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof. When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying, "It's raining cats and dogs."

There was nothing to stop things from falling into the house, which posed a real problem in the bedroom where bugs and other droppings could really mess up your nice clean bed. Hence, a bed with big posts and a sheet hung over the top afforded some protection. That's how canopy beds came into existence.

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt. Hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (straw) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. A piece of wood was placed in the entranceway. Hence the saying a "thresh hold."

In those old days, they cooked in the kitchen with a big kettle that always hung over the fire. Every day they lit the fire and added things to the pot. They ate mostly vegetables and did not get much meat. They would eat the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers in the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. Sometimes the stew had food in it that had been there for quite a while. Hence the rhyme, "Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot nine days old."

Sometimes they could obtain pork, which made them feel quite special. When visitors came over, they would hang up their bacon to show off. It was a sign of wealth that a man "could bring home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with guests and would all sit around and chew the fat."

Those with money had plates made of pewter. Food with high acid content caused some of the lead to leach onto the food, causing lead poisoning and death. This happened most often with tomatoes, so for the next 400 years or so, tomatoes were considered poisonous.

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, or "upper crust."

Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."

England is old and small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a "bone-house" and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out 5 of coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive. So they thought they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell. Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (the "graveyard shift") to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be "saved by the bell" or was considered a "dead ringer."

Absent Without Leave of Senses

2005-01-12T16:56:00.000-05:00

I haven't written anything for a while. as you may have noticed. Since the aftermath of that calamitous election, the road to sanity has been to not read the usual online barrage of progressive angst. On one hand, seems like writing might have been a productive way to vent some of that angst, but I needed to take a break. Ohio, count me out.

I've certainly been keeping up with the news, and the daily outrages of this administration and it's reactionary impact on the socio-cultural American gestalt continue unabashed, unaplogetic and unabated. The attacks on our 200 year old yet fledgling democacy have been executed with ever more arrogance from Capital Hill as well as the White House--no surprise there, of course. They do believe they have a mandate, to go along with all the power they've usurped or stolen over the last 30 years. Never ones to let facts stand in the way of a good opinion, they have upped the pace and will continue to dismantle 60 years of progressive social advancement on every front as fast as their two right feet can carry them. It's just too enervating. I need a nap and a great big bag of Valium.

And except for Ted Kennedy's urging today for the party to return to its progressive roots and Barbara Boxer's courageous stand against certifying the Ohio electoral vote, pretty much the rest of the Democrats seem to be stuck in some wimp timebandits wormhole of centrism. Even Howard Dean, though never a flaming prog regardless of reputation, acknowledged acceptance of anti-choice leadership on his side of the aisle. Something about a big tent. Familiar phrase, that. It was nauseating when the neocons used it pre-convention, but somehow the Democratic party trying to win a broader appeal by courting anti-choice ignocrats is, well, unseemly. And, may I say, yucky. Remember moderate or liberal Republicans? Now pretty much extinct, their legacy remains in the DLC. Ol' Ralphie Boy was right. He was an asshole and megalomaniac, of course, but it's hard to argue with his main premises--except that one about no difference between Bush and Gore, oh that was really dumb.

So I've been quiescently frozen of late, but like one of those succulent orange treats on a stick away from its freon nest, I'm melting too.

So fie on the valium, and bring on the crank. It's time to get this horse back in the race. I'm going to cram in as many angry sarcastic diatribes as ever, along with every cliche ever written and some of the most godawful puns my evershrinking frontal lobes can pustulate--er, postulate

It's my job, after all. If I have to have one.

Clean up formatting in emails you want to forward

2004-11-12T16:39:00.000-05:00

This amazing little tool will strip emails of all those <, indents, blank lines, and word or line breaks that makes some much-forwarded emails hard to read.

http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm

I would be proud to say that I wrote the following paragraph but I didn't.

2004-11-12T16:34:00.000-05:00

I would be proud to say that I wrote the following essay, but I didn't. I understand that credit goes to a woman in Cleveland whom I never met. It captures better than I have been able my feelings and views about the election.

--------
It would be difficult to fully communicate my disappointment in a simple email. On the other hand, slipping out into the hall and drowning myself in the mop bucket would mean that someone else would have to feed my dog.

The American people have spoken, and they have sent the world a message: "We're barely bright enough to chew our own food."

Incompetence, incoherence, inarticulateness, pettiness and random savagery apparently do not deter the majority of Americans. The thing that really, REALLY matters to Americans? Homos. And foreigners. Both must be stopped at any cost.

Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of bigotry, amending state constitutions around the country to prevent same-sex couples from having any rights beyond the right to live on the margins of society. We clearly have far more to fear from The International Homosexual Conspiracy(tm) than we do from North Korea and the collapse of the American health care system.

Apparently, we are truly a nation of slackjawed yokels, awed only by grotesque displays of wealth and violence, reverent only of the bossman and beholden not even to our children, since we seem content to mortgage their future in favor of a $300 tax refund that we have traded for decent jobs, healthcare, and a just society.

We make pious noises about worshipping a Just and Merciful God, while doling out destruction and horror upon the innocent, pausing only to pat ourselves on the back for waging a "just" war to rid the world of tyrants that audaciously aspire to exist after they lose their utility to us in endless low-level conflicts to control the world's oil supply.

We seem to have become cheap, venal, vulgar and petty while we apparently don't have the ability to reason our way out of the dilemma of taking care of the sick, watching out for the elderly, and teaching our children not to be credulous, callow dupes.

To my friends from the UK, France and anyone to whom they choose to forward this, I feel that I owe you an apology. It is as if I have brought an orangutan to high tea. While he flings shit at you and tries to snatch pastries from your plate, I am left wondering how I might make it up to you.

The world's richest and most powerful nation seems to have lost its moral compass. We have lost interest in leading by example in favor of taking by force. I would like to say that I believe that one day in the future America might regain its senses. Unfortunately, I am not terribly optimistic. The best I can offer you is to remind you that Nixon also won a second term.

CON SESSION SPEECH: From The Wish I'd Said That Department

2004-11-12T13:31:00.000-05:00

Adam Felber is a comedian who often appears on NPR's "Wait, Wait,Don't Tell Me" quiz show. This was posted on his blog. Did you notice his candidacy? Well, here's his concession speech.

Former candidate Felber, flanked by his family and supporters, steps up to the podium in the bright autumn sunlight. Cheers and applause are heard.

My fellow Americans, the people of this nation have spoken, and spoken with a clear voice. So I am here to offer my concession. [Boos, groans, rending of garments]

I concede that I overestimated the intelligence of the American people. Though the people disagree with the President on almost every issue, you saw fit to vote for him. I never saw that coming. That's really special. And I mean "special" in the sense that we use it to describe those kids who ride the short school bus and find ways to injure themselves while eating pudding with rubber spoons. That kind of special.

I concede that I misjudged the power of hate. That's pretty powerful stuff, and I didn't see it. So let me take a moment to congratulate the President's strategists: Putting the gay marriage amendments on the ballot in various swing states like Ohio... well, that was just genius. Genius. It got people, a certain kind of people, to the polls. The unprecedented number of folks who showed up and cited "moral values" as their biggest issue, those people changed history. The folks who consider same sex marriage a more important issue than war, or terrorism, or the economy... Who'd have thought the election would belong to them? Well, Karl Rove did. Gotta give it up to him for that. [Boos.] Now, now. Credit where it's due.

I concede that I put too much faith in America's youth. With 8 out of 10 of you opposing the President, with your friends and classmates dying daily in a war you disapprove of, with your future being mortgaged to pay for rich old peoples' tax breaks, you somehow managed to sit on your asses and watch the Cartoon Network while aging homophobic hillbillies carried the day. You voted with the exact same anemic percentage that you did in 2000. You suck. Seriously, y'do. [Cheers, applause] Thank you. Thank you very much.

There are some who would say that I sound bitter, that now is the time for healing, to bring the nation together. Let me tell you a little story. Last night, I watched the returns come in with some friends here in Los Angeles. As the night progressed, people began to talk half-seriously about secession, a red state / blue state split. The reasoning was this: We in blue states produce the vast majority of the wealth in this country and pay the most taxes, and you in the red states receive the majority of the money from those taxes while complaining about 'em. We in the blue states are the only ones who've been attacked by foreign terrorists, yet you in the red states are gung ho to fight a war in our name. We in the blue states produce the entertainment that you consume so greedily each day, while you in the red states show open disdain for us and our values. Blue state civilians are the actual victims and targets of the war on terror, while red state civilians are the ones standing behind us and yelling "Oh, yeah!? Bring it on!"

More than 40% of you Bush voters still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. I'm impressed by that, truly I am. Your sons and daughters who might die in this war know it's not true, the people in the urban centers where al Qaeda wants to attack know it's not true, but those of you who are at practically no risk believe this easy lie because you can. As part of my concession speech, let me say that I really envy that luxury. I concede that.

Healing? We, the people at risk from terrorists, the people who subsidize you, the people who speak in glowing and respectful terms about the heartland of America while that heartland insults and excoriates us... we wanted some healing. We spoke loud and clear. And you refused to give it to us, largely because of your high moral values. You knew better: America doesn't need its allies, doesn't need to share the burden, doesn't need to unite the world, doesn't need to provide for its future. Hell no. Not when it's got a human shield of pointy-headed, atheistic, unconfrontational breadwinners who are willing to pay the bills and play nice in the vain hope of winning a vote that we can never have. Because we're "morally inferior," I suppose, we are supposed to respect your values while you insult ours. And the big joke here is that for 20 years, we've done just that.

It's not a "ha-ha" funny joke, I realize, but it's a joke all the same.

Being an independent candidate gives me one luxury - as well as conceding the election today, I am also announcing my candidacy for President in 2008. [Wild applause, screams, chants of "Fel-ber! Fel-ber!] Thank you.

And I make this pledge to you today: THIS time, next time, there will be no pandering. This time I will run with all the open and joking contempt for my opponents that our President demonstrated towards the cradle of liberty, the Ivy League intellectuals, the "media elite," and the "white-wine sippers." This time I will not pretend that the simple folk of America know just as much as the people who devote their lives to serving and studying the nation and the world. They don't.

So that's why I'm asking for your vote in 2008, America. I'm talking to you, you ignorant, slack-jawed yokels, you bible-thumping, inbred drones, you redneck, racist, chest-thumping, perennially duped grade-school grads. Vote for me, because I know better, and I truly believe that I can help your smug, sorry asses. Vote Felber in '08! Thank you, and may God, if he does in fact exist, bless each and every one of you.

[Tumultuous cheers, applause, and foot-stomping. PULL BACK to reveal the rest of the stage, the row of cameras, hundreds of unoccupied chairs, and the empty field beyond.]

Posted by Adam Felber at November 3, 2004 02:43 PM | TrackBack

Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives

2004-11-12T13:25:00.000-05:00

A friend writes:

"Please... everyone who wants to learn how to argue progressive

issues so as to be competitive with the powerful right wing wave

in this country right now... PLEASE read this book (thin, quick

read, inexpensive and life-changing):



**Don't Think of an Elephant**

Know Your Values and Frame the Debate--The Essential Guide for Progressives

by George Lakoff"

Lakoff wrote a terrific article in the Sept 03 issue of The American Prospect, along with one by Deborah Tannen--together they were that issue's cover stories under the banner "How Republicans Hijack Language"; Lakoff's piece was called "Framing the Dems--How conservatives control political debate and how progressives can take it back." We sure did followed that advice, didn't we? Well, maybe we progressives did, but our candidate, not being a progressive anymore, probably felt the advice also no longer applied.

Tannen's article was "Let Them Eat Words--Lingustic lessons from Frank Lutz", the evil who was profiled on the last Frontline. He's the one responsible for Clear Skies, Partial Birth Abortion, etc.

Here's an excerpt: "How many would get all worked up about an exceedingly rare abortion procedure (that the Alan Guttmacher Institute estimated represents less than one-fifth of 1 percent of all abortions performed in the United States in 2000)? But attach the name "partial-birth abortion" and a second-trimester fetus becomes a half-born baby. Legislation to outlaw the vaguely described medical procedure then becomes another success in chipping away at constitutionally protected abortion rights -- as well as a wedge issue to defeat Democratic candidates. According to an insider in Al Gore's 2000 Tennessee campaign, the vice president's opposition to this legislation was one of the factors that turned many Tennesseans against their home-state candidate.

Who among us wants to call ourselves anti-life? Win the name game and you're more than halfway toward winning the battle. Win enough naming battles and you're on your way to winning the war."

And one more:

"The cynicism in Luntz's advice is astonishingly explicit. On the subject of the gender gap, for example, he informed Republican members of Congress that they could woo women with words (no need for troublesome deeds). While acknowledging that women (like the caller to the radio talk show) care about education, he cautions against trying to back up promises with actual programs:

I begin with the premise that we must do no harm. That is, we should not undermine our growing strength among working-class white men (1994 set a modern-day record) in our efforts to reach out and communicate to women. I refuse to advocate an educational strategy that leads to a net loss of votes just to win over a few women and silence a few media critics. It would be unwise and foolish. ...
I do not subscribe to the notion that we must change our substance or create a separate women's agenda. Listening to women and adapting a new language and a more friendly style will itself be rewarded if executed effectively and with discipline.

These excerpts come from a document that Luntz circulated to Republican members of Congress in 1997 titled "The Language of the 21st Century." The section that came to my attention was "Addressing the Gender Gap," but it provides a blueprint reflected in Republicans' rhetoric in other areas as well. Luntz's advice boils down to this: Forget action. Improve your image by revising the way you talk. Let them eat words."

The articles are still available online at their website
Lakoff: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=6862
Tannen: http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=6861

None of us are naive about the dastardly neocons, but this was scary stuff. And we saw it played out daily over the last 4 years. The articles were real eye-openers for me, and everyone I referred to them. Sounds like this book may be an expansion of his article. Must reads, all.

The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy

2004-11-12T10:19:00.000-05:00

The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy --by Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D. "As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states [Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania] of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error... The likelihood of any two of these statistical anomalies occurring together is on the order of one-in-a-million. The odds against all three occurring together are 250 million to one. As much as we can say in social science that something is impossible, it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote counts in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.

Systematic fraud or mistabulation is a premature conclusion, but the election's unexplained exit poll discrepancies make it an unavoidable hypothesis, one that is the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies, and the public to investigate."

This excerpt is from a daily Citizens For Legitimate Government briefing, called Breaking News and Commentary. CLG does great work. In addition to Breaking News, they have at least three Yahoo discussion groups. people post all kinds of great articles and links, as well as rant, though the volume of daily mail from each of those groups is more than I can handle. That's why I now just get Breaking News.

Three thumbs up.

LETTER FROM PETER COYOTE ON BLACK BOX VOTING AND LOCKDOWN ORDERS ABOUT NEWS COVERAGE AT THE NETWORKS

2004-11-11T16:59:00.000-05:00

These kinds of lists (that Peter writes, below) and other compilations are all over the net, including the sites at end of this post. But what he writes about the "lockdown orders" at the networks is pretty scary--though hardly surprising.

Already, of course, the propaganda machines are trying to label us all as conspiracy-theory nutcases or paranoids. Maybe some of us are, but let me remind you of two of my favorite quotes:

"Paranoia is just having all the facts."--William Burroughs.

And of course you all know this anonymous one. "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you."

The letter:

Nov 09 2004 22:49:01

" There is a bumper sticker I saw months ago that sums up the current state of affairs in our country regarding what is the biggest news story you'll neversee on the General Media reported. It said "IF YOUR NOT OUTRAGED, YOUR NOT PAYING ATTENTION".On Friday I received a phone call from a good friend who works at CBS--I've known her for years and she is a Producer for some of the news programs, one well known one in particular. She tipped me off that the news media is in a"lock-down" and that there is to be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2nd. She said similar "lock-down orders" had come downlast year after the invasion of Iraq, but this is far worse--far scarier. She said the majority of their journalists at CBS and elsewhere in NYC are pretty horrified--every one is worried about their jobs and retribution Dan Ratherstyle or worse. My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time but she was pissed and her journalistic and moralintegrity as what she considers to be a gov't watchdog requires her to speakout, while be it covert and she therefore asked me to "spread" the word...She said that journalism and the truth is at stake. She said another friend ofhers, a producer at MSNBC, said that an anchor by the name of Keith Olbermannhad brought it up on his show on Friday eve and the axe came down. He'satleast fighting back and talking about it on his "Blog", but she said that people there are worried that he's going to be fired by higher ups. She saidat this point the only way that the "real news" was going to be if the peoplestarted talking about it and made a big enough stink about it to our electedofficials, the FEC, and "noise" to the international media, that our own media won't have any choice but to cover it. (Yes, this is really happening in the good ole' supposed "democratic" free press of the US of A). The only place you'll see this talked about right now is on the internet and onAirAmericaRadio.

Everyone--this is serious....I can't emphasize it any more than saying ifthere was ever a time to speak up and take action it is NOW. If you are feeling sick to your stomach (like me) about the possibility of 4 more yearsunder Bush and the future of our country, and yet you feel helpless, here'syour opportunity to take action. Imagine if you saw a loved one drowning--whatdo you do? Well, our country's democracy is drowning and she needs us. In anemail I sent you last night, I used the F-word--FRAUD and mentioned to youthat I felt strongly that there is a lot of mounting evidence that thiselection was not clean. I say that not only out of a result of my observationswhile out in the field as a poll watcher in the key battleground state ofOhio, I say it with the knowledge and information of reports that have been circulating around the country in various voting precincts involvingirregularities and problems with the voting machines and numbers not matchingup with the exit polls or actual numbers of registered voters in variousprecincts. I've been busy researching this issue and compiling for you belowsome details of these reports and where you can get more info:To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe:

1- That the exit polls were WRONG...(remember--they have been used for over adecade and considered reliable)

2- That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH, FL were WRONG. He was within a less than 1/2 % point margin of error in his 2000 final poll andprevious polls for other elections.

3- That Harris Poll last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. They were alsowithin a 1/2% point margin of error in their 2000 final poll.

4- The Incumbent Rule #I (that undecideds primarily break at the end for the challenger)was WRONG.

5- The 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)
6- The Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50%approval will most likely lose the election)

7- That Journalist Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before theelection, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter tobreak the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disnfranchised in 2000.

8- That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where thereWAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.

9- That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry, eventhough it was the largest number of youth voters 18-29 ever and a huge jumpfrom 2000 and they were over 55% in favor of Kerry.

10- That Bush BEAT 99 to 1 mathematical odds in winning the election.

11- That Kerry did WORSE than Gore against an opponent who LOST the support ofSCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.

12- That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed himtied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote toend up with a 51-48 majority--when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.

13- That Voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computerscientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in thiselection.

Some Examples: (There are many more, but I won't list them all here--this is to give you an idea)
- The City of Gahanna in Ohio discovered a discrepancy that gave 4,000 votesto George Bush. After media scrutiny, city officials have admitted to anelectronic "glitch" that caused the problem.
- In Broward County, FL, errors in software code caused a referendum ongambling to be completely overturned. The error caused totals to count backwards after reaching a ceiling of 32,500 votes. The problem existed in the2002 election as well however the issue was never resolved by the manufacturerof the electronic voting machine.
- In North Carolina, a Craven County district logged 11,283 more votes than voters and actually overturned the results of a regional race."

For more info, go to: http://www.blackboxvoting.org or
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1106-30.htm

SOME OF THE CRAZY THINGS YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE--OR ELSE

2004-11-11T16:49:00.000-05:00

This post is from another blog, and one of our favorites: http://xymphora.blogspot.com/ . Unlike with my blog, you can't subsscribe, but it's worth checking out regularly.

The link below to Peter Coyote's lists takes you to a letter he wrote to the Yahoo group Political-Research, which I just joined. His letter and the list are mighty impressive, and I am going to post it here later.

"Peter Coyote lists just some of the crazy series of things you have to believe in order to believe that George Bush actually won the election (see an earlier letter from Coyote here). I'm amazed at how easily the left has rolled up on this issue. It is not an exaggeration to say that this stolen election represents the United States slipping into fascism, a problem that is usually irreversible without a lot of really bad things happening to a lot of people. World war is the usual outcome, and the attack on Falluja, expressly couched as a religious Crusade (see here or here, and here), is clearly intended by the Christian Zionists to lead to that goal. If you make the connection between the people behind the computer voting machine companies, their insane religious desire to see the Apocalypse in the Middle East, and the grim future of the world evidenced by the completely unnecessary attack on Falluja, you have to come to the conclusion that there is no time to wait for another election. It is not morally acceptable for the American left to allow the Apocalypse to happen without even the slightest attempt at a fight. It is insane to save your energy for the next election, when the chances are there won't be one."

20 Ways To Maintain A Healthy Level of Insanity

2004-11-11T13:59:00.000-05:00

20 Ways To Maintain A Healthy Level of Insanity

1. At Lunch Time, Sit In Your Parked Car With Sunglasses on and point a Hair Dryer At Passing Cars. See If They Slow Down. 2. Page Yourself Over The Intercom. Don't Disguise Your Voice. 3. Every Time Someone Asks You To Do Something, Ask If They Want Fries with That. 4. Put Your Garbage Can On Your Desk And Label It "In." 5. Put Decaf In The Coffee Maker For 3 Weeks. Once Everyone Has Gotten Over Their Caffeine Addictions, Switch To Espresso. 6. In The Memo Field Of All Your Checks, Write "For Sexual Favors." 7. Finish All Your sentences with "In Accordance With The Prophecy." 8. Dont use any punctuation 9. As Often As Possible, Skip Rather Than Walk. 10. Ask People What Sex They Are. Laugh Hysterically After They Answer. 11. Specify That Your Drive-through Order Is "To Go." 12. Sing Along At The Opera. 13. Go To A Poetry Recital And Ask Why The Poems Don't Rhyme. 14. Put Mosquito Netting Around Your Work Area And Play Tropical Sounds All Day. 15. Five Days In Advance, Tell Your Friends You Can't Attend Their Party Because You're Not In The Mood. 16. Have Your Co-workers Address You By Your Wrestling Name, Rock Hard. 17. When The Money Comes Out Of The ATM, Scream "I Won!, I Won!" 18. When Leaving The Zoo, Start Running Towards The Parking Lot, Yelling "Run For Your Lives, They're Loose!!" 19. Tell Your Children Over Dinner, "Due To The Economy, We Are Going To Have To Let One Of You Go." And The Final Way To Keep A Healthy Level Of Insanity.......

CALLING THEM WHAT THEY ARE

2004-11-11T13:14:00.000-05:00

Now, more than ever, I read the Smirking Chimp. You can read all the essays and articles, and sign up for daily email summaries here: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/index.php

After I wrote the prior posts, I came across Joe Bageant's column 'Hung over in the End Times' on the Smirking Chimp site. It's at http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=18653&mode=nested&order=0

It's sub-headline is: "If liberal society is to survive the rise of the Godwacks, we need to start by calling them what they are."

This is one damn terrific article--it's terrific , mostly because it supports my own contentions, but also because he's a terrific writer, and funny too. He grew up in fundamentalism, and understands more than most of us that " ...You cannot talk to these people and you cannot reach them with words or language. Not unless it is Biblical or Koranic or scriptural. Dialogue is impossible even though, publicly at least, they claim to want dialogue. (Take it from me. What they want is to convert you. I've wasted years on that dialogue gig.) Their only language is religious rhetoric and that's damned narrow stuff. Combined with the emotionalism of the born-again consciousness state, it reduces them to incomprehensible psychotics, especially when they feel threatened, which is constantly. Calm psychotics, but delusional and unreachable people nevertheless. ..there can be no dialogue because that which is not born of reason cannot be reasoned with. These people not only do not negotiate, they cannot even hear you."

Later in the article he says, "Don't kid yourself about making peace with these people. And for god's sake don't believe the pundit's horseshit about it being about "values." It is about a minority among us who want to stamp out all the advances made during the Enlightenment -- take us back to Biblical Law, wars and rumors of wars. And it is about a band of dyspeptic, neoconservative money grubbing bastards who knew how to exploit our ancient and destructive legacy, the war making Calvinist fundamentalism brought here by the Scots Irish and still smoldering across the heartland. By now most of you who live where you can buy a copy of the New York Times without special ordering it, or feel free to walk down the street arm in arm with a lover of another race, are starting to wake up. All I can say is that you have worse enemies than you know, and they will still be around next election. If there is one. And they can crush us if they manage to align themselves with the same kind of oppressive bastards they did this time. Which they will. They never cease, proof of which is that what we saw last November was the culmination of twenty years of organizing. What to do about it is still being debated, but to my mind, publicly calling these people what they really are would be a damned good start. "

I'm doing my part.

I'd reprint the whole thing here, but it's better than mine, so I won't.

IGNORANCE ISN'T BLISS; IT'S...IGNORANT

2004-11-11T13:07:00.000-05:00

Check out this chart at http://chrisevans3d.com/files/iq.htm. It's going around the net, you've probably seen it.

Actually, while this may be fun, the Economist, which originally printed the chart, printed a retraction: "Last week we published a list that purported to show the IQs of states voting for George Bush and Al Gore in 2000. Alas, we were the victim of a hoax: no such data exists. By way of apology, here are two very crude ratings of states' intelligenceand how they voted." http://www.economist.com/World/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2692859

But so what. One sign of a truly stupid person is making the choice to remain ignorant when presented with facts. This explains not only the election but abstinence-only programs, creationism, and their time-honored tradition of selectively choosing passages from the bible to support their particular loci of ignorance. After all, why let a fact stand in the way of a good opinion?

What else would one expect from people who believe in The Rapture; 17% of those 70 million self-identified Evangelicals believe the world will end (the Rapture) in their lifetime. So we are now in the end times, according to them. After Israel is established, God will swoop down and transport only the true believers to Heaven, and smite everyone else, including the Jews--except for 144,000, and I have no idea why. Comic relief?

Bush is one of those evangelicals.

But of course there's more to this story than ignorance. There's venality. Oh, there's plenty of that.

Look at Bush denying global warming, encouraging homophobia, and prohibiting stem cell research from that perspective. Denying established scientific consensus certainly appeases his conservative Xian "base" so widely blathered about, as does his homophobia; but he has more than one base. Now that the cabal has again stolen the presidency*, he can concentrate on his real base--the rich and powerful robber barons of capitalism, whose allegiance he cemented--as if he needed more stickiness--with his tax cuts. Who benefits most from ignoring environmental concerns? Big Energy,of course. Who benefits from prohibiting stem cell research? Big Pharma. Explore every issue where this administration obstructs or overturns progressive policies and name your industry that benefits. Those Christians ain't benefiting on the material plane, that's for sure. They're getting screwed over as much as we are; in fact even more, since those red states rely even more on government largesse than the blue states, and most of that largesse these days is going up the chain, not down. Another fact they choose to ignore.

It sure is annoying, though, that their willful ignorance so negatively impacts the rest of the sentient world, and for long beyond their much-prized Rapture date.

While I'm fairly sure Bush's membership in his religious cult is hearfelt (with this man and his co-conspirators one can't be truly sure of any integrity), his desire to please and enrich his corporate daddies trumps most of his dedication to his fellow religious bonkjobs. Religion is his foil. He used it, as so many have before him, to maintain power. And he maintains power for the main purpose of increasing tribute to plutocracy.

*How do we define "stolen?" Will it prove to be voting corruption again, as many progressive organizations are investigating now? Maybe. But a cabal that wins by the nastiest lying and distortion of fact I've ever seen, by manipulating a system filled with loopholes in the most corrupt way, by stooping so low that the bar is on the floor--well, that's theft to me. Regardless of how the voting recounts come out, this team has stolen another chunk of our still-evolving democracy and threw it into the garbage disposal. They've stolen more than the election. They've stolen hope that America could become the idealistic Democracy that 54 million voters, in their unrelenting ignorance, think it already is. That's a capital offense.

NO PUN INTENDED

2004-11-11T13:05:00.000-05:00

NO PUN INTENDED

1. Two vultures board an airplane, each carrying two dead raccoons.
The stewardess looks at them and says, "I'm sorry,
gentlemen, only one carrion allowed per passenger."

2. Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina. One went
to Hollywood and became a famous actor. The other stayed
behind in the cotton fields and never amounted to much. The second one,
naturally, became known as the lesser of two weevils.

3. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, but when they lit a fire in
the craft, it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and
heat it, too.

4. A three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old
West. He slides up to the bar and announces: "I'm looking for the man
who shot my paw."

5. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain
during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

6. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in
the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an
hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. "But
why?" they asked, as they moved. "Because," he said, "I can't stand chess
nuts boasting in an open foyer."

7. A woman has twins and gives them up for adoption. One of them goes to a
family in Egypt and is named "Ahmal." The other goes to a family in Spain;
they name him "Juan." Years later, Juan sends a picture of himself to his
birth mother. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband that she
wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. Her husband responds, "They're
twins! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal."

8. These friars were behind on their belfry payments, so they opened up a
small florist shop to raise funds. Since everyone liked to buy flowers from
the men of God, a rival florist across town thought the competition was
unfair. He asked the good fathers to close down, but they would not. He
went back and begged the friars to close. They ignored him. So, the rival
florist hired Hugh MacTaggart, the roughest and most vicious thug in town
to "persuade" them to close. Hugh beat up the friars and trashed their
store, saying he'd be back if they didn't close up shop. Terrified, they
did so, thereby proving that Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist
friars.

9. Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which
produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very
little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from
bad breath. This made him ... what?
A super callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

10. And finally, there was a girl who sent ten different puns to friends,
with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh.
Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

WAS THE ELECTION STOLEN?

2004-11-10T18:39:00.000-05:00

Well, yes.

The truth is out there.

Soon it'll be here--and everywhere.

For now, check out http://blackboxvoting.org/

Am I the only wondering why everyone to the left of Joe Lieberman except the Kerry campaign is investigating this?

FUCK THE SOUTH

2004-11-10T17:57:00.000-05:00

I wish I'd written this. My only complaint is the anonymous author is too easy on these bonkjobs. I was just getting warmed up. Please sir, may I have some more?

"Fuck the South. Fuck 'em. We should have let them go when they wanted to leave. But no, we had to kill half a million people so they'd stay part of our special Union. Fighting for the right to keep slaves - yeah, those are states we want to keep.

And now what do we get? We're the fucking Arrogant Northeast Liberal Elite? How about this for arrogant: the South is the Real America? The Authentic America. Really?

Cause we fucking founded this country, assholes. Those Founding Fathers you keep going on and on about? All that bullshit about what you think they meant by the Second Amendment giving you the right to keep your assault weapons in the glove compartment because you didn't bother to read the first half of the fucking sentence? Who do you think those wig-wearing lacy-shirt sporting revolutionaries were? They were fucking blue-staters, dickhead. Boston? Philadelphia? New York? Hello? Think there might be a reason all the fucking monuments are up here in our backyard?

No, No. Get the fuck out. We're not letting you visit the Liberty Bell and fucking Plymouth Rock anymore until you get over your real American selves and start respecting those other nine amendments. Who do you think those fucking stripes on the flag are for? Nine are for fucking blue states. And it would be 10 if those Vermonters had gotten their fucking Subarus together and broken off from New York a little earlier. Get it? We started this shit, so don't get all uppity about how real you are you Johnny-come-lately "Oooooh I've been a state for almost a hundred years" dickheads. Fuck off.

Arrogant? You wanna talk about us Northeasterners being fucking arrogant? What's more American than arrogance? Hmmm? Maybe horsies? I don't think so. Arrogance is the fucking cornerstone of what it means to be American. And I wouldn't be so fucking arrogant if I wasn't paying for your fucking bridges, bitch.

All those Federal taxes you love to hate? It all comes from us and goes to you, so shut up and enjoy your fucking Tennessee Valley Authority electricity and your fancy highways that we paid for. And the next time Florida gets hit by a hurricane you can come crying to us if you want to, but you're the ones who built on a fucking swamp. "Let the Spanish keep it, it’s a shithole," we said, but you had to have your fucking orange juice.

The next dickwad who says, "It’s your money, not the government's money" is gonna get their ass kicked. Nine of the ten states that get the most federal fucking dollars and pay the least... can you guess? Go on, guess. That’s right, motherfucker, they're red states. And eight of the ten states that receive the least and pay the most? It’s too easy, asshole, they’re blue states. It’s not your money, assholes, it’s fucking our money. What was that Real American Value you were spouting a minute ago? Self reliance? Try this for self reliance: buy your own fucking stop signs, assholes.

Let’s talk about those values for a fucking minute. You and your Southern values can bite my ass because the blue states got the values over you fucking Real Americans every day of the goddamn week. Which state do you think has the lowest divorce rate you marriage-hyping dickwads? Well? Can you guess? It’s fucking Massachusetts, the fucking center of the gay marriage universe. Yes, that’s right, the state you love to tie around the neck of anyone to the left of Strom Thurmond has the lowest divorce rate in the fucking nation. Think that’s just some aberration? How about this: 9 of the 10 lowest divorce rates are fucking blue states, asshole, and most are in the Northeast, where our values suck so bad. And where are the highest divorce rates? Care to fucking guess? 10 of the top 10 are fucking red-ass we're-so-fucking-moral states. And while Nevada is the worst, the Bible Belt is doing its fucking part.

But two guys making out is going to fucking ruin marriage for you? Yeah? Seems like you're ruining it pretty well on your own, you little bastards. Oh, but that's ok because you go to church, right? I mean you do, right? Cause we fucking get to hear about it every goddamn year at election time. Yes, we're fascinated by how you get up every Sunday morning and sing, and then you're fucking towers of moral superiority. Yeah, that's a workable formula. Maybe us fucking Northerners don't talk about religion as much as you because we're not so busy sinning, hmmm? Ever think of that, you self-righteous assholes? No, you're too busy erecting giant stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in buildings paid for by the fucking Northeast Liberal Elite. And who has the highest murder rates in the nation? It ain't us up here in the North, assholes.

Well this gravy train is fucking over. Take your liberal-bashing, federal-tax-leaching, confederate-flag-waving, holier-than-thou, hypocritical bullshit and shove it up your ass.

And no, you can't have your fucking convention in New York next time. Fuck off. "

Click here to contact the author.

And read on, where I reference this article and give its website.

VALUES

2004-11-10T17:40:00.000-05:00

Feeling sorry, like you need to tell the world "It Ain't Me, Babe....No No No It Ain't Me You're looking For, Babe (From B. Dylan, a popular artist from ancient times when only Love meant never having to say your sorry): www.sorryeverybody.com

Tired of this nonstop Rove propaganda-machine bazzfazz about red state "values" (now its "values voters"--but I guess that's marginally better than "security moms) and the punditry's continued dead-from-the-neck-up goosestepping blather about how they didn't vote for us because we're arrogant and condescend to the southern sensibility. That we think they're stupid? Well, http://fuckthesouth.com/and http://www.bobsgeek.info/dfus.gif

Because
1) They ARE stupid. Yes, it's true. It's always the stupid ones who don't know they're stupid, after all. I mean, look at Ben Affleck--I mean Britney Spears--that is, Clarence Thomas...OK, don't, you're right. Some things are just too painful.
2) They're selfrighteous sanctimonius whining fanatical hypocrites whose idea of values means it's OK to hate and kill as long they get to decide who gets hated, who gets dead,and how it happens. Oh yeh, evolution is only a theory. Here's a theory--evolution bypassed these pre-hominids. Apologies to pre-hominids, and damn you, evolution. What where you thinking? Clearly they're not descendents of Homo-erectus, because Homo-erectus was significantly brainier than his predecessors--except for that subset knows as Log-Cabinids. Evolution, you may be fickle, but you got a great sense of irony.
3) As Carville said a few years ago, "We're right, they're wrong." (Even an idiot can occasionally say something wise--except, apparently, the Chosen One in the oval office)If the Democrats in their clearly finite wisdom decide to pander to these fools (I mean the media--come on!) instead of defending the real values of any just society, like Volvos that run on carbs--they're just gonna die anyway--then, as my 8th grade general science teacher used to yell at us, "no culture, no future, no hope."

Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian, Says: "The party that so gloriously brought this country the fabulous Red Scare of the 1950s, in a bit of an about-face, has now made the godly throughout America scared they are not a Red. State, that is. With this in mind, I have drafted this handy list as a quick reference to determine if you are living in one of those demon-infested Blue States – or Jesusland!" http://www.bettybowers.com/nl_redorblue.html

Meanwhile, time to buy property in Tierra del Fuego.

Well, illuminati, are you happy now?

--Thorath Ovgahd

MICHAEL MOORE'S SPEECH AT THE "TAKE BACK AMERICA" FORUM IN BOSTON DURING THE DNC.

2004-08-10T14:48:00.000-05:00

I mentioned this speech in an earlier post. Here it is.

Transcript of Michael Moore's speech:

I don't know what it is with right-wingers and Republicans. They seem to have hijacked over the years the word "patriotism", the American flag, these things. And it's an odd thing. I have been thinking about this lately. Because the true patriots are those who believe the important thing is to ask questions, you know. To dissent when necessary. And I know a lot of people have seen my film and the obvious bad guy in the movie is George W. Bush. But there's the unstated villain in the film. And that's our national media.

You've seen the film. Right? A lot of them are mad at me right now because I can't go on a show without them, you know. But I would be mad if I were them too, because the film outs them. It outs them as being for the Bush administration. It outs them as people who were cheerleaders for this war. It outs them as, to be kind to those who are actually good journalists, journalists who fell asleep on the job. Journalists who didn't ask the hard questions. The one thing I hear when people come out of the theater over and over again is I never saw that on the news. Right? I never saw those Black congressmen being shut down one after another. Did anyone see that?

I didn't know there was a riot at the inauguration parade. I never saw the egg hit the limo. I never saw that! I don't hear from the amputees who sit in our hospitals, 5,000 or 6,000 of them. How come I don't hear from them on the nightly news? I don't hear from the mothers. I don't see them on the evening news, the mothers of children who have been killed in Iraq and who state their opposition to this war. I haven't seen them on the news.

Why haven't I seen this? I live in a free and open country that has a free and open press where you can show us anything. That's the great thing about America. You can show us anything! You can ask any question you want to ask. And this is my humble plea to those of you from the press here. And don't any of you take this personally. I don't mean it this way, but I – we, the people, we need you. We need you to do your jobs! We need you! To ask the questions, demand the evidence! Demand the evidence! Don't ever send us to war without asking the questions!

You do us no service by hopping on a band wagon, by becoming cheerleaders, by looking the other way, because you know that's the safest way to play it if you want to keep your job. Or, you are just afraid of being accused of being un-American if you were to ask a hard question to the President or his administration. That's not un-American. That's pro-American! To ask the questions. That's patriotic! But I know it was rough. I know in those first days of the war, I know. I stood on an Oscar stage five days into the war. I know what the mood was like. It was not easy to say we are being led to war for fictitious reasons. Right?

And those of you who felt the same way at the beginning of this war, you know, remember what it was like at work or at school? You had to be kind of careful. Right? And if you expressed any opposition to the war, you had to immediately say, but I support the troops! Right? But I support the troops. You didn't need to say that. Of course you support the troops. You've always supported the troops. Who are the troops? The troops are those who come from the other side of the tracks. The troops are the people who come from families who have been abused by the Bush administration. You've always supported them. You've always been on their side! This no one should question that!

The way that you don't support the troops is to send them into harm's way when it isn't necessary. The way that you hate the troops is when you send them off, some of them, to their death, so that your rich benefactors can line their pockets even more. The Halliburtons, the oil companies. That is anti-American. That is unpatriotic. You do not support the troops when you do that. The thing here is, and again, and I am not picking on the press who are here, but it is true. We are talking about our mainstream national media. A media, for instance, NBC, owned by General Electric. You know, I understand General Electric now has over $600 million worth of contracts in Iraq. They are war-profiteers. It doesn't surprise me that their news arm has failed to do the job that it needs to do to tell the truth to the American people about this war. There's nothing surprising about that. I understand that.

I understand the Matt Lauers and the Lisa Myers and the people that have to work for this entity. You have cameras and microphones and the ability to get into places of power that the people in this room can't get in. To ask these questions. And the great thing about this country is you can ask any question you want. You can ask any question you want and not be arrested. Right? You would not be sent to prison if you ask a question. So what has prevented you from asking the question? But you've got the little lapel flag pin. Right? And the TV. Screen filled up with American flags flying. See, we are patriotic. We are patriotic. But you've thrown down with the wrong people. You haven't just been embedded. You've been in bed with the wrong people. You've listened to those in power and just report their lies as truths....

The majority of our fellow Americans are liberal and progressive when it comes to the issues. That's not just me saying this or wishing it to be true. Every poll shows that the majority of Americans believe in women's rights. The majority of Americans want stronger environmental laws. The majority of Americans want government laws much the majority of Americans are pro-labor. Put down the whole list of issues, Americans, whether they use the label or not, and most Americans don't like labels, but most Americans in their hearts are liberals and progressives. It's just a small minority of people who hate. They hate. They exist in the politics of hate. They don't believe two consenting adults should have the right to be in love and share their lives together and be legally protected by the state for doing so. What would motivate that?

What business is it, anyway, of these people? These, they aren't patriots. They are HATE-triots and they believe in the politics of HATE-riotism. That's where they stand and patriotism is where real Americans stand. And that's the truth....

They keep saying that this is a 50/50 country. This is not a 50/50 country. In their wildest dreams, it's a 50/50 country. Look at all the polls I just, and I've got all the statistics in my book and I cite them all. And these aren't left wing polls. These are Gallup polls and even ABC and CNN polls and they go right down the line and you see where Americans are at. When they, when you hear about this close election, about the 50/50 country, don't forget the key words they always use. In a poll of likely voters. Likely voters. This is how far behind the media is with the times in which we live. They are using an old paradigm. They only poll people who have consistently voted in previous elections. But the other 50% of the country doesn't vote. If they wanted to be honest, they could say it's a 50/50/50 country because they never ask the other 50% how they feel. And I got to tell you, this is what they are in for a big surprise.

Come November 2, the other 50% you can't compare this election to any election before September 11, 2001.

That day and since that day has made average Americans more aware of what's going on in the world. They want to know more about what's going on in the world. They talk politics now. We all know this. Right? At work, you go in the bar, people are talking about politics. Anywhere you go, people talk politics. It's cool now to talk about politics. Right? It's uncool if you don't know what's going on in the world. It's uncool to be apathetic. Now that has not been the case for most of our lives much. Right? If you talked too much politics you were seen as kind of strange and wonkey. Right? But that's not the case. That's why John Stewart is so popular, because people want to talk about politics. They want to hear about it, and that's the big story that the media has missed. That there's been this shift in the country. And who are these 50% who don't vote? Who are they? Are they the wealthy and the privileged?

No. They are the people who have been most hurt by the Bush administration. They are people of color. They are single moms. They are poor. They are working class. They are young people. These are the people most affected by the policies of the Bush administration and they are now talking politics. And they are not apathetic. And I think we are going to see a significant number of them leave the house on November 2 and come out to vote.

I believe we'll have the largest percentage of people voting in our lifetime come November 2! I really, really believe, you don't hear that, though. You won't see that story reported because they are just focusing on likely voters from 1992, 1996 and 2000. And it's a 50/50 country. Like if they just keep repeating it enough, it will be true. It's a 50/50 country. Put your heels together now. It's a 50/50 country.

I got to tell you, I have traveled across this country quite a bit in the last year. It ain't a 50/50 country. People are angry. They want Bush out of the White House. They want to be able to send their kids to college. (applause) They want to be able to go to the doctor. This isn't a 50/50 country. Speak the truth. Come on. Take a real poll. Take a real poll!

A few weeks ago I was flipping around on the dial and I came across a NASCAR Race on FOX and there was NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt Jr. He said what would you do, what did you do the night before while you were getting prepared for the big race? He said, "Well, I took my crew to go see Fahrenheit 9/11." And then he said, and "I think all of America should see this movie." I fell off the couch! I said a little prayer for George W. Bush. I'm thinking oh, my God, I hope he's not watching this race now and eating pretzels!

Whoa. I thought, man, if the movie has gone that far into middle America, and this is where the country's at, how come we don't know this? How come this isn't being reported? What's wrong here? Well, we have our conventional wisdom and our conventional wisdom tells us that the paradigm that we have been following over the last 20 years is the one we must follow and that's the one we are worried about. Thank you. It doesn't hurt to report the truth. It's ok. You know. I was on a, one of those morning talk shows and after we went to commercial, the person who was interviewing me said you know, you are right, I mean when the war started, it was very difficult here to book the people we wanted to book, ask the questions we wanted to ask. In fact, I got a memo about my tone of voice. And apparently the brass had received a call from the Dick Cheney's office is what – and said that he didn't like my tone of voice. And I got a memo on it to watch my tone of voice. Well you've got to tell that story! You've got to tell that story. I can't. Well why? They can't fire you.

You are like one of the most well-known people in America. And, you know, you've got to tell this story. If you don't tell it, I'm going to wait like maybe another week. What's today? Within the week, I will put this on my web site. I'll tell the whole story and I'll name who said it. So this person is unnoticed now and I am doing it in a friendly way. Because this is a good person. You know? Just that I think the people deserve the truth and they need to know how the decisions get made behind the curtain. Who is pulling the strings here? Who's calling the shots? It's like, coming from where I come from politically, we always are in this place of yeah, the man this and the man that and this corporation and this and that and there's probably a part of us that says oh, you know, it's really, there's, maybe it's not that bad. You want to believe it isn't that bad. You know? And then, they have made the mistake of giving me a peek behind this curtain and I've seen this happen and it's stunning to me, for instance this whole experience with Disney not releasing the film and it's like what? – you know, the film has gone on now to make more money than any Disney film this year.

It shocked me at the time, because the way I have been able to get my work out there over the years is that usually when the media companies, greed always supercedes politics or personal animosity toward me. Oh, I can't stand the guy. Oh, how many books did he sell last week? Well, OK. Print a few more. You know this incredible flaw of capitalism that has always worked in my favor.

You know the old saying that the rich man will sell you the rope to hang yourself with if he can make a dollar off it? That will eventually be their undoing. But this time it didn't happen. This time a film made for a very small amount of money that will now make, you know, at least a quarter billion dollars around the world by the time it's done, the greed didn't motivate them to release this film. I couldn't figure it out for the longest time and it took a Canadian journalist to finally do the story and thank god for the Canadians, you know?... The Canadians really do like us. They just wish we would read a little more and – but it took a Canadian journalist to write that perhaps one of the problems that Mr. Moore had with Disney is the fact that the Saudi world family owns almost 17% of Euro-Disney. And that in 1994, Prince Walid, one of the richest men in the world, and a member of the Saudi Royal Family, wrote Michael Eisner and Disney a check for over $300 million to bail out Euro-Disney. And the people that helped put the thing together to bring the two together was a company called the Carlyle group.

Now my film was already done, you know, but I was like can it get any worse? Are they everywhere? But no journalist will ask Mr. Eisner or Disney the question: Will that have anything to do with the decision because their good friends maybe don't look that good in this movie. But this is what, just a small example of what we have come to expect. But the good news is that things are going to change very soon. And the other side, the unelected side, who occupy our white house, they are not going to go peacefully. They like being in charge with no mandate. All right? They actually believe they could take us to war based on no mandate from the people. And they knew that they had to lie to the people to get them to believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11th and that there were weapons of mass destruction and this, this, and that.

So they aren't going to go without a fight. And believe me, they are better fighters than we are. They have proven themselves; you have to give them their props for that. I mean, they are up at 6:00 in the morning trying to figure out which minority group they are going to screw today. The hate that they eat for breakfast. I mean, our side, we never see 6:00 in the morning unless unless we have been up all night.... So they are going to fight and they are going to smear and they are going to lie and they are going to hate. And we have to get out there and counter that with the truth. We have to get out there and we have to get up and we have to get moving. And we must not stop between now and November 2. No stopping! No stopping! I'm telling you, if we don't do it....

[R]eporters have been asking me while I have been here at the convention, so how do you square the fact, this John Kerry, that he voted for the war? And my answer to them is similar to the answer actually I gave a soldier who stopped me on street a short time back. And he said to me, you know, I was on a ship off Iraq the night of the Oscars and we watched you give your speech. And we booed along with the audience. I was very angry at you for what you said that night but now that I have been there and served my tour in Iraq, what you said was the truth. They sent us there under false pretenses. And he said to me I want to apologize to you for booing at you on that ship. And I said to him, you owe me no apology. It is we, the American people, who need to apologize to you for sending you into harm's way based on a lie. I apologize to you. And I said to him your only crime is that you believed your president. Why would you apologize for believing your Commander in Chief? You are supposed to be able to believe your commander in chief. You are supposed to be able to believe the president.

Because if we don't have that, that basic thing of being able to believe what comes out of the mouth of the president of the United States, my friend, what are we left with? What are we left with if you can't believe anything that's being said from the man who sits in the white house? John Kerry did what 70 to 80% of our fellow Americans did. He believed. And he believed that he was going to do something in a different way, but he believed in the majority of our fellow Americans believe. Do we point our finger at them now? Do you point your finger at your neighbors and your friends who supported the war at the beginning but no longer support it because now 54% of this country believes the war is wrong and never should have been fought? Do you?

Does one in this room sit on your high horse and look down at them? Oh, you supported the war! I didn't! Does anyone in this room have that attitude to your friends and neighbors and family members? Of course not. Of course not. People come to the wrong conclusions at their own speed. And you know what, friends? We are getting better at this. Because during Vietnam it took years before we figured it out. This time, it only took months. It only took a few months before the majority of Americans figured out how wrong this president was.

And that applause is for our fellow Americans, because they will always respond in the right way when given the truth. They will always come from a righteous place when they have the facts and information available to them. As soon as it was made available, as soon as that happened, they create, the shift took place, didn't it. And it's a long way from the 16 months but not that far, really, from those first days of the war. We now are the American majority. Would are with them and they are with us. And this is the American majority that's going to show up on November 2 and remove George W. Bush from the White House. I so believe that.

But it's only going to happen with our hard work and us coming from a good and gentle place with those that we speak to in the coming months. To hold out our hand and say, come on. It's ok. I mean, you should see some of the mail I am getting from Republicans. I love these letters. You know? Because there are good Republicans. And I predict we are going to see Republicans for Kerry movements across the country. Because a lot of people who call themselves Republicans are that way because they, you know, they just don't like the government sticking their hand in the pocket. Right? That's really their big issue. You know. You've got one in your family. Come on. Everyone in here. Right? They just don't like paying their taxes. Do they? Hum? [laughter] ok. But they are good on everything else, aren't they. They believe women should be paid the same as men. Right? They don't believe companies should be dumping crud into the river. Right? They don't believe assault weapons should be made available easily on the streets. They are good on all the other things. They just don't want their hard-earned money taken out of their pocket.

Well, all we got to do is show them how George W. Bush has taken this money from them and from their children and grandchildren. These are the people that are going have to pay off this incredible debt that this war has created. George W. Bush has gone from being the compassionate conservative to the anti-conservative. He doesn't really believe in conservative values. And we need to do that. But here's my plea to the Democrats and to Mr. Kerry. You will not win this election by being weak kneed and wimpy and wishy-washy and lacking the courage of your convictions. The only way this is going to happen is if you stand up forthrightly and say what you believe and push for the liberal progressive agenda that the majority of America already agrees with. If you move to the right, thinking that's how you are going to pick up a few extra votes from that very small sliver of likely voters who haven't made up their mind yet, if you give up the very principles and things that the people in this room and those delegates believe in, to get those few votes over there, you will encourage millions to stay home.

The people who are already feeling disenfranchised who are full of despair and have sunk into their own cynicism believing what's the use? What's the use? You know, if the Democrats move that way, they will in the only energize the base, the base will stay home. I went to one of these meeting of ACT, I forget what it stands for. America coming together, one, two, and they put up on the screen a map of Cleveland, Ohio and they showed a precinct in Cleveland that was 96% African American. 96%. Total vote are turnout in 2000, 13%. You can't get more base of the Democratic Party than African Americans and if you don't have a message that will inspire them to come out on Election Day and tells them with no B.S. and shows them how their life will be better, we will not win this election....

I say this not to rain on the party. We are all in this together. And as they said last night, we have a big tent. And all of us, from conservative democrats to greens who are voting democrat, are all in this tent right now for one common goal. That's to get our white house back in our hands, the majority's.

And a word about Ralph Nader. Yes, the Republicans do love Ralph. I just came from Michigan where Ralph turned in 50,000 signatures. 43,000 of which were gathered by the Michigan Republican party. This is a painful thing to witness, because of the great Americans, Ralph Nader is one of them. His legacy, what's done for this country has been incredible. And what I and others try to explain to Ralph before he decided to run is that you already did your job. The Democratic Party of 2004 is not the Democratic Party of 2000. The threat that you posed in 2000, they got the message. And it was carried on by Howard dean and Dennis Kucinich and others in this year. And they helped push the Democrats toward where the majority of Americans that liberal progressive majority, is at.

You did a great thing and now, they are in a better place. You have to admit that. Even Al Gore of 2004 isn't the Al Gore of 2000. He's moved! And all you have to do, if you think the Democrats this year are the same as the democrats four years ago, ask yourself this question. Do you think john Kerry will ask Bill Clinton not to campaign in Arkansas for him? Hum? I don't think so. So my appeal to the Nader voters, to the greens out there, is that we have a different job to do this year....

I think that when it comes to that day people will know what to do. But I would not have the Democrats spending any time attacking Ralph Nader. All right? That is the wrong way to go. What the Democrats should be doing, and I have heard Kerry say this, is we need to give, we need to give those who are thinking of voting for Ralph Nader, a reason to vote for John Kerry. That is the right answer.

When I was in Cannes with the movie, I showed it to the American students whose were working there. There were about 200 of them. At the end of the movie, I asked them, let me just ask you a question, how many of you are college-aged student, how many of you are thinking for Ralph Nader? Nearly had a lot of them raised their hand. I invited Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, to come and sit in the back. They didn't know she was there. And she witnessed this. And we went out to lunch afterwards and she was shocked. How could they, after watching this movie, for two hours, with the message of the movie that seems to be that Bush must go, that nearly half of them would say they are still considering voting for Ralph Nader?

I think I saw one poll recently that said 12% of 18-25-year-olds are planning on voting for Ralph Nader. And I said to her, I said you have to tell your dad that, you know, because they, some of the kids that gave their reasons and they spoke with all that great honesty that comes out of an 18 or a 19-year old. Right? Because there's [beep] right? When you are 18 and 19. And they call you on it really quickly. I said you need to tell your dad that the way to deal with this is to take the strong stand that needs to be taken. The majority of Americans are already with you. Don't be afraid. Speak out on these issues. Speak out about health care in the right way. Don't put ads on TV that say we will provide health care for nearly all Americans. Don't do that. Stand up for something. Don't be afraid. Don't try to be the hamburger version of the Republican Party. And I think he got that message. And I think that from what I've heard in recent weeks, I got to say this and I've said this to everybody here who's been asking me about the war.

One thing I do know about Kerry, he will not invade a country like George W. Bush did. I believe in my heart of hearts – that this man, because you know, when you have been shot three times and you have been in that situation and you know this – if you have family members whose have been to war, if you have parents who were in World war II, my dad always says to me, he was in the Marines in the south pacific and he said, you know, if you have been there, you never want to see anybody else go there. And you want it to be the last resort. And so in my heart, I trust that when he says that. In closing, I just want to thank you for everything that everyone here has done. We are all in the same boat together....

I am glad these rallies are taking place, because, you know, I don't know how the press will write about these gatherings of these rallies.... This is not a niche of the Democratic Party. The things that the people in this room believe in is where the American public is at. Especially where I believe a large chunk of that 50%, that non-voting public, is at. And it's going to be our job to get them out on November 2 and that's what we are all going to do. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you.

This speech was transcripted by Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!

VOTE OR WE'LL KILL YOUR DOG

2004-08-10T13:37:00.000-05:00

I wrote this again in response to someone on either the Citizens for Legitimate Government list or Speak-Your-Peace.

CLG is at http://legitgov.org/
SYP is a Yahoo group, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Speak-Your-Peace/?yguid=186198871

Whether it's because of Kerry or the Democrats policies on Iraq or their
lack of seriously controlling corporate influence, or for any reason,
many people on the left feel in good conscience that they cannot vote
for Kerry. They may or may not vote for Nader, but are sympathetic to
his call that both parties are essentially in bed with corporate
America, and that Kerry's plans for Iraq are not that different from
Bush's.

Because this list is about Peace, many invoke the fact that neither
candidate can be called anti-war. Bush obviously so, and Kerry because
he won't support US total withdrawal from Iraq immediately or in any
case sooner than we want. And that he has supported actually increasing
troop levels there.

Ya got us there.

But one of the reasons, obviously, for being anti-war, as of course we
all are, is to prevent needless human suffering and death.

In that regard, Iraq is a minor player, as I'll illustrate.

So I must ask you which candidate, outside of Iraq, contribute to and
increase human suffering and death, and which will not only not increase
it, but work to reduce it. And also to consider that, again outside of
Iraq, the actual number of deaths--actual and clearly to come-- directly
linked to this administration's policies, vs those that would be linked
to a Democratic presidency..

The other Bush policies that result in increased death and suffering are
well known to readers of this list, but are worth repeating. They mostly
involve sexual and reproductive freedom, and amount to an unprecedented
attack on women. A war, in fact.

I mentioned previously that Bush's reinstatement of the abortion gag
rule for international health and reproductive care agencies in
developing countries has resulted in the deaths of 300,000 women.
Estimates are of 10,000 civilian and military Iraqi deaths, and 1000
Americans. 5000 Americans are seriously wounded, and I don't know the
count of Iraqi wounded, but it surely is in the thousands.

We all consider those to be needless, but so are those of 300,000
women. That's vs 11,000 known dead in Iraq.

The World Aids Conference this week highlights the other front in the
Bush wars, and there are three main factors.
1. Obstructing making anti-viral drugs affordable: We know of Bush's
interests in protecting Big Pharma via the Medicare bill, which is a
megabillion dollar windfall for that industry. The US's pressuring of
poor countries to relinquish rights to make the generic drugs in return
for free trade agreements is consistent with this policy.
2: Promoting abstinence instead of condom use: The administration's
policy is ABC--Abstinence, Being Faithful, and Condoms, in that order of
priority. They believe that condom use promotes promiscuity. (That
policy applied in the US has resulted in increased rates of teenage
pregnancy and STD's.) The US does not make much effort to counter absurd
claims that condoms are ineffective, nor does it want to challenge it's
main ally in this death march, Uganda, which has adopted the Bush ABC
approach.
3. Funding: It's still apparently little known that of the
already-insufficient $15B Bush has promised over the next few years to
fight AIDS in Africa (vs the $200B Bush will ultimately use to fight
Iraqis in Iraq), 1/3 of that money must be devoted solely to abstinence
programs.

I've copies two articles, below, that go into more detail on these
factors, But the end result is millions of unnecessary cases of AIDS in
the developing world, and millions of unnecessary deaths, both of which
not only bring about major suffering but economic devastation as well,
as family breadwinners die off and nations' workforces are decimated.

So let's compare:
Deaths from the Iraq debacle: 11,000 so far
Deaths from Bush's other policies: Millions

All of the policies that contribute to Bush's war on women, sexual and
reproductive freedom will be dismantled or reversed under a Democratic
administration.

So it seems clear and irrefutable that to be truly anti-war, one must do
all one can to defeat Bush. And that means voting for Kerry. The person
who does not vote out of protest over the Democrat's positions on two
war fronts (Iraq and the battle for control of our democracy) thereby
accedes the third front (the war on women and reproductive freedom and
AIDS) to the reactionaries, and rather than preventing needless death
and suffering, actually contributes to them.

Surely that is not the intent of the non-voter, but it is the result.

Please reconsider. The struggle to eliminate armed conflict as anything
but a last resort will continue no matter what, and for the foreseeable
future, regardless of who wins this November. But the number of deaths
from other "wars" will continue in the millions if Bush wins. If
conscience and principle are the guiding forces, how in good conscience
can one contribute to these millions of deaths on the grounds of
protesting thousands of deaths. It may be unseemly to reduce this to a
numbers game, but it surely is one. The greater good needs the
non-voters hearts to listen to these pleas, bite the bullet yet again,
and vote.

Here are the two articles:

*AIDS is "Terrorism'' Richard Gere Tells World AIDS Conference
by Vijay Joshi
The Associated Press/

(Bangkok) France accused the United States of ``blackmail'' tactics to
pressure poor countries into ceding rights to make cheap generic HIV
drugs, while the AIDS conference issued a stirring call Tuesday to get
more medicine to millions of needy in the developing world.

``A vicious terrorist is out there. It is not Osama bin Laden, it is
AIDS,'' Hollywood actor Richard Gere told the conference. ``The biggest
threat to our livelihood, our happiness is AIDS.''

A U.S. official denied the French allegation as ``nonsense,'' while
conference delegates lamented World Health Organization figures that
show only about seven per cent of the six million people in poor
countries who need anti-retroviral treatment are getting it.

``All of us with the power and responsibility to make a difference, can
only hang our heads in shame,'' said Jim Kim, WHO's AIDS director. ``We
know what we need to do. We know prevention and treatment must be
accelerated together.''

Since the last AIDS conference in Barcelona in 2002 generated optimism
about the availability of new anti-retroviral drugs, six million people
have died of AIDS and 10 million have become newly infected.

``By these measures of human life _ the ones that really matter _ we
have failed. And we have failed miserably to do enough in the precious
time that has passed since Barcelona,'' Kim said.

The number of people on treatment has doubled in the developing world to
440,000. UN officials hope to treat three million people there by 2005.

Cost of the drugs is a key issue. European and U.S. pharmaceutical
giants make most of them, protected by patents and costing as much as
$5,000 US ($6,600 Cdn) per person per year.

Some developing countries such as Thailand, India and Brazil are making
cheap generic drugs but not enough to reach everybody. Some 38 million
people are infected with HIV, mostly in poor countries: 25 million in
sub-Saharan Africa and 7.2 million in Asia.

French officials accused the United States of pressuring poor countries
to relinquish rights to make the generic drugs in return for free trade
agreements. In a written statement to the conference, President Jacques
Chirac called that tactic ``tantamount to blackmail.''

France's global ambassador on AIDS, Mireille Guigaz, said Chirac's
comments were not aimed at creating new tensions with the United States
but were ``a question between the United States and developing countries.''

``The United States wants to put pressure on developing countries who
try to stand up for their own industries,'' Guigaz said. ``This is a
problem.''

World Trade Organization rules give developing countries the flexibility
to ignore foreign patents and produce copies of expensive drugs in times
of health crises. All WTO members including the United States have
signed an agreement to respect that clause.

But there is nothing to prevent a country from imposing patent
restrictions in a bilateral trade agreement, such as the one Washington
is negotiating with Thailand.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, called the French
allegations ``nonsense,'' and insisted the trade agreements will be
consistent with WTO rules that will allow poor countries to make generic
drugs.

``There really is no issue,'' he said.

Chirac also called on rich nations to raise donations to the 2{-year-old
UN Global Fund aimed primarily at fighting AIDS by $3 billion ($4
billion) per year. Wealthy countries have committed only a fifth of the
$3.5 billion ($4.6 billion) the fund needs for next year, UN officials said.

A group of African protesters interrupted a French minister delivering
Chirac's message to demand more AIDS funding from developed G-8 countries.

``Shame! Shame!'' they chanted in harmony for nearly a minute. Activists
at the venue have also splashed red paint on posters of the G-8 leaders.

*Condoms vs Abstinence Divides World AIDS Conference
by Ian Mader
The Associated Press

Posted: July 12, 2004 11:02 am ET

(Bangkok) AIDS conference delegates were deeply split over the use of
condoms Monday, with Uganda's leader drawing criticism for insisting
they are less effective for HIV prevention than campaigns to promote
abstinence and loving relationships.

President Yoweri Museveni's comments on the second day of the
International AIDS Conference were in line with the policy of U.S.
President George W. Bush but at odds with a majority of researchers and
AIDS activists at the meeting.

Condoms have been promoted as a front line defense against AIDS by
countries such as Thailand where a campaign to get sex workers to insist
on condoms yielded a more-than-sevenfold reduction in HIV rates in 13 years.

An epidemiologist tracking Asia's emerging epidemics told conference
delegates that additional countries - including China and Bangladesh -
face HIV problems largely driven by prostitution, and that promoting
condoms is best to block further spread.

``I disagree with (Museveni) ... condoms are greatly shortchanged in
Africa as a prevention method,'' said Tim Brown, of the Hawaii-based
think-tank East West Center. ``If you increase condom use by 50 per
cent, I guarantee you that HIV will go down by 50 per cent.''

Uganda has waged a successful battle against the spread of HIV in a rare
success story for sub-Saharan Africa - though some experts say it's
unclear how that success has been achieved.

Museveni said loving relationships based on trust are crucial, and that
``the principle of condoms is not the ultimate solution.''

``In some cultures sexual intercourse is so elaborate that condoms are a
hindrance,'' he told a conference plenary session. ``Let the condom be
used by people who cannot abstain, cannot be faithful, or are estranged.''

Museveni, in a departure from many western proponents of abstinence
before wedlock, said marriage should be flexible, and that sticking with
someone when a relationship turns sour might mean that an unfaithful
partner brings home an infection.

``Ideological monogamy is also part of the problem,'' he said.

Uganda pioneered a strategy that later became known as ``ABC'' or
``Abstinence, Being faithful, and Condoms'' - in that order - a policy
backed by Bush. Critics have said promoting condoms should come first.

Uganda has brought its infection rate down from more than 30 per cent in
the early 1990s to about six per cent of the country's 25 million people
last year.

Many conference delegates criticized the Bush administration's AIDS
funding initiatives for requiring that one-third of the money allotted
for HIV prevention support abstinence-until-marriage programs.

``In an age where five million people are newly infected each year and
women and girls too often do not have the choice to abstain, an
abstinence-until-marriage program is not only irresponsible, it's really
inhumane,'' U.S. Congresswoman Barbara Lee said, presenting a report by
family planning group Population Action International.

Lee, a California Democrat, and other delegates urged more spending to
expand the availability of affordable condoms in the developing world.
Activists at a youth session punctuated those demands with a song to the
tune of Queen's We Will Rock You - with the lyrics, ``We want, we want
protection!''

Some 25 million of the 38 million infected with HIV worldwide are in
sub-Saharan Africa, but the virus is taking root increasingly in Asia,
where 7.6 million are infected.

In Asia, the sex trade has been the main engine behind infections in
countries such as Thailand and Cambodia, where epidemics exploded by the
late 1980s - sparking aggressive responses including campaigns to boost
condom use, said Brown.

Other Asian countries where the proportion of men who visit prostitutes
is lower will face the same problem but more slowly.

``The slowly evolving epidemics of Asia are very dangerous, because they
will grow steadily and silently,'' Brown said, and are less likely to
prompt aggressive government responses.

Brown said China and Bangladesh are potential hotspots because their
rate of condom use is only about 10 per cent.

©Associated Press 2004

OBAMA, MOORE, AND THE DNC

2004-08-10T13:35:00.000-05:00

A response to a friend about Obama:

Yes, I felt the same way. Out of the blue, a brilliant contender appears. And I agree with one of the pundits, who later said he will--not may, but will--be our first black president. He was positively mesmerizing.

And how about that Theresa? Forget Hillary for prez--I'd go for Theresa, after hearing that quietly powerful speech. I've always liked Hillary, but I never heard her tell an asshole reporter to shove it. So she can be VP.

We were lucky enough to get in to see Howard Dean, Michael Moore, Robert Reich, Carl Pope and others in the first day of the Campaign for America's Future's "Take Back America" forum. Dean and Moore were absolutely incredible. Dean spoke for 30 minutes, and got us all pumped up--much better than he did at the convention last night, or even during his campaign. Reich was his in his usual bright, witty and feisty form, and then Moore took us over the top. All the media--dozens and dozens--were surrounding him and the stage while he lambasted them repeatedly for their impotence, cowardice and co-option over the last four years. We jumped out of our seats applauding at least a dozen times. I missed the Boston Social Forum, so it was a thrill to be in ballroom full of progessives, on the floor and at the podium.

Inerestingly, though, among all the speakers at that event and at the convention itself, Moore was the only one who even mentioned the equal marriage issue, with a comment that anybody ought to be able to be with anybody, nobody's elses business, etc. Clearly "they" have decided to strategically ignore this issue this week.

Moore revealed another reason for Disney's refusal to distribute his film. It turns out one of the Saud family's richest princes (Moore named him, don't remember the name) bailed out EuroDisney to the tune of $300 million a while back. Another good point that he made, that maybe you have thought about but I confess I hadn't, was that all of the polls that claim the country was 50/50 divided did not poll that "other 50%," that portion of the populace that doesn't vote. The pollsters poll "likely voters." When the opinions of that "third 50%" were taken into account, there was no 50/50 split--a majority of the people supported traditional liberal/progressive positions, and are looking for standard bearers to represent those positions, not be Repub lite yet again.

As many times as I've seen Moore on TV being interviewed or on talk shows, his talk--not a speech-- yesterday was light years more insightful, informative and inspiring--and funnier--than I have ever seen from him.

As we exited, we were video-inteviewed by a French TV reporter, who asked us about Kerry distancing himself from Moore and the movie, and yada yada about the campaign moving rightward as a strategy, whether we thought that was true and whether it was a good idea. We told him to shove it and go eat some freedom fries, you cheese-eating surrender monkey. No, actually we told him that we all felt that taking the advice of Clinton (even though his speech seemed to belie his backroom DLC-centrist maneuvering) and the DLC and moving to the center or rightward was a big mistake, and used Moore's comments as support for that conclusion, and by the way we love France but honi soit qui mal y pense, eh, cochon?

What a day.

I expect CAF will have these talks available recorded or transcribed on their website at some point: http://www.ourfuture.org/

Meanwhile, Amy Goodman has compiled them all, and many others, for downloading in transcript, audio or video format. At least she did. Now I can't find them on her website: http://www.democracynow.org/index.pl

DEAR CNN

2004-08-10T13:33:00.000-05:00

A letter I wrote to CNN after watching some of their disgusting DNC coverage:

Dear CNN,

I don't get it.

I used to trust CNN as being truly fair and balanced, as opposed to that other network. But watching the DNC coverage on CNN, at times it was hard to tell if I was watching Fox or CNN. I had that same reaction watching MSNBC--is this Fox?

If all three major cable news networks are going to fill their airtime with conservative pundits, conservative newscasters who fail to keep their slants to themselves, or Republican spin, then you will drive us all to the internet or the Daily Show (in spite of Brokaw's out-of-the-loop comments).

You're already losing market share to those venues. Do you really want your audience to comprise that percentage of the conservative half of this country that watches anything other than Fox? Don't see how you can stay afloat economically if that trend continues. Obviously I'm on the left, but you should know that everyone I talk to was so disappointed with CNN this week that they are tuning off. Can you affford that? Do you want that? You can't outfox Fox--so why try?

You once were fair and balanced. CNN has an opportunity to reclaim the role of an independent and thoughtful news network that shook off pressures to conform to any political point of view, and thus was a real alternative. You can be so again--if you want.

With that will come greater market share. Don't you want that?

My family encourages CNN to return to its roots. More than ever America and the world needs what made CNN a household name in the first place. We don't need another Fox wannabe.

Sincerely,
Arthur Cohen

FOR WHOOPI, TO UNILEVER/SLIMFAST

2004-08-10T13:28:00.000-05:00

A letter I wrote to the PR flack at Unilever, parent company of SlimFast.
Keckler@slimfast.com

Dear Ms. Keckler,

Shame on Unilever for giving in to an orchestrated campaign of intimidation. You, being in Communications and PR, know as well as anyone that this is an artificial controversy created by one small segment of our society as part of their campaign to advance their own extremist agenda. And you surely know as well that the media have been too often uncritical accomplices to much of this political grandstanding, as demonstrated yet again by essentially parroting that segment's criticism of Ms. Goldberg, and that entire fund raising event.
In this regard, Whoopi has become yet another scapegoat, and you have also become accomplices. Giving in to intimidation by self-censoring is the worst form of citizenship--corporate or individual. And of course you are aware that--this being a created scandal--the vast majority of your customer base does not give a hoot about Whoopi's so-called "offensive" remarks. But they do care about intimidation of thought and speech.

It has been suggested that Unilever has much to gain by supporting the Bush administration due to its military contracts. We will never know your company's true motivation for this action, but it is suspect, because surely this huge multinational corporation cannot be intimidated by extremists who would attack for political gain one of the foundations of this democracy, the First Amendment--the very amendment that guarantees your company's right to promote itself as it sees fit, including who you choose as a spokesperson. The irony of your decision is not lost on your customers. You may not have compromised Ms. Goldberg's free speech, but you surely have done so for your own.

Our family and friends will join the growing boycott of all Unilever products, and will urge everyone we know to do the same, We may or may not effect your bottom line, but we will not forget your cowardice in the face of these hypocritical attacks on our constitution.

Sincerely,

Arthur Cohen

PEOPLE WHO SAY THEY CAN'T SUPPORT KERRY SO THEY WON'T VOTE--WELL, READ ON

2004-07-13T19:33:00.000-05:00

What? You're Not Going to Vote? Are You Insane?

Recently, a member of the discussion group Speak-Your-Peace ( (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Speak-Your-Peace/), call her Ishmael, wrote this:

"For all of you who think Nader is a "Bush plant" or a spoiler....check out the following article (not included, it was so dumb--ed.) and find out...WHO IS
REALLY TAKING THE MOST REPUBLICAN MONEY? Hint...It ain't Nader.

If you must vote....vote peace. Or else take responsibilty for the murder of the innocents to come. When you vote for war.....you are killing them.

I will probably will not vote this year....my message to the
DNC....I don't buy what you are selling and I will not participate in this FARCE. Smoke, mirrors and bull shit. Two sides of one coin...NO CHIOCE! With the votes being handled, controled and counted by the GOP and their companies. What a joke."

Yow! So I responded--surprise--with a rant:

"Ishmael, you won't vote this year? Have you taken leave of your senses?

And by "you" I mean all who agree with Annie or plan to vote for Nader in a swing state.

Whatever merit there is to Naderism, it's been, at least temporarily, been made moot. There just too much at stake to be bogged down in the trough of "same coin, two sides." In many ways, that dogma feeds right into the neocon's pit bull attack. The more of you--who would not vote Republican under any circumstances-- that don't vote, the better off they are. And as much as 3rd party that offers a real choice is desirable and necessary, I can wait another few years--it's been a few hundred, after all--to resume that fight.

I don't have a problem with Nader's general points of view. His conclusions about the evils of corporate dominance are indisputable. But--and there's a big one--but with extreme rightwing neocon zealots having hijacked the Republican party (not that it ever was admirable), being in charge of the government and still largely controlling the national agenda, and even with a centrist DNC-dominated Democratic party, to still maintain that there's no difference between the two parties is mind-boggling and hopelessly reactionary. "Corporate interests" are an incredibly destructive force, but note this--no mater how insufficient the Clinton administration was in fostering a sustainable environmental and energy policy, the democrats would not and will not undo 30 years of environmental progress, and invite the energy industry into the White House to write energy policy. That comparison obtains across the board. The dems don't distort or deny all science to a radical or religious agenda, that not coincidentally enriches the corporate coffers at the expense of yours and mine, as does the Medicare bill that the dems would never have passed. Under the dems, slow and plodding--often begrudging, sometimes bludgeoned into it-- advancement of consumer interests and reigning in of corporate power. Under the current incarnation of Republicans, total capitulation to the goals of the worst of corporate America, and total undoing of any progress in that direction since the New Deal, if not the first Roosevelt era--if they could get away with it. Another term, and they might.

At this stage, do we again have to list all the crimes of the Bush administration to convince anyone to vote against them,and that corporate hegemony is far from the only,or maybe even the most important problem? How about the 300,000 women around the world who have died because of Bush's re-imposition of the Reagan gag rule--no funding for international health clinics if abortion is even mentioned, let alone advocated or practiced, or don't adhere to the Bush's insistence that the only advocacy can be of abstinence. That's 300,000 dead. As that was one of the first acts of Bush as pres, repealing it will be one of the first acts of a Democratic pres. Once more --300,000 needless deaths, and immeasurable suffering. I shouldn't have to say anything else to get you to vote for Kerry--or rather, against Bush. Jesus Christ, 300,000!

But I will.

Remember that $15B AIDS money? How much do you think has been distributed so far? And to whom was it distributed? And who didn't speak up when some sick fuck of a Bishop in the Vatican told Africans it's no use to use condoms because they leak the AIDS virus--in an attempt to support his Church's vile policy against contraception? How many vulnerable uneducated African Catholics, with no access to the truth--due in no small part to that murderous gag rule--have suffered or died because of these hateful policies? You'd think the leader of the free world would condemn loudly and boldly such malicious ignorance--were it not for the fact that he instructed his CDC to say essentially the same thing on their website--or remove any reference to condoms at all in AIDS prevention. Condoms, after all, promote teenage promiscuity, in addition to not being very effective.

How much suffering and death have these actions and inactions caused? Your guesses will be far too low.

In the interest of full disclosure, the CDC seems to have restored some info on condoms recently, and Bush has recently mentioned, oh so briefly, condoms, in a positive way. Much too little, much too late. Close to 40% of teens in America think condoms don't work so there's no point in using them, mostly as a result of the same abstinence-only advocacy policies in public schools and other institutions that accept (or need) govt money, and the general; lack of any integrity in govt policy towards AIDS and STD education in America. All they seem to care about is stopping kids from fucking, instead of preventing pregnancy or disease. The former is idiotically futile, while the latter is eminently achievable.

That pig Reagan's silence during the early years of the AIDS epidemic resulted in the slogan SILENCE=DEATH. In more ways than he imagines, Bush is Reagan's legatee.

How about 10,000 dead Iraqis, 1000 (so far) dead American soldiers--and 5000 grievously wounded, and tens of thousands who will suffer the Iraqi version of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome? In Vietnam, 52,000 Americans died (and countless Vietnamese), but almost as many vets died after the war due to PTSS, via drug od's, suicide, and other manifestations of depression and despair. What will happen to the vets from this war, especially as they continue to realize how they too have been lied to, manipulated, and ill-treated when they return home--this time not by their civilian peers, but by their government? Whatever Kerry may or may not do as pres regarding Iraq (and his comments are not encouraging), there's no question the invasion wouldn't have happened under a Democratic regime. Two sides of the same coin? What offensive nonsense.

And those are just the appetizers for Bush's Grande Bouffe.

Now add this--during the next presidential term, up to four supreme court justices may retire. Two at least are guaranteed to do so. How long will Roe v Wade last with one more rightwinger on the court? Or for that matter, the Bill of Rights? Can you imagine the consequences of having an unassailable rightwing majority on the court? Are you even thinking about this? You think that won't further corporate interests in more far-reaching ways than even Nader is talking about?

And finally, does anyone really expect the Democrats, ever, to dismantle the corporate hegemony of America, no matter who the candidate? Do you really think even Kucinich or Nader as pres would have the power to do that? Come on! Not to be paranoid or anything, but this corporate star-chamber is not going to just pack it in--ever. If any true progressive ever made it to the Oval Office, he or she better have good life insurance.

But what the Dems would do, and what even today's wimpy incarnation will do, is wage a good fight against the social and civic oppression, the disgusting disregard for and attempts at dismantling of 80 years of social progress, and stop the vile and disgusting Daily Outrages that have threatened the wellbeing of billions of people on this planet.

So who gives a damn whether Nader is right or wrong, ultimately. And who gives a damn about who is or isn't accepting Republican money. And finally who gives a damn that Kerry isn't the progressive savior we want him (or the candidate) to be? All I want from him is to stop the hemorrhaging of our democracy, restore the Bill of Rights and the social progress of the last decades, and slow the heretofore depressing and inexorable usurpation of the government by the forces of evil. That's all. And that's not sarcasm. Any democrat will do that--because we've gone so far in the other direction, we don't need a hero to turn it around. A goddam moderate can do it, with our help and unrelenting pressure on him or her to do so.

The overwhelming priority for us, our country, and our children is to get rid of the Bush administration, prevent the total corruption of Supreme Court and finally win back control of the Congress from the real Evil Empire. We simply have to disempower the neocons and the religious right, and their surrogates in Congress. That won't get rid of the Ken Lays or Halliburtons of the world, overnight, or maybe at all, but it will stop the brutalizing of women abroad and at home (where they are being denied access to the morning-after contraceptive even after a rape), our children (who as teens are being denied access to condoms, safe sex education, sane advice about sexuality), our health (where stem cell research--well, really, any progressive science, including environmental--is another victim of these insane theocrats), our parents and seniors (who are further victimized by that scam Medicare bill) and our safety in the workplace, in the streets and as citizens of the world.

If one professes to care about any of these issues, and the hundreds more that you know are at risk by the traitors in the White House, then one has no choice but to vote for Kerry/against Bush. If one wants our leaders to care about the furthering of human dignity, and that our leaders at least make an attempt to protect us from our own worst instincts (like corporate greed), then one must vote for Kerry/against Bush. Not voting, or voting for a third party candidate, no matter who, when the electorate is still so closely divided, is not only unprincipled, it's disgraceful. It's treasonous. It's manslaughter!

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

If you don't vote, you help elect Bush. If you vote for Nader in a swing state, you help elect Bush. If you support Nader's one-trick-pony litmus test, you help elect Bush. If you buy into Nader's lame responses that he didn't put Bush in office, against irrefutable evidence that those who voted for him, had even half of them voted Democratic, would have also irrefutably given the victory to Gore--then you help elect Bush. .

Take offense if you will, but if Bush wins because people like you didn't vote, or voted for Nader, and you allow these pricks to bring back that "constitution in exile" and continue to bankrupt the govt so it can't afford any social programs at all, you will have become part of the problem, and all your so-called principled attacks on corporate dominance will be revealed as self-serving bluster and incredible naivete. And you won't win the hearts and minds of the citizens you claim to care about but actually will have dishonored them by your incredible arrogance.

The Right has won because they have drilled down to a set of certitudes, turning them into achievable goals, spent billions in think tanks over the last 39 years in formulating strategy--including mastering the art of framing the debate and using language--and dismissing those conservative forces that represented moderation--essentially eliminating internal dissent and co-opting the religious right. And of course being totally unethical unscrupulous lying cheating hypocritical pusmongers.

So how can the Left regain hegemony? Well, that's what the entire leftie pundiscenti are talking about. One thing is clear, though. Ignoring the few tools we have on the grounds that those tools are as bent as the opposition's ain't going to cut it.

So get off your polemical platform and see the forest for the trees--work to defeat Bush, and vote, goddamit. Not voting is not a protest, this time around. It's aid and comfort to the real enemy. And it's stupid. Are you stupid? Of course not. So why are you behaving that way?

Work to defeat Bush. It IS the principled stance. It's the only one. All else is rendered crap by the crimes of this administration.

If Bush gets in again, I will hold you personally responsible."

Now today we read that Bush, Inc. is making "contingency" plans to cancel--they say postpone--the election in case of terrorist attacks.

Isn't that convenient?

THE REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND THE LEFT

2004-06-17T16:22:00.000-05:00

In Case It Wasn't Obvious department

Referring to the "war on terror", National Review Online columnist Victor Davis Hansen says we shouldn't fret over its effects on the "Arab Street." He says that history teaches us that only resolute force wins wars and creates respect. Don't worry about the effect on ordinary Arabs. "Most people simply wish to associate with victory," he says. The best answer to terrorism is to rush the "insurrectionists" who threaten democracy in Iraq and elsewhere.

Jessica Stern--author of "Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill"--has since 1998 been interviewing terrorists from Islamic, anti-abortion, white supremacist and other violent organizations, trying to discover what inspires them to make holy war. In a LA Times piece, she said "there was one common thread: overwhelming feelings of humiliation." Cunning terrorist leaders tap this humiliation, giving legions of powerless young men the means and an ideological justification for turning their rage into revenge. The US doesn't yet understand this, and the statistics prove it. Nearly twice as many terrorist acts occurred in the two years following 9/11, the Rand Corp recently found, than in the two years preceding it. Clearly, "reactionary remedies like bombs and bullets won't win this conflict. (Here's a link to a Buzzflash interview with Ms. Stern: http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/05/int04024.html

Further, Marc Sageman, also in the Times, says our real enemy is the nihilistic "jihadist" vision. To win a lasting victory, the US must lay out "an alternative vision of a just and fair Islamic society living in harmony with the West. Day by day, year by year, we must provide proof of our sincerity, in Iraq, in Israel, and throughout the Mideast. "This war of ideas promises to be a long war of narratives, fought on a battlefield of interpretations. But it is the only thing that can work."

So there it is again. Brains vs. Brawn. Reason vs Force. The usual suspects.

I think, though, that Robert Reich is right in his new book, Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America. I predict that America is going to ultimately get so fed up with the lack of reason in the ideology and policies of the Radcons (as he calls them) that the citizens will finally throw the bums out of the national body politic. And I predict that day is coming sooner than we would have anticipated a year ago. But more on that another time. Meanwhile, here's a link to a terrific Buzzflash interview with him about his ideas and the book: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=17132

MOURNING IN AMERICA

2004-06-15T08:21:00.000-05:00

BEDTIME FOR BONZO

The funeral and services are over. The predictable rightwing paeans and suggestions to name everything in America after him from Washington DC to a mountain in New Hampshire, and to replace Andrew Jackson's pic on the 20 with his (bad to worse), seem thankfully to be over--or at least off the front page and the soundbite parade, which is all that matters anymore. Even America's worst president has stopped trying to compare himself to America's 2nd worst president (apologies to all the other contenders for the #2 slot).

Instead of mourning for this criminal's death, we ought to be mourning for the tens of thousands of people who died in Central America and elsewhere, or at home by AIDS, or who otherwise suffered or died miserably because of his direct actions and inactions.

America is like the anonymous woman in Bob Dylan's "Idiot Wind" (off Blood On The Tracks:

"Idiot wind blowing every time your move your mouth
Blowing down the backroads heading south
Idiot wind blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot babe
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."

But Greg Palast said it best:

KILLER, COWARD, CONMAN - GOOD RIDDANCE, RONNIE REAGAN
MORE PROOF ONLY THE GOOD DIE YOUNG
Sunday, June 6, 2004
by Greg Palast

You're not going to like this. You shouldn't speak ill of the dead. But in this case, someone's got to.

Ronald Reagan was a conman. Reagan was a coward. Reagan was a killer.

In 1987, I found myself stuck in a crappy little town in Nicaragua named Chaguitillo. The people were kind enough, though hungry, except for one surly young man. His wife had just died of tuberculosis.

People don't die of TB if they get some antibiotics. But Ronald Reagan, big hearted guy that he was, had put a lock-down embargo on medicine to Nicaragua because he didn't like the government that the people there had elected.

Ronnie grinned and cracked jokes while the young woman's lungs filled up and she stopped breathing. Reagan flashed that B-movie grin while they buried the mother of three.

And when Hezbollah terrorists struck and murdered hundreds of American marines in their sleep in Lebanon, the TV warrior ran away like a whipped dog ... then turned around and invaded Grenada. That little Club Med war was a murderous PR stunt so Ronnie could hold parades for gunning down Cubans building an airport.

I remember Nancy, a skull and crossbones prancing around in designer dresses, some of the "gifts" that flowed to the Reagans -- from hats to million-dollar homes -- from cronies well compensated with government loot. It used to be called bribery.

And all the while, Grandpa grinned, the grandfather who bleated on about "family values" but didn't bother to see his own grandchildren.

The New York Times today, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, "faith in small town America" and "old-time values." "Values" my ass. It was union busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn't buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million.

"Small town" values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up.

And all the while, in the White House basement, as his brain boiled away, his last conscious act was to condone a coup d'etat against our elected Congress. Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper the Ghost Weinberger with the crazed Colonel, Ollie North, plotted to give guns to the Monster of the Mideast, Ayatolla Khomeini.

Reagan's boys called Jimmy Carter a weanie and a wuss although Carter wouldn't give an inch to the Ayatolla. Reagan, with that film-fantasy tough-guy con in front of cameras, went begging like a coward cockroach to Khomeini pleading on bended knee for the release of our hostages.

Ollie North flew into Iran with a birthday cake for the maniac mullah -- no kidding --in the shape of a key. The key to Ronnie's heart.

Then the Reagan roaches mixed their cowardice with crime: taking cash from the hostage-takers to buy guns for the "contras" - the drug-runners of Nicaragua posing as freedom fighters.

I remember as a student in Berkeley the words screeching out of the bullhorn, "The Governor of the State of California, Ronald Reagan, hereby orders this demonstration to disburse" ... and then came the teargas and the truncheons. And all the while, that fang-hiding grin from the Gipper.

In Chaguitillo, all night long, the farmers stayed awake to guard their kids from attack from Reagan's Contra terrorists. The farmers weren't even Sandinistas, those 'Commies' that our cracked-brained President told us were 'only a 48-hour drive from Texas.' What the hell would they want with Texas, anyway?

Nevertheless, the farmers, and their families, were Ronnie's targets.

In the deserted darkness of Chaguitillo, a TV blared. Weirdly, it was that third-rate gangster movie, "Brother Rat." Starring Ronald Reagan.

Well, my friends, you can rest easier tonight: the Rat is dead.

Killer, coward, conman. Ronald Reagan, good-bye and good riddance.

Yep:
"Idiot wind blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to Capitol
Idiot wind blowing every time you move your teeth
You're an idiot babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."

D-DAY

2004-06-06T17:21:00.000-05:00

The last just war. Maybe one of the few. Seems true to me, but what a concept.

As a boomer who came of age during the Vietnam madness, it's sometimes been hard to acknowledge and thank those who indeed gave the ultimate sacrifice for us in WWII. My father was too old at the time to go into the service, and my family was not personally touched by the Holocaust, but to this day I get shivers and tears at the thought of it.

On both of these fronts--the war itself and the shoah--it's Steven Spielberg that has re-created some of the most lasting images, outside of the actual photos from the death camps.

Schindler's List. Saving Private Ryan.

An image from each haunts me. In Schindler's List, it's the Nazi idly shooting the little girl, an act of such insane evil, performed perhaps hundreds of thousands of times, incomprehensible, too much to countenance, yet of course it must be.

But, surprisingly, it's an image from Saving Private Ryan that I can't get out of my mind, and it's the one that reminds me to be grateful to all those who fought and died in that war. It's in the opening scenes of the landing on Omaha Beach. One of the Higgins boats reaches the shore, the landing panel opens, and before any soldier--any scared-to-death teenager--in the boat can even move an inch, every one of them is killed instantly from machine gun fire.

I heard a vet on NPR today describe what seemed to be that very event. Or another one just like it. How many were there?

Nevermind. There were many.

And we are here now because of those events. I'm taking a moment to reflect on that obvious point, and how lucky I was to be born when and where I was.

OL' MENCKEN

2004-06-06T17:08:00.000-05:00

Reagan's death makes me wistful for a premature passing of our current Resident (and his VP, oh my god, if he were overtly in charge, ye cats, as Scrooge McDuck was so fond of saying).

The Man can't take away my hope.

Speaking of sayings and Bush,I am reminded of this H.L.Mencken quote:
"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it."

Or this one, from George Eliot:
"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us evidence of the fact."

Or this one by Steven Wright. It's not related--I just like it.
"Ninety-nine percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name."

REAGAN DIES, SENTIENT BEINGS SIGH WITH RELIEF

2004-06-06T16:46:00.000-05:00

HORSESHIT

We heard the news today oboy.

All the horseshit paeans to him are making me nauseous. His crimes against the country, the constitution, and humanity are manifold, and there's no need to list them to anyone reading this, though I might later anyway, as a catharsis.

But this open letter addresses poignantly one of his most egregious crimes. One of? What am I saying? They ALL were most egregious.

Sunday, June 6, 2004

A Letter to My Best Friend, Steven Powsner On the Death of Former President Ronald Reagan

Matt Foreman, Executive Director National Gay and Lesbian Task Force

June 6, 2004

Dear Steven,

I so much wish you were here today to tell me what to do. You would know if it's right to comment on the death of former President Reagan, or if I should just let pass the endless paeans to his greatness. But you're not here. The policies of the Reagan administration saw to that.

Yes, Steven, I do feel for the family and friends of the former President. The death of a loved one is always a profoundly sad occasion, and Mr. Reagan was loved by many. I have tremendous empathy and respect for Mrs. Reagan, who lovingly cared for him through excruciating years of Alzheimer's.

Sorry, Steven, but even on this day I'm not able to set aside the shaking anger I feel over Reagan's non-response to the AIDS epidemic or for the continuing anti-gay legacy of his administration. Is it personal? Of course. AIDS was first reported in 1981, but President Reagan could not bring himself to address the plague until March 31, 1987, at which time there were 60,000 reported cases of full-blown AIDS and 30,000 deaths. I remember that day, Steven - you were staying round-the-clock in Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital caring for your dying partner of over 15 years, Bruce Cooper. It was another 41 days of utter agony for both of you before Bruce died. During those years of White House silence and inaction, how many other dear friends did we see sicken and die hideous deaths?

Is it personal? Yes, Steven. I know for a fact that you would be alive today if the Reagan administration had mounted even a tepid response to the epidemic. If protease inhibitors been available in July of 1995 instead of December, you'd still be here.

I wouldn't feel so angry if the Reagan administration's failing was due to ignorance or bureaucratic ineptitude. No, Steven, we knew then it was deliberate. The government's response was dictated by the grip of evangelical Christian conservatives who saw gay people as sinners and AIDS as God's well-deserved punishment. Remember? The White House Director of Communications, Patrick Buchanan, once argued in print that AIDS is nature's revenge on gay men. Reagan's Secretary of Education, William Bennett, and his domestic policy adviser, Gary Bauer, made sure that science (and basic tenets of Christianity, for that matter) never got in the way of politics or what they saw as "God's" work.

Even so, I think I could let go of this anger if this was just another overwhelmingly sad chapter in our nation's past. It is not. Steven, can you believe that the unholy pact President Reagan and the Republican Party entered with the forces of religious intolerance have not weakened, but grown exponentially stronger? Can you believe that the U.S. government is still bowing to right wing extremists and fighting condom distribution and explicit HIV education, even while AIDS is killing millions across the world? Or that "devout" Christians have forced the scrapping of AIDS prevention programs targeted at HIV-negative gay and bisexual men in favor of bullshit "abstinence only until marriage" initiatives? Or the shameless duplicity of these same forces seeking to forever outlaw even the hope of marriage for gay people? Or that Reagan stalwarts like Buchanan, Bennett and Bauer are still grinding their homophobic axes?

No, Steven, I do not presume to judge Ronald Reagan's soul or heart. He may very well have been a nice guy. In fact, I don't think that Reagan hated gay people -- I'm sure some of his and Nancy's best friends were gay. But I do know that the Reagan administration's policies on AIDS and anything gay-related resulted - and continue to result - in despair and death.

Oh, Steven, how much I wish so much you were here.

Matt

(On November 20, 1995, Steven Powsner, died of complications from AIDS at age 40. He had been President of the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center from 1992-1994.)

WHY CAN'T KERRY TALK THIS WAY, PART TWO

2004-05-27T09:40:00.000-05:00

AL GORE'S INCREDIBLE SPEECH

"Gore to Call for Resignation of Bush Team Members Responsibe for Iraq Involvement (algoredemocrats.com) "Major address will cite imminent risk to U.S. soldiers and Homeland from Bush failure to hold top officials accountable --Former Vice President Al Gore will deliver a major foreign policy address in New York City on Wednesday,May 26, sponsored by MoveOn PAC, calling for the resignation of five members of the Bush Administration team and one member of the military command responsible for the failed policy and abuse of prisoners in Iraq. Gore will identify the various ways in which all Americans--soldiers in Iraq, residents and travelers abroad, and citizens at home—are endangered by the bitterness created throughout the Islamic world—and beyond—by US policy. He will also explore the linkages between the President[sic]’s Iraq policy and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison."

I'll say! That summary is guilty of gross understatement. You must read this. Here's a quote:

"How dare the incompetent and willful members of this Bush/Cheney Administration humiliate our nation and our people in the eyes of the world and in the conscience of our own people."

Here's another link.

http://www.moveonpac.org/goreremarks052604.html/

Could any of us have said it better? Not John Kerry. At least not yet.

It now seems sad that so many of us lacked the passion for Al Gore back in 2000, I think partly because he appeared to lack any passion himself. But when I look at the passionate and courageous person he seems to have grown into, at least as evidenced by these amazing and moving MoveOn speeches, I wonder--had we that passion, would Florida even have happened? (And by the way, where's ol' Bubba in all of this? His silence is revealing, too. Maybe the VP should have been P.)

I wonder too if we are making the same mistake with John Kerry. Certainly most of us have not mustered any passion for him. Granted it's not just his style, but the content as well. But I didn't think that highly of Al Gore's content then either.

Will Kerry too grow and evolve into the mensch we wish he would be now? Who knows? Would Gore have grown as he has, or been as forthright on whatever the great issues would have been, had he been allowed to claim the office he won and thus the circumstances that instigated and aroused such feelings now not occured? Who knows?

But maybe it's another mistake to merely begrudgingly accept and vote for Kerry. Maybe we need to muster enough passion for him to guarantee his victory, by a margin so large that Jeb Bush, Diebold, or the repugnant tactics of Karl Rove can't stop it. I'm thinking maybe if he felt secure about his victory, then maybe he too would start to speak like Gore instead of some damn second-rate automaton pandering to the holy middle. Or like the speech I wrote for him in yesterday's post. (And the final irony is that we used to say that about Gore.)

That'll be hard, finding that passion. So many maybes, so many doubts. But maybe it's just too important not to.

I'm gonna try.

WHY CAN'T KERRY TALK THIS WAY?

2004-05-26T07:45:00.000-05:00

BUT FIRST, ANDY ROONEY

I missed 60 Minutes this Sunday, but a transcript of Rooney's commentary is buzzing around the net.

It would have been interesting to see Andy Rooney read it. I don't much like his sociopolitical opinions when he goes there--usually too conservative (not rightwing), or at least centrist. But I do like his curmudgeonly style.

And I don't agree with all his points in this commentary either, but there's enough good stuff in his piece that it's worth reading. While he states that Abu Ghraib "belongs high on the list of worst things that ever happened to our country," I would have included slavery and its legacy, and the genocide of Native Americans, but in fairness he was talking about singular events like 9/11. And that part about booting the offenders out of the country is not my style. I'd publicly humiliate them, like getting them all nekkid and piling them up on some of the bullshit that comes out of the Whitehouse. Rumsfeld especially(The horror, the horror).

But it got me thinking. Specifically, that if these kinds of thoughts are coming from the center maybe there's hope that Bush will be defeated.

And I got to thinking about that phraseology. I didn't say that Kerry will win, but that Bush will lose.

Because if that doofus doesn't figure out this campaigning thing soon, we only have the continuing neocon implosion to hope for. We'll only win because they will lose. Or we won't win, because a critical mass of frustrated lefties will go for nadir--as many apparently are. I'm having deja vu all over again.

As for Kerry's strategy so far, it's almost inexplicable that he and his team don't get it. And it's not that hard, especially since every liberal or democratic pundit in the country is telling him the same thing, and it's pretty obvious anyway.

And can't his handlers get him to stop rambling off into incoherent one-size-fits-all politico-babble?

Can't they stop regularly supplying Mr. Bush with great fodder for his snarky and degrading attacks, like that stupid declaration that he might postpone the nomination until after the convention.

How hard can that be? The neocons have been street smart, but have no wisdom. Kerry and his team seem to understand what that wisdom is--sometimes--but are quite dumb about applying it.

For instance, he might say something like this:

"My fellow citizens, I want to tell you how this administration's extremist basis for reproductive health policy is responsible for death and suffering of women of all ages in our country and around the world. And I want you to know that an enlightened country, the world leader in science and medicine, cannot continue to let ignorance and radical ideology dictate a health policy that ignores, or worse, distorts that science for its own ends. In 2004, in fact, it's criminal.

Every time I hear Mr. Bush talk about the rights of women in Afghanistan and Iraq, I am reminded that on the first day he took office, he reimposed the gag rule. Since then, WHO estimates 75,000 women worldwide have died due to lack of reproductive health care and advice. The only right they had was the right to die.

Since Mr Bush essentially banned anything but abstinence to be taught in schools by withholding funds from those that do otherwise, teenage pregnancy rates have increased significantly. In the face of multiple studies in schools that support that fact, Mr. Bush's team claims they were flawed, and ignores them.

Since Mr. Bush has removed any mention of condoms from the CDC website pages on HIV/AIDS, how many STD's that could have been prevented are now plaguing our citizens? And do you know why he has banned references to condoms? Because they don't work, his minions claim. And they lead to teenage promiscuity. The former statement is patently absurd, and the latter is unsupported by any data--any at all. In fact, as with the abstinence-only policies, if anything leads to increased sexual activity in our teenagers it's the lack of responsible and truthful education about all aspects of reproductive health in our schools. I hold this administration completely responsible for increased rates of pregnancy and std's among our youth, and that is just unacceptable.

Bush has banned the OTC sales of Plan B (levonorgestrel), the emergency contraceptive that can be used after unprotected sex, even though the FDA approved it for OTC. Amazingly, though even the FDA knows it's a contraceptive, they even ignorantly call it an abortion pill. They claim it will lead to promiscuity, and can cause health problems for teenagers. Apparently it's "healthy" for a 14 year old victim of rape or incest to be pregnant, but not take an FDA-approved contraceptive.

If this administration really cared about the rights of women and the wellbeing of our teenagers, they would stop spreading this nonsense, and stop prohibiting our public health teams from telling the truth. But as in so many areas of public policy that affect our daily lives in countless ways, they are more concerned about supporting their radical agenda than the real health of our citizens.

They must think we are stupid. Why else would they continue to feed us such nonsense on a daily basis? They think that if they repeat these lies enough times, we'll eventually start believing them. Well, we're not stupid. And as citizens we demand respect from our leaders.

This madness must stop. Isn't it time we confronted every instance of Mr. Bush's telling us the opposite of what we know is true? Isn't it time we held this administration accountable for its lies and ignorance? Isn't it time we stopped letting science be manipulated or suppressed to support an extremist ideological program that results in death and misery? Is ignorance and willful misinformation in the service of this hateful agenda part of the legacy we want?"

Now, unlike any proclamation from this administration, everything I wrote here is true, and hardly radical. So why won't Kerry talk about these things? Who's telling him that it's in his interest to constantly redefine himself as a centrist, and that being a centrist means dancing around the real hot-button issues that affect our lives immediately and perhaps more than Bush's debacle in foreign policy, as awful as that is? Are they all that dumb?

And that's only on one of many issues that's not getting much press coverage these days. Imagine if he talked that way about Medicare. Deficits. Class warfare. Environmental policy--or destruction. Budgetbusting budgets. Unfunded mandates. Spending, secret and public, lawful and unlawful. Secrecy itself. Ashcroft's primitivism, priggery and oppression. Attacks on the Constitution. Delusions of Theocracy. Refusal to accept responsibility for anything. Judicial appointments. Pandering to idiots. Blaming the victims. And on, and on.

Kerry could address these issues and expose the deceit in every one of them by merely stating fact. It would just be the truth, after all. It's out there.

And wouldn't it be refreshing to hear Kerry talk this way? Wouldn't it be so satisfying to finally hear a contender speak truth to power, to address the unrelenting and insulting doublespeak of this administration?

Anyone holding breath?

How did we get to this point?

I think it's the mercury in the tuna.

Here's Rooney:

(Broadcast on Sunday, May 23, 2004 by 60 Minutes / CBS News)

Our Darkest Days Are Here by Andy Rooney

If you were going to make a list of the great times in American history, you'd start with the day in 1492, when Columbus got here.

The Revolution when we won our independence would be on the list.

Beating Hitler.

Putting Americans on the moon.

We've had a lot of great days.

Our darkest days up until now have been things like presidential assassinations, the stock market crash in 1929, Pearl Harbor, and 9-11, of course.

The day the world learned that American soldiers had tortured Iraqi prisoners belongs high on the list of worst things that ever happened to our country. It's a black mark that will be in the history books in a hundred languages for as long as there are history books. I hate to think of it.

The image of one bad young woman with a naked man on a leash did more to damage America's reputation than all the good things we've done over the years ever helped our reputation.

What were the secrets they were trying to get from captured Iraqis? What important information did that poor devil on the leash have that he wouldn't have given to anyone in exchange for a crust of bread or a sip of water?

Where were your officers? If someone told you to do it, tell us who told you. If your officers were told we should know who told them.

One general said our guards were "untrained." Well, untrained at what? Being human beings? Did the man who chopped off Nicholas Berg's head do it because he was untrained?

The guards who tortured prisoners are faced with a year in prison. Well, great. A year for destroying our reputation as decent people.

I don't want them in prison, anyway. We shouldn't have to feed them. Take away their right to call themselves American - that's what Id do. You aren't one of us. Get out. We don't want you. Find yourself another country or a desert island somewhere. If the order came from someone higher up, take him with you.

In the history of the world, several great civilizations that seemed immortal have deteriorated and died. I don't want to seem dramatic tonight, but I've lived a long while, and for the first time in my life, I have this faint, faraway fear that it could happen to us here in America as it happened to the Greek and Roman civilizations.

Too many Americans don't understand what we have here, or how to keep it. I worry for my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. I want them to have what I've had, and I sense it slipping away.

Have a nice day.

Citizen posters at the acclaimed political web log www.dkos.com contributed ten of their best ideas for progressive bumper stickers to this effort.

2004-05-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

Here they are.

Asses of Evil
Thanks for Not Paying Attention
Four More Wars!
More Trees, Less Bush
It Takes a Village Idiot
One Person, One Vote (*May Not Apply in Certain States)
Putting the "Con" In Conservative
We're Gooder!
Leave No Billionaire Behind
Bring Back Monica Lewinsky

This one is from a friend:
Jail The Neoconmen

OSAMA VS CUBA, ROUND 1

2004-05-12T08:46:00.000-05:00

The Miami Herald reports that the Treasury Department has more than 20 people assigned to catching people who violate the trade and tourism embargo on Cuba. It has four employees assigned to tracking the assets of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

I think I can forego my normally sardonic comments, which are clearly unecessary. Except for that last sentence, of course.

YOU'D THINK THE DEMOCRATS WOULD LEVERAGE THIS

2004-05-12T08:16:00.000-05:00

Findings from a new national poll show support for impeachment, growing
opposition to war on terrorism.

May 11, 2004
For Immediate Release

Berkeley--Reporting from an ongoing survey of public knowledge and
opinion, Berkeley based NGO Retro Poll released startling results
suggesting that 39% of Americans favor impeachment of President Bush.
The poll, taken between April 19 and May 5 asked whether people believe
that misleading Congress and the Public on weapons of mass destruction
to take the country to war is grounds to impeach the President (39% said
yes, 40% said no). On whether the U.S. should have invaded Iraq the
poll results are consistent with findings of Gallup and other major
polls (48% said yes).

Other surprising findings were that almost half of respondents (46%)
favor an independent investigation of the U.S. role in the overthrow of
Haiti's democratically elected president, Juan Bertrand Aristide, and
57% favor a national moratorium on the death penalty because of the
procedural problems that have put many innocent people on death row (112
released so far). Four out of five Americans also repudiate the use of
torture.

As in earlier Retro Polls most support for the war in Iraq and the War
on Terrorism was found among people who still think that Saddam Hussein
worked with Al Qaeda (though no evidence has been published) and among
the 32% of people who believe the War on Terrorism is preventing
terrorism. However, 24% of Americans believe that the War on Terrorism
is actually creating terrorists. In addition, 56 % of people who gave
an opinion say the War on Terrorism is removing important democratic
rights in the US and large percentages (50-80%) oppose various intrusive
provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act.

The poll reached 513 random Americans and has a "margin of error" of +/-
3.5% Full results are available at www.retropoll.org.

THE DANGER ZONE IS EVERYWHERE

2004-04-13T08:35:00.000-05:00

The Curtis Mayfield song The Danger Zone was recorded by Ray Charles and issued as the B-side of Hit the Road, Jack, Charles's 1961 hit.

The Danger Zone

Sad and lonely all the time
That's because I've got a worried mind
You know the world is in an uproar
The danger zone is everywhere, everywhere

Just read your paper
And you'll see
Just exactly what keeps worryin' me
Yeah, you'll see the world is in an uproar
The danger zone is everywhere

My love for the world is like always
For the world is a part of me
That's why I'm so afraid
Of the progress that's being made
Toward eternity

Every morning, noon, and night
Finds me hoping that everything's alright
Mm-hmm, the world is in an uproar
The danger zone is everywhere

Thengs were getting worse by 1971 when Stone the Crows recorded a version and put a little oomph in the lyrics:

Sad, sad and lonely
And sad and lonely all the time
That's because I've got
such a worried mind
The world is in an uproar
The danger zone everywhere
It is everywhere

Just read your paper
Read your paper and you'll see
Just what exactly has been
bothering me
The world is in an uproar
The danger zone everywhere
It is everywhere

My love for the world
It will always be the same
Because the world
has become a part of me
And I'm so afraid of the progress
that's being made toward eternity

Every morning, every morning
Every morning, noon and night
I keep on wishing and hoping
that everything's gonna be alright
The world is in an uproar
The danger zone everywhere
It is everywhere, everywhere

My love for the world
will always be the same
Because the world
has become a part of me
And I'm so afraid of the bloody progress
that has been made toward eternity

Every morning, every morning
Every morning, noon and night
I keep on wishing and hoping
that everything's gonna be alright
The world is in an uproar
Don't you know, don't you know
The danger zone everywhere
It is everywhere

32 years later, of course, the entire world is at peace and humanity has risen to its highest potential, abandoning armed conflict and violence as means to ends, and the reign of reason, tolerance and peace has begun. Just read your paper and you'll see.

NADER REDUX AGAIN

2004-04-12T16:19:00.000-05:00

A FEW TACOS SHORT OF A FIESTA PLATTER

After a group of prominent liberal activists sent a letter last week to Ralph "A flower short of an arrangement" Nader begging him to abandon his "quixotic and destructive" bid for the presidency, Nader spokesman Kevin Zeese said Nader would not bow out simply to help someone else beat Bush. "You have to stand for something,"Zeese said.

And what is that, Kevin? That you can hold a grudge longer than anyone else except perhaps the Serbs? That it's OK to fuck over your friends and your country for the sake of your own ineffectual dogma?

See, all along I thought beating Bush WAS something to stand for.

What do I know?

AIRAMERICA IS HERE

2004-04-01T09:32:00.000-05:00

After all the anticipation, AirAmerica radio is here. The first broadcasts yesterday got mixed reviews in the media. The Washington Post piece was somewhat irritating: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40719-2004Mar31.html?referrer=email

There were amusing quotes from O'Reilly The Conqueror and Boston conservative radio host Jay Severin, and clearly neither one was aware of the astounding irony in their comments.

Severin: "Yes, we know you believe with utmost sincerity that we are monstrous Neanderthals, but do you really believe your left-wing/pacifist/United Nations/French worldview will win a big middle-class audience? In America?"

O'Reilly: "this whole liberal network scheme is just plain stupid. . . . These pinheads backing the venture will lose millions of dollars because the propaganda network is simply tedious and tedious doesn't sell."

In now-commonplace extremist Republican fashion, they accuse their counterparts of the very offenses they thrive on, while portraying themselves as saviors and expressing the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of zealots.

While the network is broadcast on few stations so far, we can listen live on the web via AirAmerica's website:http://www.airamericaradio.com/

Onward through the fog, Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo.

Interesting footnote: the Blogger spellcheck suggested a replacement for O'Reilly: Orwell

THIS ISN'T AMERICA by Paul Krugman

2004-03-31T09:25:00.000-05:00

THIS ISN'T AMERICA

Paul Krugmans's NY Times columns:
www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/

By PAUL KRUGMAN

03/30/04 "New York Times" -- Last week an opinion piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the killing of Sheik Ahmed Yassin said, "This isn't America; the government did not invent intelligence material nor exaggerate the description of the threat to justify their attack."

So even in Israel, George Bush's America has become a byword for deception and abuse of power. And the administration's reaction to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies" provides more evidence of something rotten in the state of our government.

The truth is that among experts, what Mr. Clarke says about Mr. Bush's terrorism policy isn't controversial. The facts that terrorism was placed on the back burner before 9/11 and that Mr. Bush blamed Iraq despite the lack of evidence are confirmed by many sources — including "Bush at War," by Bob Woodward.

And new evidence keeps emerging for Mr. Clarke's main charge, that the Iraq obsession undermined the pursuit of Al Qaeda. From yesterday's USA Today: "In 2002, troops from the Fifth Special Forces Group who specialize in the Middle East were pulled out of the hunt for Osama bin Laden to prepare for their next assignment: Iraq. Their replacements were troops with expertise in Spanish cultures."

That's why the administration responded to Mr. Clarke the way it responds to anyone who reveals inconvenient facts: with a campaign of character assassination.

Some journalists seem, finally, to have caught on. Last week an Associated Press news analysis noted that such personal attacks were "standard operating procedure" for this administration and cited "a behind-the-scenes campaign to discredit Richard Foster," the Medicare actuary who revealed how the administration had deceived Congress about the cost of its prescription drug bill.

But other journalists apparently remain ready to be used. On CNN, Wolf Blitzer told his viewers that unnamed officials were saying that Mr. Clarke "wants to make a few bucks, and that [in] his own personal life, they're also suggesting that there are some weird aspects in his life as well."

This administration's reliance on smear tactics is unprecedented in modern U.S. politics — even compared with Nixon's. Even more disturbing is its readiness to abuse power — to use its control of the government to intimidate potential critics.

To be fair, Senator Bill Frist's suggestion that Mr. Clarke might be charged with perjury may have been his own idea. But his move reminded everyone of the White House's reaction to revelations by the former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill: an immediate investigation into whether he had revealed classified information. The alacrity with which this investigation was opened was, of course, in sharp contrast with the administration's evident lack of interest in finding out who leaked the identity of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame to Bob Novak.

And there are many other cases of apparent abuse of power by the administration and its Congressional allies. A few examples: according to The Hill, Republican lawmakers threatened to cut off funds for the General Accounting Office unless it dropped its lawsuit against Dick Cheney. The Washington Post says Representative Michael Oxley told lobbyists that "a Congressional probe might ease if it replaced its Democratic lobbyist with a Republican." Tom DeLay used the Homeland Security Department to track down Democrats trying to prevent redistricting in Texas. And Medicare is spending millions of dollars on misleading ads for the new drug benefit — ads that look like news reports and also serve as commercials for the Bush campaign.

On the terrorism front, here's one story that deserves special mention. One of the few successful post-9/11 terror prosecutions — a case in Detroit — seems to be unraveling. The government withheld information from the defense, and witnesses unfavorable to the prosecution were deported (by accident, the government says). After the former lead prosecutor complained about the Justice Department's handling of the case, he suddenly found himself facing an internal investigation — and someone leaked the fact that he was under investigation to the press.

Where will it end? In his new book, "Worse Than Watergate," John Dean, of Watergate fame, says, "I've been watching all the elements fall into place for two possible political catastrophes, one that will take the air out of the Bush-Cheney balloon and the other, far more disquieting, that will take the air out of democracy."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Paul Krugmans's NY Times columns:
http://www.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/

LA TIMES ENLIGHTENED POLICY ON LANGUAGE

2004-03-18T09:13:00.000-05:00

From The Week, March 19, 2004:

The article:
A Los Angeles Times music critic who'd described an opera as "pro-life"--meaning celebrating life--was shocked to find that a copy editor had changed the phrase to "anti-abortion." Richard Strauss' Die Frau Ohen Schatten has nothing to do with abortion, said critic Mark Swed. The copy editor was adhering to a strict policy banning the phrase "pro-life" as offensive to people who support abortion rights.

The Week printed this little article in a section called "Only in America." I guess this was meant to belittle the situation.

As silly as the incident was, I was delighted to find out about the LA Times language policy. Perhaps The Week saw just humor in this, but I saw something more. I saw, finally, the media beginning to resist the conservative usurpation of language to achieve an extreme political and cultural goal.

"Pro-life" has always been one of the most flagrant and obnoxious examples of the success the right has achieved in framing the debate. "Partial-birth abortion" is another, among many.

Congratulations to that copy editor for a mistake that brought an enlightened policy to our attention, and to the LA Times for its stance.

1,049 FEDERAL MARRIAGE RIGHTS

2004-03-14T20:10:00.000-05:00

1,049 Federal Rights Available to Married Couples

In 1997, the General Accounting Office of the Federal Government compiled a list of 1,049 rights and benefits which were related to civil marriage. The list includes thirteen categories of rights and benefits, including:

Social Security and Related Programs, Housing, and Food Stamps
Veterans' Benefits
Taxation
Federal Civilian and Military Service Benefits
Employment Benefits and Related Laws
Immigration, Naturalization, and Aliens
Trade, Commerce, and Intellectual Property
Financial Disclosure and Conflict of Interest

You can view the entire GAO report here: http://www.marriageequality.org/facts.php?page=1049_federal

Then click on "GAO report here." It's a pdf file.

THE MYTH OF THE 'GOOD' NADER

2004-03-14T18:44:00.000-05:00

MORON NADER--I MEAN MORE ON NADER

I don't read the New Republic, haven't in years, and don't know much about Chait, but I've said myself some of what he's saying in this artcle, decided to let someone else rant about him this time.

THE MYTH OF THE 'GOOD' NADER

Make You Ralph
by Jonathan Chait ,The New Republic

Post date: 02.29.04
Issue date: 03.08.04
As Ralph Nader prepares for another spoiler run at the presidency, liberals are again wringing their hands at the damage he may do not only to Democrats' chances of retaking the White House but to his own reputation as well. "The most regrettable thing about Mr. Nader's new candidacy is not how it is likely to affect the election, but how it will affect Mr. Nader's own legacy," editorialized The New York Times this week. "Ralph Nader has been one of the giants of the American reform movement. ... [I]t would be a tragedy if Mr. Nader allowed [his anger] to give the story of his career a sad and bitter ending." The same theme was sounded in November of 2000. "Bernie Sanders is right. Ralph Nader is 'one of the heroes of contemporary American society,'" argued Eric Alterman in The Nation. "How sad, therefore, that he is helping to undo so much of his life's work in a misguided fit of political pique and ideological purity." As Robert Scheer lamented in the Los Angeles Times, "What Nader did was to impulsively betray a lifetime of painstaking, frustrating, but most often effective, efforts on his part to make a better world. He is a good man who went very wrong."

The good-man-who-went-wrong assessment of Nader is virtually unchallenged among liberals. But, if you think about it for a moment, it's awfully strange. Heroes of history do not normally reverse themselves out of the blue. George Washington did not end his days pining for a return of the British monarchy to U.S. shores. George Orwell did not suddenly warm to the virtues of totalitarianism. Nor, for that matter, did Ralph Nader go wrong after decades of doing good. The qualities that liberals have observed in him of late--the monomania, the vindictiveness, the rage against pragmatic liberalism--have been present all along. Indeed, an un-blinkered look at Nader's public life shows that his presidential campaigns represent not a betrayal of his earlier career but its apotheosis.

Nader made his name with the 1965 publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, an exposé of the Chevy Corvair. Today, people generally remember the ways in which Nader was right--the appalling lack of concern for safety in the automobile industry and the need for federal regulations. Few realize that Nader's campaign against the Corvair was only the most visible edge of an uncompromising, conspiratorial worldview. Nader believed not only that the Corvair was dangerous but that General Motors (GM) knew it was. Justin Martin, in his fair-minded 2002 biography, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon, shows how Nader hounded liberal Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff into investigating whether GM had lied about what it knew in testimony before Congress. In a letter to Ribicoff, Nader wrote, "Now comes decisive evidence which reveals a labyrinthic and systematic intra-company collusion, involving high General Motors officials, to sequester and suppress company data and films." Nader insisted he had an array of inside sources and documents that would reveal this conspiracy. Ribicoff dutifully assigned a pair of staffers to the case, and they spent two years chasing down Nader's leads. None of them panned out. The investigators found no evidence that GM knew of the Corvair's safety flaws. The failure to confirm Nader's suspicions enraged him. "He could not let go of the Corvair issue," one of the staffers told Martin. "He was fixated. And, if you didn't accept or believe the same things he did, you were either stupid or venal."

During the late '60s and early '70s, Nader developed a reputation as a wonk's wonk, a data-driven do-gooder with a stack of papers perpetually tucked under his arm. In fact, even then his work was driven by ideologically motivated fanaticism. In 1971, Nader pressured one of his associates, Lowell Dodge, to sex up his study "Small on Safety: The Designed-in Dangers of the Volkswagen." In his self-proclaimed 1976 hatchet job, Me & Ralph, former tnr managing editor David Sanford describes how Nader insisted that Dodge rewrite the conclusion of the study so that it began, "The Volkswagen is the most hazardous car in use in significant numbers in the U.S. today." Objecting that "the conclusion is not reflected in the data," Dodge left the project, allowing others to take credit as principal authors. "I have always carried around considerable guilt about what I regard as the extreme intellectual dishonesty of that conclusion," he told Sanford.

Nader's true fame came not from Unsafe at Any Speed but from the fact that its publication prompted GM to hire a private investigator to dig up damaging personal information that might discredit him. The irony is that Nader's grandiose paranoia predated this episode. Before publishing Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader worked as an obscure functionary at the Labor Department under then-Assistant Secretary Pat Moynihan. "Ralph was a very suspicious man," Moynihan told Charles McCarry in his 1972 biography Citizen Nader. "He used to warn me that the phones at the Labor Department might be tapped. I'd say, 'Fine! They'll learn that the unemployment rate for March is 5.3 percent, that's what they'll learn.'"

Nader's friends recalled that often he would act furtively, speaking in code, always convinced he was being monitored or phone-tapped. When he insisted in 1966 that he was being followed, one of his friends replied, according to Martin, "Ralph, your paranoia has grown to new extremes." Of course, it turned out that in that instance Nader was being followed. But this merely proved the old adage that sometimes even the paranoid have enemies plotting against them.

Nader sued GM and won $425,000, which he used to found activist organizations that helped push through a staggering series of consumer and environmental reforms, most of them in the late '60s and early '70s. Nader rightly wins credit for spurring progress during the era. And yet, even during his heyday, Nader habitually denounced liberals and their work, sabotaging the very causes he claimed to believe in. Martin's biography is filled with examples. In 1970, Nader championed a report by his staff savaging Ed Muskie, the liberal senator from Maine. Muskie, who helped engineer the Air Quality Act of 1967, had a reputation as an environmental ally, but Nader's report called the act "disastrous," adding, "That fact alone would warrant his being stripped of his title as 'Mr. Pollution Control.'"

That same year, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill to create a Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), what Nader called his highest legislative goal. But, just days after praising the bill, Nader turned against it, saying that "intolerable erosions" had rendered the bill "unacceptable." As Martin writes, "Without Nader's backing, the bill lost momentum" and died in committee. The pattern repeated itself, as the CPA passed either the House or the Senate five more times over the next six years, but Nader rejected every bill as too compromised. "Ralph could have had a consumer agency bill in any of three Congresses," liberal consumer activist and former Nader associate Mike Pertschuk told Martin. "But he held out for the perfect bill."

The final defeat came in 1978. Again, Nader's strategy was to impugn every Democrat who harbored any reservations at all about the bill. He maligned Washington Representative Tom Foley as "a broker for agribusiness"--despite the fact that Foley had bucked agribusiness to pass a bill regulating meatpackers. He attacked Colorado liberal Pat Schroeder, who had supported earlier versions of the CPA but had minor reservations this time, as a "mushy liberal" selling her vote to corporate contributors. He so alienated Democrats that, as the measure went down to defeat, one reportedly said as he voted no, "This one's for you, Ralph." House Speaker Tip O'Neill told The Washington Post, "I know of about eight guys who would have voted for us if it were not for Nader."

For Nader, it was almost axiomatic that anybody who disagreed with him was a corporate lackey. "Nader sees critics as enemies," wrote Sanford, a former ally. "Those who do not serve him serve the evil elements of corporations." This Manichaean worldview came through in everything Nader did. In the 1970s, he worked to establish automatic funding for Public Interest Research Groups (pirg) on campus--proto-Naderite outfits to train the next generation of like-minded activists. Nader's preferred funding mechanism was for every student to automatically contribute $1; those who objected could go to the college administration for a refund. But the administration at Penn State University in 1975 opted instead for a positive checkoff, whereby each student would check a box if he wanted to pitch in $2 for the pirg. Nader attacked Penn State as "a citadel of fascism" and threatened one Penn State board member: "I would advise Mister Baker to study very carefully the meaning of conflict of interest if he wants to understand the kind of disclosures that will be forthcoming in the coming year."

The Jimmy Carter presidency only saw a heightening of Nader's schismatic tendencies. "I want access. I want to be able to see [Carter] and talk to him. I expected to be consulted," he told The New York Times. That Carter filled his administration with former Naderites didn't help. Less than a year after Carter put former Nader deputy Joan Claybrook in charge of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Nader denounced her, demanding she resign for implementing an air-bag regulation with "an unheard of lead time provision." In 1980, Nader told Rolling Stone, "In the last year we've seen the 'corporatization' of Jimmy Carter. Whereas he was impotent and kind of pathetic the first year and a half, he's now surrendered. ... The two-party system, by all criteria, is bankrupt--they have nothing of any significance to offer the voters, so a lot of voters say why should they go and vote for Tweedledum and Tweedledee." (Liberals today who anguish over Nader's insistence that no important differences exist between the two parties should note that this belief dates back more than two decades.) In the summer of 1980, Jonathan Alter (now a Newsweek columnist) worked on Nader's voting guide for the presidential election. Alter came away amazed by Nader's fury at Carter. "He didn't seem overly distressed at the idea of Ronald Reagan becoming president," Alter later told Martin. As Nader addressed a gathering of supporters in 1981, according to The Washington Post, "Reagan is going to breed the biggest resurgence in nonpartisan citizen activism in history."

Of course, that did not happen. But twelve years of Republican rule failed to dim Nader's conviction that little difference existed between the two parties. Even Nader's critics seem to forget that he began running against Democrats in 1992, when he urged New Hampshire primary voters to write in "None of the above." "None of the above" meant Nader himself, as he would tell audiences: "Hello, I'm 'None of the above,' and I'm not running for president." Nader demanded that the major candidates address what he deemed the important issues of the day. In his 2002 memoir, Crashing the Party, Nader alleges that Bill Clinton leaked the Gennifer Flowers adultery revelations himself to avoid having to address Nader's agenda. "I'm almost certain that [Clinton] and his supporters knew [the Flowers scandal] was coming," he posits. "Clinton knew how to stay on message, and nothing was going to get him to take a stand on President Bush's nafta proposal before Congress, or on nuclear power, or on the failing banks in New Hampshire." This assertion neatly encapsulates Nader's style of thinking--the fevered conspiracy-mongering, the moral righteousness, and the laughably outsized role he assigns himself in world events.

s Nader embarks upon his fourth protest run against the Democrats in as many elections, there is something slightly ridiculous about the shock of his liberal critics. They still don't know who they're dealing with. Nader is not a heroic figure tragically overcome by his own flaws; he is a selfish, destructive maniac who, for a brief historical period, happened upon a useful role.

In the waning days of the 2000 election, some of Nader's campaign advisers urged him to concentrate on uncontested states, like New York and California, where he could attract local media without competition from the major-party candidates and win liberal voters who needn't fear tipping the race to George W. Bush. Instead, he chose a whirlwind tour of battleground states, campaigning in Pennsylvania and Florida, where votes would be harder to come by but more consequential to the outcome of the race. Liberals assume Nader tried to maximize his vote total without regard to how it affected Bush and Gore. The truth is that he actively sought to help Bush, even at the expense of his own vote total.

It's therefore both comic and sad when liberals take Nader at his word that he does not believe he affected the outcome of the 2000 race. The website RalphDontRun.net patiently explains how, if Al Gore had netted even 1 percent of Nader's 97,000 Florida votes, he would have overcome Bush's 537-vote margin. Like other liberals, the people behind the website seem to think, if they could only persuade Nader that his candidacy might help reelect Bush, it would dissuade him from running. More likely, it would have the opposite effect. The real mystery is not why Nader would do something so destructive to liberalism. It's why anybody ever thought he wouldn't.

HILLARY YOU PUTZ

2004-03-09T09:16:00.000-05:00

Hillary moves to the right.

In today's news: "But while the Republican mayor of America's largest city says he supports same-sex marriage, both of New York's Democratic senators have come out against it. Spokespeople for U.S. senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton told the New York Post they would not support marriage rights for gays and lesbians."

Oh Hillary, what the hell are you thinking? A Republican taking a more liberal and compassionate stance than you?

Add this to your wimpy record and almost inaudible voice against the Bush cabal, and I am ready to abandon you to the clutches of the DLC and the road to political impotence. Did you leave your brain and courage behind you when the press belittled you during the Affair of the Blue Dress? Are your ambitions such that you won't make waves at a time when a sunami is what's needed to dislodge the usurpers? Are you still listening to hubby, who also still thinks the party's success lies in staying in the capitulating and pandering center, rather than proudly building on its liberal past?

Shame on you, Hillary. This is a betrayal of your own political history and all who supported you then and now. You are on the verge of marginalizing yourself, and if that happens, you have only yourself to blame. For example, I'm writing you off, unless or until you show the spunk and fortitude we expected from you.

Sincerely,
Renfrew Zetz

I GOT A LETTER FROM BUSH

2004-03-04T18:28:00.000-05:00

March 4, 2004

Mr. Arthur Cohen
xxx xxxxxxxxx Street
xxxxxxxxx, Massachusetts 02466-2105

Dear Mr. Cohen:
On behalf of President Bush, thank you for your e-mail. The President appreciates learning your views and welcomes your suggestions.

President Bush is dedicated to pursuing policies and programs that make America safer and more prosperous for all citizens.

Thank you for writing. Best wishes.

Sincerely,
Desiree Thompson
Special Assistant to the President
and Director of Presidential Correspondence

This needs no comment.

RALPH YOU FRICKIN' EGOMANIAC Part 2

2004-02-23T12:26:00.000-05:00

WHO'S MORE WILLFULLY IGNORANT--BUSH OR NADER?

A friend from California reports that a commentator named Travis T. Hipp on KPIG radio was speaking about Ralph and said that he could be applauded for his work 30 years ago regarding car safety and the Chevrolet Corvair.

He went on to say that Nader's run for President in 2000 was responsible for getting George Bush elected and asked if Ralph thus realized that he (Ralph) was responsible for killing more people than the Corvair did.

ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER WORSE SECURITY THREAT THAN TERRORISM

2004-02-23T12:14:00.000-05:00

EAT YOUR SUV, ENEMY OF THE STATE

The article is at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5732.htm.

I was going to just summarize it and provide the link, but it's so illustrative of the incredible hypocrisy and corruption of this administration that I decided to print the whole thing.

Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be 'Siberian' in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

Mark Townsend and Paul Harris in New York

Sunday February 22, 2004: (The Observer) Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life.'

The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Last week the Bush administration came under heavy fire from a large body of respected scientists who claimed that it cherry-picked science to suit its policy agenda and suppressed studies that it did not like. Jeremy Symons, a former whistleblower at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said that suppression of the report for four months was a further example of the White House trying to bury the threat of climate change.

Senior climatologists, however, believe that their verdicts could prove the catalyst in forcing Bush to accept climate change as a real and happening phenomenon. They also hope it will convince the United States to sign up to global treaties to reduce the rate of climatic change.

A group of eminent UK scientists recently visited the White House to voice their fears over global warming, part of an intensifying drive to get the US to treat the issue seriously. Sources have told The Observer that American officials appeared extremely sensitive about the issue when faced with complaints that America's public stance appeared increasingly out of touch.

One even alleged that the White House had written to complain about some of the comments attributed to Professor Sir David King, Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, after he branded the President's position on the issue as indefensible.

Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading Bush to accept climatic change.

Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office - and the first senior figure to liken the threat of climate change to that of terrorism - said: 'If the Pentagon is sending out that sort of message, then this is an important document indeed.'

Bob Watson, chief scientist for the World Bank and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added that the Pentagon's dire warnings could no longer be ignored.

'Can Bush ignore the Pentagon? It's going be hard to blow off this sort of document. Its hugely embarrassing. After all, Bush's single highest priority is national defence. The Pentagon is no wacko, liberal group, generally speaking it is conservative. If climate change is a threat to national security and the economy, then he has to act. There are two groups the Bush Administration tend to listen to, the oil lobby and the Pentagon,' added Watson.

'You've got a President who says global warming is a hoax, and across the Potomac river you've got a Pentagon preparing for climate wars. It's pretty scary when Bush starts to ignore his own government on this issue,' said Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace.

Already, according to Randall and Schwartz, the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Randall told The Observer that the potential ramifications of rapid climate change would create global chaos. 'This is depressing stuff,' he said. 'It is a national security threat that is unique because there is no enemy to point your guns at and we have no control over the threat.'

Randall added that it was already possibly too late to prevent a disaster happening. 'We don't know exactly where we are in the process. It could start tomorrow and we would not know for another five years,' he said.

'The consequences for some nations of the climate change are unbelievable. It seems obvious that cutting the use of fossil fuels would be worthwhile.'

So dramatic are the report's scenarios, Watson said, that they may prove vital in the US elections. Democratic frontrunner John Kerry is known to accept climate change as a real problem. Scientists disillusioned with Bush's stance are threatening to make sure Kerry uses the Pentagon report in his campaign.

The fact that Marshall is behind its scathing findings will aid Kerry's cause. Marshall, 82, is a Pentagon legend who heads a secretive think-tank dedicated to weighing risks to national security called the Office of Net Assessment. Dubbed 'Yoda' by Pentagon insiders who respect his vast experience, he is credited with being behind the Department of Defence's push on ballistic-missile defence.

Symons, who left the EPA in protest at political interference, said that the suppression of the report was a further instance of the White House trying to bury evidence of climate change. 'It is yet another example of why this government should stop burying its head in the sand on this issue.'

Symons said the Bush administration's close links to high-powered energy and oil companies was vital in understanding why climate change was received sceptically in the Oval Office. 'This administration is ignoring the evidence in order to placate a handful of large energy and oil companies,' he added.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES

2004-02-22T17:19:00.000-05:00

I know I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating, and it's one of my favorite quotes. I clipped it from a letter-to-the-editor in the Boston Globe about 10 years ago, before an off-year election when local progressive Mark Roosevelt was running for governor and Kennedy for Senate re-election. I have no idea now who the writer was.

The writer asks, "Why am I going to voter for Kennedy and Roosevelt? It has to with something my pappy used to say."

"He said, 'Son, outside of Mother Theresa, there are basically two kinds of people: those that live their lives in an essentially selfish manner and feel guilty about it. They're called liberals. And those who live their lives in an essentially selfish manner and are proud of it. They're called conservatives. The first may be capable, on occasion,of responding to an ideal higher than their own self-interest; the second don't even know that such things exist."

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

2004-02-22T16:50:00.000-05:00

I'm still waiting, America.

Waiting for anyone to demonstrate how same-sex marriage will harm existing heterosexual marriages or the institution of marriage.

Or that the children of same-sex couples are any more troubled or socially maladapted than any other kid. Iin fact the data that does exist by the APA unambiguously concludes that if there is any difference, it is that these kids are better adjusted than those from opposite sex couples.

Or that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope that will lead to societal approval or legalization of polygamy or bestiality.

We're all waiting for your proof, America.

So either put up, or have a nice cup of shut-the-fuck-up.

SAMUEL JACKSON OFFERS ADVICE TO HIS DAUGHTER'S DATES

2004-02-22T16:21:00.000-05:00

It was reported in FHM magazine that Jackson never speaks to his daughter's dates. He doesn't want them to think it's OK to be there at all.

But one date couldn't keep quiet.

"He had come in and insisted on having a conversation with me, and I ws trying to watch a game, and he was like, 'How are you doing?' I looked at him. He was like 'I just want you to know it's really good to meet you, and we're going to the movies.' And I said, 'Don't (expletive) her!' My daughter walked in just as I said that. She said, 'Dad!' Then she grabbed him and left. That's pretty much all the conversation I had with that kid. He kind of blanched."

I would guess blanching was as close as the kid would get to any heat that night.

MEL YOU FRICKIN' SELF-DELUDED ANTI-SEMITIC EGOMANIAC

2004-02-22T15:20:00.000-05:00

Well, sure, I've got a lot of passion over this movie. I've seen clips and read reams about it. It depicts Jews clamoring for Christ's crucifixion. Some who've seen the whole movie say it distinguishes between the Jewish priests and the Jewish people at large. That difference will be lost on those who seek affirmation for their overt or latent anti-Semitism.

That Gibson also portrays the historically brutal and ruthless tyrant Pontius Pilate as a man caught up in events he didn't support but had to implement is equally egregious. Pilate was not a nice guy, whereas in the movie he comes off almost sympathetic--in a scene from the Gospel of Matthew, after his final attempt to save Jesus fails, Pilate washes his hands and says to the Jewish crowd, "It is you who want to crucify him, not I. ... I am innocent of this man's blood."

Caiaphas and most Jewish authorities are clearly among the bad guys. They arrest Jesus by stealth, spit on him and have him scourged and find him guilty of blasphemy in a mock trial. In an extrabiblical cinematic touch, Jewish soldiers knock Jesus off of a wall, and it is only the chains around his body that stop his fall just before he hits the ground.

He is so badly wounded by the time he gets to Pilate that the Roman ruler says, "Do you always punish your prisoners before they're judged?" It is the Jewish leaders who incite the crowd to yell, "Crucify him, crucify him" in the face of Pilate's repeated attempts to release Jesus. The leadership at times even seems to take pleasure in the torture Jesus is forced to endure.

Gibson did cut a controversial scene that drew objections from Christian and Jewish leaders alike -- the so-called "blood curse" from the Gospel of Matthew that has been abused for centuries to hold all Jews accountable for the death of Jesus.

But he filmed it, and only cut it under pressure. And he added a few scenes that
show Jesus commanding his followers to love all people and declaring he faced death "of my own accord."

Oh, that's better.

But forget the movie for a minute. Let's look at Mad Max himself

Gibson's dad is overtly anti-Semitic, and is a Holocaust denier. The filmmaker gets prickly when asked about his father, and closes off discussion about him in interviews. Nor does he distance himself from his Dad's positions.

In an interview with Peggy Noonan, forthcoming in the March issue of Reader's Digest, he says, "My dad taught me my faith, and I believe what he taught me. The man never lied to me in his life."

Oh so? The Holocaust never happened?

Noonan offered him a chance to end any speculation about his views on the Holocaust: "You're going to have to go on record. The Holocaust happened, right?"

Gibson's reply: "I have friends and parents of friends who have numbers on their arms. The guy who taught me Spanish was a Holocaust survivor. He worked in a concentration camp in France. Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps. Many people lost their lives. In the Ukraine, several million starved to death between 1932 and 1933. During the last century, 20 million people died in the Soviet Union."

Well Well Well. War is horrible. "Some of them were Jews in concentration camps." Nothing special, just part of the mix among tens of millions.

George Mason University law professor David Bernstein points out that Holocaust "revisionists" typically do not deny that Jews were killed; they simply minimize the killing, portraying it as another part of the overall death toll of World War II rather than the systematic extermination campaign that it was. In Bernstein's opinion, "Gibson is skirting pretty close" to this kind of minimization.

And Cathy Young in Reason says, "Given an opportunity to state clearly that the Holocaust happened and that it was a horrific crime, Gibson, instead, chose to hedge--to give a "yes, but" answer, to gloss over the Nazi extermination of the Jews and quickly move on to other victims of other regimes. This may not signify anti-Semitism, but it certainly signifies a frightening moral obtuseness."

Mel, you can act hurt or offended all you want when accused of anti-Semitism, but with friends like you, the Jews don't need enemies. Polls done before the release of this movie report that while six in 10 Americans believe Bible stories are literally true*, only 8% believe Jews are responsible for Jesus' death. 80% say Jews are not responsible. I'd like to see results of those polls if retaken after this movie has its run.

In some mid-eastern or Arabic countries, it's not hard to imagine that those percents would be reversed, if they even cared who killed Jesus--which fortunately they do not. But anyone want to bet that this movie won't get used by the Palestinians and Islamic extremists to support their own home-grown anti-Semitism; or that the Christian rightwing Jew-haters all over Europe won't do the same?

So, Mr. Gibson, while you fire up the passions of those who want me at best marginalized and at worst dead, here's my passion: you are persona non grata in this house and the house of the Jews. You can't escape the ignominy of your actions with a turn of phrase. I'll never be able to see you in a film--new or old--without thinking of your "moral obtuseness." Never again. So I won't see you.

*Six in 10 believe Bible stories are literally true? Jesus H. Christ!

RALPH YOU FRICKIN' EGOMANIAC

2004-02-22T15:13:00.000-05:00

I didn't see him on Meet The Press this morning. I am finding even listening to him distasteful, and his announcement that he is planning to run confirms that for me. There'll be lots of punditry over this, and I've said everything that needs saying in my previous post--except this:

At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency? Have you no shame?

RALPH DON'T RUN

2004-02-02T10:33:00.000-05:00

Unbelievably, there are still many on the left who think Nader's run had no effect on the outcome of Coup 2000, including of course the megalomaniac himself. Given Nader's selfserving obstinacy about acknowledging any role, and his apparently limitless ego, it's no surprise that he's exploring another run, this time independent of the Green Party.

The Greens should be grateful. According to some observers, the Greens lost the Mayoral race in San Francisco because a number of VERY liberal Democrats have decided NEVER to vote Green again.

Some sad Nader voters, feeling guilty as they should, have come up with RepentantNaderVoters.com: http://www.repentantnadervoter.com/

Not to be outdone, the unrepentant ones have countered with UnrepentantNaderVoters.com: http://www.unrepentantnadervoter.com/. Dismissive of the "blame nader" position, they continue to argue that any Democratic candidate is just "more of the same," and a progressive third party is the only honorable choice. The site founder says in a letter to Nader decrying the blame,

"I absolutely and utterly reject the contention that I bear even the slightest iota of responsibility for putting George Bush, Jr. into office, or will bear any responsibility for re-electing him. The candidate who wins my vote must EARN it, no candidate is entitled to it by merely being the lesser of two evils.

I vote FOR a candidate, not AGAINST his or her opponent."

Talk of being out of step. For those of us who accept the premise that the only honorable goal is to defeat Bush, and will indeed vote against Bush by, if necessary,picking the lesser of two weevils, this is just an insufferable self-righteous and judgmental position.

The Green party will survive their folly, but weakened and even less viable if they support this position or field a presidential candidate. Nothing, however, will change the mind of the Nader/Green zealots.

Not even this must-see video:
http://www.turtlerock.com/RalphDontRun/

2004-02-01T11:00:00.000-05:00

"LIBERALS THROW PUNCHES LIKE GIRLS"

Wacko Ann Coulter gets off on infuriating her audiences. That's why she likes to speak in LA, New York, college campuses. She loves it when outraged audiences jump up and scream. At one event, "they would call me 'fascist' or 'racist' or whatever. It was great." Now finding respectability at cocktail parties, she admits not so long ago she found it slightly embarrassing to be right wing. "You would go to a cocktail party and it would take 45 minutes to determine the person you were talking to was a right winger. We were like homosexuals with a scarf in the back pocket." Now she's out as a conservative and not the least bit afraid of people she infuriates for a living. "Nooo," she says, "Liberals throw punches like girls."

Phew. Well, other than delineating all that's offensive in her comments--all of it, actually--it's the last line that intrigues me, because for the most part, she's right about that, sexism aside.

As the pundits are now unanimously noting, it took Dean to get the other candidates to get to the point. While Dean's own campaign may be floundering (and the pundits are doing their best to make this happen by repeating it constantly), nonetheless his moral outrage, expressed angrily at times, has resononated with many of us. He, with no guile, speaks truth to power.

Now the other contendas are beginning to express themselves with that outrage. But they need more.

The net is filled with commentaries on why liberals and progessives won't or can't fight on the same turf as the extreme right. It's all true, and good for us. Because--we're right, and they're wrong--not just in substance, but in political demeanor.

But these are no ordinary times. Let's take the gloves off. We don't have to surrender the moral high ground, which we've always had by definition* if not action, but we do have to throw stronger punches. Dean taught us that.

*A modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in
moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification
for selfishness." -- John Kenneth Galbraith

2004-02-01T10:39:00.000-05:00

(UN)HEALTHY MARRIAGE INITIATIVE

1.5 Billion, "to promote strong, lasting.legal unions between low-income men and women," because "research definitely shows that marriage is the fastest route out of poverty." Below is a list of where that money could be spent that actually would make a difference in the lives of low-income people. Oh nevermind, you all know that list.

It's not the lack of relationship skills that keeps so many impoverished urban women from marrying," says the New York Times. "It's a lack or worthwhile husbands. Jobless. poorly educated, and incarcerated men don't make good mates, and women who marry them don't get the financial and social benefits that marriage provides to the middle class." Rather, spend the money on useful things like "like pregnancy prevention, health insurance, job training for single moms."

Of course, this empty gesture is really a sop to social conservatives, to remind them, as Froma Harrop says in The Providence Journal, that "Bush is their guy.

Ellis Henican in Newsday points out that the Bible Belt is hardly in any position to lecture America about marriage. Rate of divorce among
Baptists: 29%;
Nondemoninational Christians: 34%;
Five states with the highest divorce rates: Nevada, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, Oklahoma.

As for the rest of us:

Agnostics: 21%;
Northeast Liberals: 19%.

As Henican says, "it could be that the president and his people need a little counseling of their own."

2004-01-27T18:09:00.000-05:00

HAPPY FUN PLACE

As reported in The Week, January 30 2004:
Teachers in schools across the country are introducing new jargon to students as young as 6 years old in order to comply with government-mandated curricula. As some schools, children are to write a "brief constructed response" or an "extended constructed response" instead of a paragraph or essay. Multiple-choice tests are now called "selected-response assessments." Rather than compare books, kids make "text-to-text connections." Said one Maryland high school senior: "It's like renaming a prison "The Happy Fun Place."

2004-01-26T15:13:00.000-05:00

RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE? YOU TALKING TO ME?

"Imagine no religion...it's easy if you try." It's getting harder by the day in a land ruled by theocrats.

On a political discussion list I'm on, one meathead posted yesterday some diatribe about how America was founded on religion, that on top of the Washington Monument, visible only from above, is a huge inscription "Laus Deo"--honor God or something like that. That 92% of Americans support the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. That religious inscriptions honoring God abound in our early statuary and public monument. And thus the separation of church and state is just the usual liberal...oh, need I go on. We were entreated, in typical internet bombast, to spread this religious screed to everyone we know. I wrote back:

"It's exactly because of this intertwining of church and state that the "separation" has evolved through decades of Supreme Court decisions since the monument was built and most of those inscriptions were written. As a country we recognized the need to expand upon the original amendment to prevent theocrats from creating the tyranny of the majority. We now cherish separation such that discussions about "under God" are critical to the continuance of religious freedom--and freedom from religion--whatever the outcome.

Similarly, there was nothing explicitly stated about privacy in the constitution, either, yet that concept has evolved through Supreme Court decisions to be one of the most valued aspects of our system, even if now threatened by the Patriot Act I and proposed #2.

And of course the constitution as written only allowed rich white men with property to vote. All hail the sacred writ.

It took centuries of judicial activism to create the body of law that now underpins this republic, and which we desecrate every day--especially this administration. And yes, judicial activism, that very concept that right-wingers condemn when they don't like a court decision, but which is as necessary to the creation of a free state as the first amendment. (We are reminded of Bush's unimaginable temerity and hypocrisy in his State of the Union comments about judicial activism, which of course is the reason he was standing at that podium at all.)

It doesn't matter how pious or religious you are. Who cares? That's your choice, your business. You have no God-given right to judge others who choose a different path. When you do, as you always do, you betray God, as you do this democracy. I swear these people wouldn't understand Christianity if it bit them on ass. If Christ were here today, any doubt who would do the crucifying this time?

You want to pray, acknowledge God, in a public forum, do it, but do it silently and privately. Anything else is just a thinly disguised equivalent of the antecedents of Taliban fundamentalism, or Islamic Sharia Law. How dare anyone impose their religious values or traditions on anyone else, anywhere, anytime!"

Then today The Boston Globe printed a column titled "Intolerance spans the religious divide" by Cathy Young--A contributing editor at Reason magazine (the magazine of "Free minds and free markets"--e.g., libertarian), who makes her own religion out of trying to always look at both sides of an issue while ending up chastising everyone. She seemed to think the left had gone too far criticizing Bush's public religiosity: "I happen to agree that on many occasions, President Bush has gone too far in injecting religion in his political rhetoric. But it is equally true that his critics have used and misused his faith to impugn his policies." Oh, Bush-wa.
Here's the URL for the column:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/01/26/intolerance_spans_the_religious_divide/

I wrote this letter to the editor in response. They didn't print it. Too much bombast, I guess.

To The Editor, Boston Globe:

Cathy Young seems to have made an illogical leap in her column on religious intolerance (January 26).
At one point she states that "I happen to agree that on many occasions, President Bush has gone too far in injecting religion in his political rhetoric." But she closes with "Lack of religious devotion should not be a basis for a smear. But neither should religious belief -- and the truth is that the intolerance of the religious right can be fully matched by that of the secular left."

While the column fails to make a compelling case to support the closing contention, any intolerance that does exist on the left is not of religion per se, but of that injection of religion where it doesn't belong.

Simply, those who try to inject religion into politics or public policy, according to our constitution, do not deserve tolerance. In fact, in defense of the constitution, it is our duty as citizens to restrain any person or institution from such behavior. We are guaranteed not only freedom of religion, but freedom from religion.

President Bush and the religious right can be as religious as they want. If they kept it to themselves, it wouldn't be anybody's business but their own. But they don't, and what Young misrepresents as intolerance is their just reward.

2004-01-17T09:49:00.000-05:00

COMIC RELIEF--IN THE NICK OF TIME

I proclaim a hiatus, a caesura from negative reports. As of today, only funny or uplifting stuff. I will begin to reprint Dave Barry's columns from when he was still funny. Wait, there's that flying pig again...

The town of Bolinas, CA voted 314-152 to adopt the following ballot measure (the official wording): "Vote for Bolinas to be socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the bluberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks, and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and make it beautiful."

The San Francisco Chronicle attributed the town's support for it to the fact that its sponsor, artist Jane "Dakar" Blethen, is a beloved, though eccentric local character.

I nominate her for a federal judicial appointment.

2004-01-17T09:18:00.000-05:00

PUTZ APPOINTS PUTZ

I just liked the alliteration in that headline.

So Bush makes a recess appointment of Charles Pickering to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, to trump Democratic filibuster to one of the most reactionary, anti-choice, anti-civil rights and civil liberties nominees possible, and perhaps in history--except maybe for the other nominees being filibustered. Pickering is far worse than Thomas or Scalia. In fact, this is one of the most un-American people I have come across--among so many on the extreme right. It's almost unfathomable that Bush would push for this guy. Almost.

Here's just one of many summaries appearing on various progressive websites about this sneak attack, this one from NARAL:

"President Bush has been pushing Charles Pickering’s controversial nomination to the Fifth Circuit for several years. When the Senate was still in pro-choice hands in 2002, the Judiciary Committee defeated this nomination for good reason. In 2003, pro-choice Democrats successfully filibustered Pickering.

Pickering's lifelong role as an architect of the anti-choice movement – as well as his hostility to other established constitutional rights and liberties – drew opposition from an unprecedented coalition of pro-choice, civil-rights, labor, environmental, and gay and lesbian groups."

And as for the latter, here's what NGLTF says:

Following is a statement from National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Executive Director Matt Foreman on the appointment of Charles Pickering:

"Wednesday, in a bald attempt to win African American votes at the expense of gay Americans, the White House told the media of their plans to unveil a $1.5 billion dollar plan to promote marriage (as if the African American and gay communities are mutually exclusive communities). Yesterday, the President laid a wreath at the tomb of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, through a recess appointment, he anointed Charles Pickering to a U.S. Court of Appeals, an individual who has spent his life opposing everything Dr. King stood and fought for. This kind of hypocrisy is both breathtaking and appalling. We stand in solidarity with the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP of Mississippi and national NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and all fair-minded Americans in opposition to this action."

Any president has a right to make recess appointments. Clinton did it to circumvent opposition from the right on nominations. But of course Clinton didn't appoint an extremist condemned by every moderate to liberal social and political organization in the country, and many not so liberal.

This is simply an appalling action. Of all the cynical moves by this administration in the past month, including the aforementioned visit to the tomb of MLK (with buses lined up to block the 1000 protesters that showed up), this one takes the cake.

Every time we ask how can it get worse, it does. Every time we think it can't get more cynical, it does. Every time we think it can't get more extreme, it does. Every single goddam time.

As usual, "At long last, sir, have you no sense of decency? Have you no shame?"

2004-01-16T17:35:00.000-05:00

"THEN, AS TODAY, THE DEFENDERS OF THE STATUS QUO ALWAYS SEEMED TO HAVE GOD'S LIPS TO THEIR EARS."

A divided three-judge panel of the 11th District Ohio Court of Appeals ruled recently that a heterosexual couple may not marry under state law if one member is transsexual.

Although Jacob Nash was born female, he changed his sex in the late 1990s and obtained a revised birth certificate from his home state in Massachusetts. Nonetheless, the Ohio courts have continued to ignore this legal document in denying him the right to marry his partner, Erin Barr.

In a Dec. 31 decision, which is expected to be appealed, Judge Diane V. Grendell insisted that the U.S. Constitution's Full Faith and Credit Clause might require Ohio to respect Nash's Massachusetts birth certificate, but it does not require Ohio to take the extra step of declaring Nash a male under Ohio law.

Instead, the judge turned to the legal authority of Webster's New College Dictionary, where she found "female" defined as "the sex that produces ova or bears young," and "male" as "the sex that has organs to produce spermatozoa for fertilizing ova." Once she determined that Nash failed to meet the latter specification, she grounded the rest of her opinion in the state law that prohibits same-sex marriage.

Grendell cited a host of conservative precedents in the course of her 17-page opinion, including a dissenting opinion in a state Supreme Court case that was overwhelmingly resolved in favor of two women who sought a name change.

In another example, the judge found a quote from a Texas transgender marriage case with which to dismiss the underlying complexity of the matter before her: "We realize," wrote the Texas 4th District Court of Appeals in Littleton v. Prange, "that there are many fine metaphysical arguments lurking about here involving desire and being, the essence of life and the power of mind over physics. But courts are wise not to wander too far into the misty fields of sociological philosophy."

In contrast, Grendell's dissenting colleague, Judith Christley, wrote that advances in civil rights have "required that we rethink the long established history and origins of our prejudices. Without exception," she went on, "the continuation of those prejudices was defended in the name of natural law, the God-given order of things, and because it had always been that way. Then, as today, the defenders of the status quo always seemed to have God's lips to their ears."

--Reported by Ann Rostow, Gay.com / PlanetOut.com Network

2004-01-16T15:12:00.000-05:00

OY, THOSE WACKY ORTHODOX JEWS

We'll get there, but first:

Boston's ultra-putz Archbishop O'Malley is continuing his Jihad against family values, security for children, stable relationships, and love.

First, on Sunday he urged Catholic lawyers on Sunday to oppose gay marriage, saying the institution of marriage and the family are under assault and attorneys need to help protect them.

"The social cost of the breakdown of family life has already been enormous," O'Malley said at the annual Red Mass, which is dedicated to judges, lawyers and others in the legal system.

"It's not a question of live and let live, it's a question of right and wrong," O'Malley said.

He didn't give specifics on what the lawyers could do to protect marriage and the family.

But later, in an interview, he said: "We hope that they will use their profession and their understanding of the law to defend marriage. They're in a better position than any of us to understand what needs to be done to correct a very complicated situation that the court has put us in."

Not that complicated. Rational, caring, compassionate human beings, including the Catholic Rainbow Sash Movement, support same sex marriage and oppose these Jihads. Here's what Rainbow Sash has to say:

"Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley of Boston urged Catholic lawyers to oppose gay marriage. We will ask the Archbishop to explain in plain English how gay marriage will under mind the marriage of heterosexuals. What is troubling about the archbishop call to arms are religious figures dictating public policy. Will Archbishop O'Malley go as far as Bishop Raymond Burke of La Crosse, Wisconsin who is refusing Holy Communion to Pro Choice elected officials, Bishop Burke cited Vatican doctrine, canon law and teachings by the U.S. bishops in an announcement telling diocesan priests to withhold communion from such lawmakers until they 'publicly renounce' their support of abortion rights. Will the Archbishop impose the same standard on those catholic lawyers and judges who do not agree with his opinion on matter of Gay Marriage which is also contrary to Church Law?

"The Rainbow Sash Movement would remind the Archbishop misrepresenting the facts and stereotyping a whole community of people is also a sin, we in the gay and lesbian Catholic Community recognize it as 'homophobia.' He further states 'The social cost of the breakdown of family life has already been enormous,' and just what does that have to do with legally affirming gay and lesbian families? Another question the Archbishop appears to be tap dancing around.

"Another question posed by the Archbishop was, 'What do we want to teach our young people about marriage?' The Rainbow Sash Movement would hope that he would want children to be taught to affirm the love between two adults, regardless of sexual orientation, race, or gender who have entered into loving committed relationship. The Archbishop apparently finds the children of gay and lesbian families, not as worthy of the protection of law, and must see them in a lesser light than he sees the children of heterosexual families, or he would support equal rights.

"We respect the teaching authority of the Church. Because of this, we find particularly troubling the increase in the use of violent and abusive language directed at members of the gay and lesbian community. Such language is inappropriate. Certainly the Archbishop must be aware that his language is divisive and exclusionary which is contrary to sound pastoral practice.

"Archbishop O'Malley should be preaching Recognition of the inalienable dignity of the human person is the only path toward justice and reconciliation. Instead he seeks to divide the Catholic Community.

"The RSM would remind the Archbishop we are most Catholic when we are inclusive and embracing, when we are exclusionary we do not reflect the Gospel Values of Jesus Christ.

"We call on the Archbishop Boston to apologize to those faithful gay and lesbian Catholics and their children who have been harmed by his words. Further to enter into dialogue with the gay and lesbian community of Boston to understand who your gay and lesbian neighbors are, gay baiting should have no place at the Eucharistic table."

To find out more about the Rainbow Sash Movement visit our web site at http://www.rainbowsashmovement.org.

But O'Malley is not likely to respond or care about all that, because he answers to a higher authority--not God, not Christ, but the uber-putz Pope. That's about as far as you can get from God. If these two were Muslim, they'd be Khomeini & Sons. Let's say it again--anyone with that authority and audience who tells the world not to use condoms to prevent AIDS because the virus leaks through them, well, that's far more than unacceptable ignorance or faithful adherence to dogma (what's the difference?)--it's tantamount to murder.

The only good news is that this miscreant is ready to kick the bucket any minute. And, brothers and sisters, when that happens, he's going to find a warm reception in his final destination. Extremely warm.

O'Malley, on the other hand, will be with us for the time it takes for, oh, a couple of hundred gay-bashings, a couple thousand kids being emotionally damaged because their same-sex parents won't have the protection of legal (and subsequently cultural) legitimacy, thousands or other LGBT youth tormented by guilt, and more than a few loving people dying alone and in misery because their partners are not allowed to visit them in their hospital deathbeds.

Next on the Jihad to-do list, today the Boston Globe reports that "the state's four Roman Catholic bishops will mail a flier to more than a million Catholic households in Massachusetts, urging the faithful to support a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

The initiative, a partnership between the state's four Catholic dioceses and the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, the church's political advocacy arm, was announced Friday . The state's highest court ruled in November that it is unconstitutional to bar gay couples from civil marriage. Since then, O'Malley has called on priests and other Catholics to defend traditional marriage."

Traditional marriage?

"Marriage as we understand it - voluntary, monogamous, legally egalitarian, based on love, involving adults only - is a pretty recent phenomenon. For much of human history, polygyny was the rule - read your Old Testament - and in much of Africa and the Muslim world, it still is. Arranged marriages, forced marriages, child marriages, marriages predicated on the subjugation of women - gay marriage is like a fairy tale romance compared with most chapters of the history of wedlock."
- Katha Pollitt writing in The Nation, Nov. 26.]

And oh, that headline? Well, it turns out the Catholic leadership isn't the only bastion of medieval religious ignorance and savagery.

Today's Globe also reports that "The Jewish Community Relations Council, the major public policy voice of the Jewish community in Greater Boston, has voted overwhelmingly to endorse same-sex marriage.

The endorsement, by an umbrella organization representing 42 Jewish groups, is part of a growing effort by liberal religious voices to counter the strong opposition to same-sex marriage voiced by the state's Catholic bishops."

So far, so good.

But my landtsmen are not all of one mind. Some don't seem to be of any mind at all. As if wearing full beards and heavy black robes and hats in blistery summer heat, or voting Republican, weren't evidence enough, this'll do:

"The leader of the Orthodox opposition to the Jewish Community Relations Council vote, Rabbi Gershon C. Gewirtz of Young Israel synagogue in Brookline, declined to comment. The Coalition for Marriage referred calls to Rabbi Chaim Schwartz of Agudath Israel of New England, an Orthodox advocacy organization, who said, "This is an issue we believe is bringing about decadence in society." "It's not that we do not believe in the civil rights of gay couples -- we believe each person should be able to live in this great country -- but we don't believe in calling it marriage," Schwartz said. "It's morally incorrect, and what's next? Bestiality? Marrying a dog? Marrying your cat?"

Well, maybe. If my choice were Rabbi Schwartz or a dog, I'm going with the one who understands unconditional love.

2004-01-15T09:48:00.000-05:00

MoveOn's Bush-in-30-Seconds Contest Awards transcripts

The Drudge report printed these, with a bit of condescension and scolding in their intro:

"Celebrity activists unleashed a torrent of obscenity-laced insults and allegations against Republicans and the Bush Administration -- just a week after the site's founders apologized for posting two political messages on the Internet comparing President Bush to Hitler."

I think Margaret responds quite adequately.

The hate email to her that the Drudge excerpts generated are at:
http://www.apj.us/20040114CroMag.html

MARGARET CHO (Comedian) --

* "Despite all of this stupid bullsh-- that the Republican National Committee, or whatever the f--- they call them, that they were saying that they're all angry about how two of these ads were comparing Bush to Hitler? I mean, out of thousands of submissions, they find two. They're like fu--ing looking for Hitler in a hawstack. You now? I mean, George Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he fu--ing applied himself." big, extended applause) "I mean he just isn't."

* "I think this last year has just proven how stupid Republicans are." (big applause)

* "For example, Judge Roy Moore, or Jay Moore or whatever, in Alabama. [inaudible] ... Ten Commandments statue stay in the lobby of a courthouse. 'You can't move the Word of God! You cannot remove the Franklin Mint edition of the Word of God!' [said in Southern accent] People are protesting there and like, I think it could have been solved so much easier if they had just placed a golden calf next to the statue and then people would have started worshipping that. And then they could have moved the Ten Commandments to Bush's office -- which he needs them, desperately. Or maybe he needs a new version of the Ten Commandments -- George W. Bush's Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not steal...votes. (big applause) Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's...country. (big applause) Thou shalt not kill...for oil. (big applause) Thou shalt not take grammar...in vain. (big applause) I mean, whatever fu--ing happened to separation of church and state? I mean, you can't like, impose your god on my god. God has many names. God is God, God is Jehovah, God is Allah, God is Buddah, God is Beyonce. (laughter) You know, you cannot impose your God on other people. And ah, George W. Bush is coming out with the weirdest stance on same-sex marriage as well. What he says about it is, well, 'well, we're all sinners.' No we're not! Just because somebody ate an apple one time does not make us all sinners. And if it was from the tree of knowledge, I think she should have eaten more than one. (laughter) Possibly even baked a pie." (applause) "I don't understand the whole same-sex marriage thing. He was quoted by saying, 'well, you you uh, just gotta take the speck out of your own eye before you take the co-- out of your neighbor's.'" [in Southern accent] (laughter)

* "I mean, I'm afraid of terrorists, but I'm more afraid of the Patriot Act." (big applause)

CHUCK D (Rapper -- Public Enemy)

* Cut off, but he appears to refer to American government under Bush Administration as "cancer of civilization."

* "But truly, seriously, quite frankly, the people are smart enough to realize that the world is important and we only have one life [or right, unclear], that's tired of this bullsh--, or better than that, tired of this Bushsh--" (big applause)

* "Americanization is like McDonaldization"

* "Son of a Bush and his crew is at it again, because, we do not want 8 years run by a Colon, a Bush and a Dick." (big applause)

JULIA STILES (Actress)

* "I was worried that some soldiers over in Iraq who are actually younger than I am would see some salacious report on MSNBC and think that I was attacking them and not the government that put them there. And I was afraid that Bill O'Reilly would come and, with a shotgun at my front door and shoot me for being unpatriotic. But I decided that that's actually, that fear that was silencing me is actually why it's so important that MoveOn exist and do this ad contest..."

AL FRANKEN

*"I'm Al Franken. I'm here to present the funniest ad award. I'm a last-minute substitution, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was supposed to be the presenter, but unfortunately he was murdered."

MOBY

*Said he had "contempt" for Bush, called him a "big fat f---ing liar."

2004-01-15T09:16:00.000-05:00

GENERAL CLARK SOFTENS HIS IMAGE

"I think there's an impression that the armed forces is a male-dominated, hierarchal, authoritarian institution," he told The Times about his gender gap, notwithstanding the fact that the armed forces is a male-dominated, hierarchal, authoritarian institution.
--Maureen Dowd-"The Argyle General"-New York Times, January 11

2004-01-15T09:11:00.000-05:00

FLORIDA'S GOV. BUSH ASKED TO REMOVE ANTI-GAY CANDIDTE

Washington, D.C.--A member of a Florida commission that helps select state court judges has inappropriately asked nominees about their religious beliefs and should be removed from office, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

The Miami Daily Business Review reported January 8 that Broward Judicial Nomination Commission (JNC) member O'Neal Dozier has asked several candidates for Broward County judgeships inappropriate questions about their religious beliefs, such as whether they attend church and are "God-fearing." Several of those judicial nominees complained about those types of questions.

The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United, sent a letter to Gov. Bush today calling on him to fire Dozier.

"Dozier's overt religious bigotry is wholly unacceptable and he must no longer be allowed an official role in the selection of judges in Florida," Lynn wrote. "It is appalling that in 2004 judicial nominees are being subjected to an inquisition. Religious litmus tests are unconstitutional in America."

In addition to grilling candidates about religion, Dozier has also been accused of questioning judicial candidates about their personal lives and their stands on controversial social issues. One woman said she was asked whether she could balance her duties as a single mother of twins with her duties as a judge. Another candidate was asked his opinions on the Supreme Court's decision last summer that overturned a Texas sodomy law.

According to the Miami Daily Business Review, Dozier said such questions are appropriate. "I am totally against that ruling," he told the newspaper. "We cannot have a judge who feels sodomy is OK." Dozier has repeatedly expressed an intolerant and theocratic approach to government. According to a report in the New Times Broward-Palm Beach late last year, Dozier told a Religious Right gathering, "We as Christians must take control of the government. We should be the ones in charge of the government."

New Times said Dozier also observed that homosexuality is "something so nasty and disgusting that it makes God want to vomit."

According to the more recent Miami Business Review article, Dozier said, "There is no such animal as separation of church and state in the Constitution."

Dozier was appointed to the judicial nomination commission by Governor Bush, and AU's Lynn urged Bush to act quickly to remove Dozier from that official post.

"As I am sure you are aware," Lynn wrote, "state and federal law forbid religious tests for public office. In our highly pluralistic society, it is outrageous to require judicial nominees to profess certain religious beliefs, participate in religious activities or conform their lives to the tenets of a particular faith."

2004-01-15T08:58:00.000-05:00

LIBERAL RADIO IS COMING AT LAST!

Al Franken announcing his upcoming radio talk show, which will launch with the new liberal talk radio network Progress Media: "My first priority is to get sued by a right-wing jerk in order to generate interest in my new show, the O’Franken Factor. Our hope is to do drug-free talk radio, although I understand it’s never been done."

Here's the full press release:

Contact: Adam Schiff
Dan Klores Communications, Inc.
212-981-5216
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AL FRANKEN INKS DEAL WITH PROGRESS MEDIA TO HOST RADIO TALK SHOW

Robert Kennedy Jr. Also to Host Show
Network Finalizes Agreement on Chicago Station

New York, January 13, 2004 - Progress Media announced today that comedian and best-selling author Al Franken will hit the airwaves to host his own radio talk show when the radio network launches. The signing of Robert Kennedy Jr. to co-host a talk show and a radio network distribution deal in Chicago were also announced. Franken’s show will air weekdays.

“Al is one of the new masters of political humor. His entertaining and insightful comedy and commentary has established him as one of the savviest and most engaging voices in America today. We are thrilled to have him aboard,” said Progress Media Chief Executive Officer, Mark Walsh.

This ends a year of speculation about whether Franken would jump into radio. “Our long national nightmare is over,” said Franken. “I’ve signed.

“My first priority is to get sued by a right wing jerk in order to generate interest in my new show, The O’Franken Factor,” Franken said. “Our hope is to do drug-free talk radio, although I understand it’s never been done.

“Quite simply, my plan is to alter the political landscape, drive this radical right-wing president from office and stand as a beacon for ordinary Americans who work hard and play by the rules. Short of that, I’d just like to get on in Albany,” added Franken.

In addition, the network is unveiling another program in its lineup. “Champions of Justice,” co-hosted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papantonio, will bring a fresh and entertaining perspective to talk radio from the top legal minds in the country with a focus on informing Americans about the inner workings of corporations and how they influence our daily lives.

“I am excited to be affiliated with Progress Media, which will provide Americans a breath of fresh air and a much needed alternative to the status-quo,” said Kennedy.

“Al Franken and Robert Kennedy Jr. are important ingredients to achieving our core mission: entertaining and engaging programming,” said Walsh.

In its first major distribution announcement, Progress Media has completed a transaction with Multicultural Radio’s WNTD 950AM, a full-signal station in Chicago.

“It is an extremely significant event for Progress Media to have clearance in the third largest media market in the country" said Jon Sinton, president of the network. “Combined with other markets we are close to finalizing, Progress Media will have tremendous reach right out of the box.”

In addition, Progress Media expects to announce additional distribution deals and acquisitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other major media markets across the country.

Progress Media is led by Walsh; New York-based investor and Chairman of the Board Evan Cohen; radio pioneer Jon Sinton; Lizz Winstead, co-creator of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show;” Shelly Lewis, a longtime network news producer most recently with CNN’s “American Morning;” Dave Logan, a former XM and Chicago radio executive; and Martin Kaplan, an associate dean of the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California, who will host a talk show about the news media.

2004-01-14T20:45:00.000-05:00

THE NEWS WILL MAKE YOU CRAZY. TRY THESE.

Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as
good. Luckily, this is not difficult. (Charlotte Whitton)

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups:
Alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat. (Alex Levine)

My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying. (Ed
Furgol)

What's the use of happiness? It can't buy you money. (Henny Youngman)

Q. What is the difference between Michael Jackson and a grocery bag?
A. One is made of plastic and is dangerous for children to play with.... the other is used to carry groceries.

2004-01-14T19:57:00.000-05:00

MISSION TO MARS

For those who haven't yet felt the Alien of Disgust burst through their chests at this transparently cynical and incredibly annoying proposal by the Smirking Chimp, I offer this palliative---Ha! There is none!

But our sources in the White House have leaked the real plan.

The timing of the fruition of the plan is not arbitrary. When the Moon is ready for human and simian (you can see it coming) habitation, the plan that Bush and his corporate masters (there's a neutral phrase) have embarked on to totally degrade the Earth environment will be completed.

And so who will be the first inhabitants of the Moon? Don't misunderestimate this team. Those of us still alive who haven't mutated into some kind of spongiform blob will be able to see, even through the haze of sulfuric acid we'll still fondly call our atmosphere, a 5000 foot tall billion-kilowatt laser/neon sign: "Welcome to Halliburton"

2004-01-13T11:08:00.000-05:00

TEFLON IS ONE THING, BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS

Can we beat Bush? The media and the pundits, along with unindicted co-conspirators New Democrats, are declaring the front-runner Dean as unelectable.

They were saying this about Kucinich until recently. Well, they still are, but now with Dean they have a juicier victim. Kucinich was presented with this shibboleth at the recent Iowa debate, when a panelist told him that many Democrats don't think he's electable. He responded, with a chuckle, "Well, you know, I'm electable if you vote for me."

Anything can happen, but with Kerry continuing to self-destruct, and Clark still polling in at best 2nd place in most places, it sure looks like Dean will win the nomination.

So the savagery against Dean intensifies. He's too angry. He's naive. He changes his mind (the old flip-flop attack). Kerry and the other candidates continue to provide great sound bites that Karl Rove can use later on against Dean--and no doubt will.

It's all so depressingly familiar.

News of late has provided hope that Bush will finally get the same treatment from the press--and thereby the public, who seem to be programmed more than ever to believe everything the talking heads tell them--that the Democratic candidates have been getting. That is, consistent diminution of their integrity and credibility, and savage attacks on their competency, especially in foreign affairs and national security.

Bush's attacks on the environment, to benefit corporate interests, are the most blatant, the most severe, and the most successful of any president--ever. While I can't quite see how allowing skimobiles in Yellowstone benefits corporate America, there must be a constituency he needs and thus is pandering to in this regard. The recent blocking of the rescinding of that restriction by a federal judge is one small victory against many losses.

I intend to write a piece about the whole environmental devastation soon, but for now, if you can, check out the Sept 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, an article titled Sale Of The Wild. Here's the intro blurb: "Dept of the Interior employees are horrified by how Secretary Gale Norton and her powerfull deputy, J.Steven Griles, have allowed industry to exploit America's wilderness. Probing stealthy bureaucratic maneuvers and Grile's ties to coal, oil, and gas, the author finds a massive, irreversible (emphasis supplied) landgrab." This long and well-researched article is ultimately horrifying.

But none of this sticks to Bush. Like Reagan and Iran-Contra (among other impeachable and corrupt actions of that administration) the Teflon effect is in full force.

That news I mentioned? It's a multi-part story. First, it's the Paul O'Neil story. The fired former Bush Treasury Secretary revealed in a recent book by Ron Suskind, and detailed in a 60 Minutes interview Sunday, that Bush and team had begun planning for the invasion of Iraq days after the election. That Bush, in that now-famous quote going around the world, in cabinet meetings was "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people." By now you all know this and more. The BBC today did a longer story on this affair than NPR. The world is chomping at the bit for ways to nail this administration. We're with 'em.

Not surprisingly, some American pundits immediately tried to dismiss these volatile criticisms as sour grapes. O'Neil was fired, so he's angry, and this is his revenge. He was fired, basically for speaking up about his opposition to the tax cuts.

He reveals in the interview that Bush was initially against the 2nd round of cuts. Bush actually was concerned that they had already given too many cuts to the wealthy--Bush's words, not mine. This was a clear acknowledgement that the administration knew the bulk of the cuts were going to the rich, unlike their then-and-now insistence of the opposite. More lies exposed. But Rove insisted they "stick to principle" and so Bush acceded to another round of manna for the rich.

O'Neil thought this was bad policy, and said so publicly. Goodbye, O'Neil.

So now the media appears to be doing the administration's dirty work by dismissing O'Neil's reports and claims as sour grapes.

Well I say hooray for sour grapes. While I don't believe for a minute that O'Neil's motivation is what is being ascribed to him,if it were, who could blame him? And if it were, that doesn't for a second negate the veracity or integrity of his claims. If we aren't allowed to act out of anger at injustice, we are silenced.

The tactic may or may not work against Dean and O'Neil, but that won't stop the Rovians from trying. Of course, now they want to investigate O'Neil for exposing classified material. That isn't the case, as is obvious, but the administration's response to questions about whether this investigation will be seen as vindictive is,"well, we don't see it that way." Hold on, there's a pig flying outside my window.

By the way, I think this news about the clear acknowledgment that the tax cuts benefited the rich are far more important than the news of the pre-9/11 Iraq invasion plans, or that Bush was disengaged at meetings.

For one, we all know he's the tool of the puppetmasters Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld et. al. It is too simplistic to say he merely does what he's told, but we all know who's running things.

We also all know about the Iraq plans. That "news" has been all over the progressive media for over a year. In fact, we know that Perle and Wolfowitz proposed this neo-con strategy back in the Bush Pere administration, but Poppy vetoed it as too volatile--and offensive. When Bush Jr. won his coup, they immediately renewed this long-time scenario. 9/11 gave them the creds (according to them) to proceed. This is not news! It's incredible that mainstream media would try to pretend it is.

The next bit of hopeful news is the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace's report that the administration 'systematically misrepresented the threat posed Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile programs." Julian Borger, writing in the Guardian, suggests that the report, by four experts on weapons proliferation at the Endowment, "is likely to re-ignite calls for a commission to look into the government's pre-war intelligence claims."

Finally, an Army War College study reports that the Iraq invasion was "an unnecessary preventive war of choice" that has robbed resources and attention from the more critical fight against Al Qaeda in a hopeless US quest for absolute security. The whole story, as reported by Will Dunham of Reuters, is at the end of this post. I'm reprinting it because it has so far received little or no national coverage

And then there's the Valerie Plame incident, the investigation of which Asscroft has finally recused himself from.

While it may come to pass that any of these reports, or the aggregate of all of them, or the seeping out of the news of totality of the environmental destruction, and no doubt more exposes to come, will finally result in positive action against this administration's continued disregard for the truth, the constitution and the will of the people (and the O'Neil story still has legs), I admit to pessimism.

There are impeachable offenses here. Ultimately Clinton was impeached because he lied. The lies of this administration continue unabated, and continue to be exposed, yet so far there is no sense of national outrage among the body politic, no indication that the administration will be held accountable for its calumnies, and not a heck of a lot of diminishment of Bush's standing in the polls.

A while back the pundits we're saying that Congress had no stomach for impeachment, after the Clinton debacle, since many congresspeople, while they went along with it, did not support it (wha?) and felt the whole think was, well, icky.

A lot has happened since then. It's time to renew the calls for impeachment of this damnable president.

THE AMERICAN WAR COLLEGE REPORT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Iraq invasion was "an unnecessary preventive war of choice" that has robbed resources and attention from the more critical fight against al Qaeda in a hopeless U.S. quest for absolute security, according to a study recently published by the U.S. Army War College.

The 56-page document written by Jeffrey Record, a veteran defense expert who serves as a visiting research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, represents a blistering assessment of what President Bush calls the U.S. global war on terrorism.

Pentagon officials on Monday said Record was entitled to his opinion, but reiterated Bush's view that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terrorism.

Record urged U.S. leaders to refocus Bush's broad war to target Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, and its allies. Record said the Iraq war was a detour from real anti-terrorism efforts.

Record criticized the Bush administration for lumping together al Qaeda and President Saddam Hussein's Iraq "as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat."

"This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action," Record wrote.

"The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al Qaeda," Record wrote.

Faculty at the Army War College, an academic institute run by the Army since 1901, produce analyzes of military and national security issues, with scholars encouraged to take a critical look a existing policies.

Lawrence Di Rita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said, "There's no question he's entitled to his views."

"People are publishing stuff all the time. That's the value of kind of having people throw analysis out there. You learn even from analysis you don't agree with. I don't even want to characterize it as something I don't agree with because I just haven't read it," said Di Rita, adding that he does not know if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plans to read the document.

Record faulted the administration for fusing disparate enemies such as rogue states, terrorist groups and weapons of mass destruction proliferators into a monolithic threat.

In doing so, he said, the administration "may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States."

Record said the administration's declared goals "are unrealistic and condemn the United States to a hopeless quest for absolute security," as well as being fiscally, politically and militarily unsustainable.

These goals include destroying al Qaeda and other such transnational groups, making Iraq a stable democracy, bringing democracy to the rest of the autocratic Middle East, ending terrorism as a means of irregular warfare, and stopping proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to real and potential enemies, Record said.

In an interview, Record took issue with the very concept of a war on terrorism.

"Terrorism is a common noun. It's a technique. How do you make war on terrorism as opposed to specific terrorist organizations?" Record asked.

"I don't think that it is within America's power to rid the world of terrorism. ... The idea that you're going to be able to expunge this form of warfare from the world, I think, is really stretching it."

Douglas Lovelace, head of the Strategic Studies Institute in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where Record works, said the report "should enter into the debate or at least be considered by those who are formulating strategy and policy."