Change For Missouri Blog

2005-08-07T19:03:00.000-07:00

WE'VE MOVED TO OUR NEW WEBSITE. ALL FURTHER POSTINGS ARE AT:CHANGE FOR MISSOURI

2005-08-06T14:33:00.000-07:00

My grandson was in first grade this year in the Hazelwood School District, and I am so impressed. He knew the alphabet when the year started, but that's all. A few times last summer, I tried to get him to connect certain sounds with particular letters, without much success. Now he can read, he can sound out unfamiliar words--a sea change in one year. Hazelwood is not a rich district with small class sizes, but Josh's teacher did her job.
At the Wednesday meetup, Peter Campbell spoke about the hidden agenda of No Child Left Behind, with its recipe for dismantling public schools in favor of schools managed by private, for profit companies. The means for accomplishing this goal is a requirement of the law called "Adequate Yearly Progress". It requires that every school, even high performing ones, improve test scores each year. By 2014 all schools must have 100 percent of their students passing the reading and math tests. As the Valley Girls have it, "AS IF!"
When I was still teaching, we had a new hot-shot superintendent one year who set forth high sounding goals for the district. She wasted a few hundred thousand dollars printing it all up on laminated paper for every teacher. In five years, we were going to see that 100 percent of our students were successful. I forget now what the definition of "successful" was in that piece of malarkey. No matter. The supe was gone in four years, off to peddle her silliness somewhere else. When year five rolled around, a few of us pulled out our laminated folders and had a good laugh.
Unfortunately, Adequate Yearly Progress is law in this country, and failing to meet the goals has consequences--for all schools but especially for poorly performing ones. Instead of helping schools in low socio-economic areas by giving them additional money to reduce class sizes and by providing adequate social services so that children are more likely to come to school prepared to learn, this law punishes such districts for the inevitable failure.
The consequences are severe. If any school, high performing or low, remains on the "needs improvement" list, it must stretch already overburdened funds in the following ways:
After two years: the school must pay for a transfer if any parent requests it
After three years: the school must pay for tutors
After four years: the school day and the school year are lengthened
After five years: teachers are fired and the school is taken over by a private, for profit company
Several unintended but nevertheless predictable problems result from the plan. First, many districts, worried about meeting the goals, are teaching students how to do well on multiple choice tests instead of spending time reading books and are cutting social studies, art, music and foreign language to concentrate on preparing for the test. (Only math and reading are tested now. Science will be added later.) Second, since the states are receiving inadequate federal funds to pay for writing and giving the tests, school funds are stretched even thinner. And finally, not surprisingly, many states are dumbing down the tests out of pure self defense.
Perhaps even Superintendent Kowal, wherever she is, disapproves of this bureacratic nightmare. At least her plan was relatively harmless and easy to ignore. This one, with its insidious aim of undermining public schools, has the potential to deep-six public education.

2005-08-05T16:00:00.000-07:00

December before last, about six busloads of activists got plenty of local news cameras trained on them by protesting in front of a Wal-Mart on a freezing winter day. Next Wednesday, Wake-Up Wal-Mart is organizing another demonstration, this time in front of the Ferguson Wal-Mart on West Florissant. This one is more important because it is part of a nationwide campaign to open people's eyes about how much the "cheap" store really costs them. Local labor leaders hope to convince the national campaign to focus particularly on St. Louis, and a good turnout next week would make the national leaders take notice.
There will be a press conference at Commons Lane Elementary at 2:00 where several people, including state legislators (Maria Chappelle-Nadal among them), will speak. Feel free to attend. Then at 3:00 the Big Event. I hope some of you will attend. Here's the letter the local office sent out:

Where is it that you can find unremitting labor violations, flagrant disregard for wage laws and Cheetos for the everyday low price of $2.49?
That’s right, Wal-Mart. Wake-Up Wal-Mart
Next Wednesday, August 10th, we’re taking this corporate criminal to task. Did you also know that Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation, has been sued for denial of worker’s comp. and unemployment benefits, wage theft, malicious prosecution, retaliatory tactics, and discrimination on the basis of age, sex, race, religion and physical handicap?
This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. Wake-Up Wal-Mart
Did you know that on average, each American teacher spends $500-600 out of their own pockets for classroom expenses? Did you know that taxpayers are being fleeced? Wal Mart also gets huge Property Tax kickbacks that negatively impact the budgets of School Districts all over Missouri and America. That's money that should go to teacher salaries or school supplies.
So what to do? What we do best, and that is get active. Wake Up Wal-Mart has announced a national day of action as the beginning of a back to school campaign that encourages teachers and parents against buying school necessities at Wal-Mart.
The AFT, the NEA, and Change for Missouri will be on hand to make sure that St. Louis becomes the focus of media attention, possibly on a national level.
We are asking one and all to join in a mass demonstration in front of the Wal-Mart on West Florissant, August 10th at 2:30 pm. You can Mapquest directions from this address:
Wal-Mart Store #1265
10741 West Florissant
Ferguson, MO 63135
If you don’t like the fact that your tax dollars pay to subsidize Wal-Mart's expansion and profit margin, then come show your support. Participation will be the key to our success, hitting them right where it counts--their pocketbook.
If you want to RSVP or have any questions, please contact one of us:
Christine Brooks
Cell-618.514.1911
Email: neo_pika@hotmail.com
Joe Bruemmer
Email: joe.bruemmer@sbcglobal.net
Cell: 314-910-0122

2005-08-04T16:15:00.000-07:00

Beth Maskow thought you'd like to read this excerpt from "How to Turn Your Red State Blue", published in In These Times last March:

Last fall, I spent seven weeks in the suburbs of Madison, Wis.,
canvassing undecided voters for John Kerry. Driving back one day from a long session pounding the pavement, our car passed two young Mormon missionaries on bicycles. They were dressed in their standard garb: grim but oddly stylish black suits, white shirts, skinny ties and backpacks, all of which were getting soaked in the rain as they struggled up a hill, standing on their pedals for extra leverage. "Now that," said a fellow organizer sitting in the backseat, "is canvassing."
Going door to door was hard enough. My pulse would quicken at each door, and after three hours tromping through numbing subdivisions I invariably got the urge to fill in numbers on my walk sheet, grab a soda and wait for the carpool to pick me up. And all we wanted was three minutes of someone's time to ask a few questions, give a short pitch and hand out some literature. A missionary who approaches a stranger's door is seeking nothing less than a complete reconstitution of that person's worldview. One imagines a lot of door slamming, unpleasant words and icy stares.
And yet the improbable fact about missionary activity is that it works, regardless of the faith's specific dogma. Mormons are the fastest-growing church in the country. Evangelical protestant congregations make up 58 percent of all new churches in the United States. Globally, Islam continues to reach into new and unfamiliar lands, experiencing explosive growth in China. Religions that actively proselytize - Pentecostals, Mormons, Muslims - grow, almost without exception.
There's a corollary to this in politics. Yale political scientists Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber have found in numerous studies of voter contact that face-to-face canvassing is far and away the most effective means of persuasion: Roughly one out of every 15 voters approached at the door will add their vote to your tally.
In a speech accepting his new position as chair of the Democratic
National Committee, Howard Dean stressed the importance of reaching out to unbelievers through retail politics. "People will vote for Democratic candidates in Texas, and Utah, and West Virginia," he said, "if we knock on their door, introduce ourselves and tell them what we believe."
Five months after the election, progressives' efforts have largely shifted away from people's doorsteps, toward saving Social Security, opposing reactionary judicial appointees and reining in the administration's foreign policy. But I can't stop thinking about those Mormons on their bicycles. What are progressives doing to win conversions to our faith?
Where are our young people on bikes approaching unfamiliar doors? How are we preaching the good news?

2005-08-03T10:00:00.000-07:00

Political discourse is practically impossible, considering how quickly people on either side of the discussion just lose it. So Saturday night's conversation with our daughter-in-law's dad was fascinating. After dinner at Kim's birthday party, Connie and I started talking politics with Jim. A former union man and staunch Democrat, he has switched allegiances. He's a born again, good ole boy from Texas who follows the right wing line to the last jot and tittle. What made the talk so interesting is that he's skilled at holding his own in a debate, and he doesn't lose his temper. The same could be said for us, though my husband is calmer and more articulate. So the talk was ... spirited. But civil.
Now Jim doesn't mince words. Islam is a religion born in the pits of hell, he told us. So is Catholicism. And Connie and I, as unbelievers, are demonic. But he makes these observations in such an agreeable, matter-of-fact tone that I don't much mind being demonic.
We tried to make the point that Christ emphasized loving thy neighbor and caring for the poor and that today's evangelicals vote for politicians who enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. Connie used the example of the rich young ruler who came to Christ asking what he had to do to be saved. Christ told him to sell all that he had and follow him. The rich young ruler went away saddened because he was unwillingly to give up his wealth. Jim pointed out that the rich young man had told Christ he had always followed all the commandments from his youth on, so when Christ ordered him to give up his wealth, He was pointing out the young man's hypocrisy in that he had NOT followed all the commandments because he coveted wealth. And besides, Jim said, Christ's main goal was to bring people to salvation. You can talk about the Sermon on the Mount if you want to, but in the end, it's not good works that count but salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Good argument. Well, Jim is a former seminarian; he ought to be able to defend his position. Still, the accusation that today's evangelicals ignore the poor rolled right off his back.
As for Bush's lies about WMD, those weapons are probably hidden in Syria. Wilson's report on Niger is immaterial because his own wife sent him there. Downing Street memos are "questionable" according to Fox. And gay marriage is an "abomination." Very few things, he said, are termed "abominations" in the Old Testament. We couldn't remember whether eating shellfish was also an "abomination". Moral: Don't argue pollutics with a former seminarian without first reviewing your own material. By the way, eating shellfish IS an abomination. And working on the Sabbath will get a person stoned.
Never mind. Even had we been perfectly prepared, we wouldn't have swayed Jim, and, of course, he couldn't have turned us into Republicans. So why did we bother? Because conversation is a starting place. Jim was once a Democrat, so there's hope, however faint. But even that isn't a reason. We came away wishing we had argued less and listened more. Of course, listening to an intelligent man spouting Fox News and Sean Hannity and pitying us for our misguided ideas gave the conversation a surreal feeling. (My word, he really believes that? That's what everybody tells me the right wingers believe, but, dadgumit, they actually do. He's saying these things with a straight face and a pure heart. Is he the kind of person who approved of burning demonic heretics like me at the stake in 1545?)
Nevertheless, if we had listened more, we stood a chance of having a "conversation" instead of a debate.
Or maybe we should have skipped the whole thing. All we definitely succeeded in doing was clearing the rest of the family out of the kitchen.

2005-08-02T16:31:00.000-07:00

I knew two things as soon as I looked at the Post-Dispatch the morning after John Roberts was nominated.
First, I knew that Bush had found a stealth extremist for the Court. All that prose about Roberts's fine manners and his good heart told me that he wasn't going to be criticized as an extremist. Yet the delight with which the far right welcomed him told me that he was one. Not that I was ever in doubt as to the sort of nominee we'd get. Bush's evangelical base has been clamoring for the "right kind" of judge, and he will not deny them.
The second thing I realized was that a filibuster was not in the picture. Not unless the Dems manage to dig up some fairly filthy dirt. One of the fourteen senators who crafted the filibuster compromise--was it McCain?--said that Roberts would not qualify under the "extraordinary circumstances" clause that would allow a Supreme Court nomination filibuster. And none of the Democrats was openly disagreeing with him about that.
Perhaps if we had feistier Democratic senators than we do, much feistier, our party could successfully educate the public about the aims of the Federalist Society (see Sunday's blog). But we have Biden, Clinton and Kerry. Barbara Boxer can't do it alone. She tried after the electoral fraud surfaced and found out how lonely the rest of her party can leave her.
At least the Dems are hanging in there by insisting on seeing the records of Roberts's public service. And they ought to use Republican intransigence about producing them to wonder very loudly what the G.O.P. is hiding. And who knows, maybe they can uncover that fairly filthy dirt. There's time. At this point in the confirmation proceedings, Scalia looked like a shoo-in and no one imagined a challenge to Bork.
But if we're not that fortunate, the best the Democrats can do is warn the public what kind of judge they're about to get and say I told you so in the years to come. Above all, they must stick together and just vote no. It would be disastrous if ten or fifteen of them strayed off the reservation for the sake of some under the table quid pro quo. That kind of behavior would damage the party's credibility and make it that much harder to challenge Rehnquist's replacement.

2005-08-01T14:31:00.000-07:00

Brad Blog has the amusing story (with photographic evidence) of Bush's latest insult to the press. As he walked away from reporters last week, he raised a finger. When Scott McClellan was questioned about whether it was a "finger of hostility", he said he wouldn't dignify such a ridiculous question with an answer. But the reporter persisted. (Has the White House press corps become emboldened by the experience of asking aggressive questions about Karl Rove?) McClellan answered:

I was there with him, and I'm just not going to -- I'm not going to dignify that with a response. I mean, I haven't seen the video that you're talking about, but I know the way the President acts. And if someone is misportraying it, that's unfortunate.

The next day, a White House spokesman said that: "Bush was definitely giving the thumbs up sign with regards to the upcoming CAFTA vote (Central American Free Trade Agreement)."
Below is the photo and to the right of that is a picture of Bush when he was governor of Texas. Judge for yourself for yourself whether it's a thumbs up or a finger of hostility. Oh and, by the way, is there anything this White House won't lie about?

2005-07-31T19:42:00.000-07:00

Yes, indeedy, Matt Blunt is playing with the big boys now.

2005-07-31T11:26:00.000-07:00

With her usual whimsical flair, Molly Ivins zeroes in on a common initial reaction to John Roberts:

My first reaction to Roberts was: "Sounds like that's about as good as we can get. Quick, affirm him before they nominate Bork, Bolton or Pinochet." A conservative with good manners and no known nutball decisions or statements on his record? Hey, take him. At least he's not (whew!) a member of the Federalist Society.

The reason Ivins thought Roberts wasn't a member is that he sorta, kinda "forgot" to mention it. Actually, he was on the steering committee of the Federalist Society in '97-98.
So?

So Roberts already looks disingenuous at best, and then the White House ups and decides it's entirely too risky to let the public in on his record as a government lawyer and refuses to release documents requested.
Excuuuuuse me, that is public record. Roberts worked for us, he was paid by the taxpayers, this is not a matter of national security. Where does this White House get off pulling this kind of stuff? Right away, it looks like they're trying to cover something up. Lawyer-client privilege? Are they nuts? Everyone's first reaction is, so what's he guilty of?

What he's guilty of is being a member of an ultra-conservative, extreme right wing organization:

Alfred Ross, of the institute of Democracy Studies, explains that "...if one goes through the publications of their practice groups, one can only gasp not only at the breadth of their agenda, but the extremism of their ideology."
The society has argued for the abolition of the Securities and Exchange Commission, severely limiting the Environmental Protection Agency, and rolling back gender equity laws (Title IX) and voting rights law. Its publications have criticized teaching evolution and attacked the principle of separation of church and state.
According to Ross, they recently launched a state judicial selection project to try to dominate the state, as well as federal, bench. This is all standard, ultra-right-wing claptrap. It's all about control.
If we can't shake loose the actual records on John Roberts, we certainly should pay attention to the group he's most identified with.

2005-07-30T13:42:00.000-07:00

217-215. That's how close the CAFTA vote was in the House. It would have been defeated without the help of 15 "Democratic" turncoats. Jonathan Tasini's article "Spanking the CAFTA Fifteen" explains why the vote matters and what labor should do about the defectors.
The treaty, like NAFTA before it, sucks jobs out of our economy. As William Greider pointed out a couple of weeks ago: "Germany and Japan, despite vast differences, both manage to keep advanced manufacturing sectors anchored at home and to defend domestic wage levels and social guarantees." We don't. Tasini is on the same protect our jobs page as Greider:

Trade is not just a single issue. So-called “free trade” is shaping the economy, here and abroad—it is the central issue upon which other economic policy issues revolve. To overlook a politician’s vote on trade means turning a blind eye to the legislative tool most responsible for shifting the power of self-determination from the hands of citizens to the corporate boardrooms of global capitalism.

Tasini notes that the national president of the fire fighters' association organized a protest against CAFTA. Instead of shrugging the treaty off as not affecting the jobs of his union members (firefighting cannot be outsourced), he understood that the loss of jobs helps push down wages and benefits throughout this economy.
But what's done is done. Maybe so, but if labor had taken action to punish renegade Democrats after NAFTA, maybe, twelve years later, CAFTA wouldn't have passed. Tasini recommends a spanking:

... For God’s sake, shouldn’t we at least cut off money to people who won’t stick up for the future economic livelihood of millions of workers?
Labor must declare immediately that unions will deny the CAFTA 15 their support. That means that, come campaign season, the CAFTA 15 will not find a single check in their mailboxes, nor receive an endorsement to grace their campaign literature, nor count on union members to make the thousands of phone calls or house visits that turn out voters. Let’s find primary opponents for each one.
Few politicians are guided by deep principle. Most understand one thing: power. And, just as important, once tasted, the absence of power is an enormously effective motivator. Nothing focuses the mind of a politician more than the thought of losing his or her seat. If labor had taken out one or two Democrats who voted for NAFTA more than a decade ago, I suspect that the CAFTA 15 might have numbered two or three—or maybe none.
The time for hardball politics is now.

Note: Ike Skelton is the only Missourian on the list.

2005-07-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

"They keep talking about drafting a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it's worked for over 200 years and we're not using it anymore."
George Carlin

2005-07-28T19:53:00.000-07:00

PAY ATTENTION. Heed and act on the following Free Press letter. (Pardon my imperious tone, but this issue is critical.) I've boldfaced the two most important paragraphs in the letter.
By the way, before you contact the FCC, you might want to review the information about Comcast in the July 18 blog.

If you're fed up with constant cable rate hikes, poor service and a lack of local and independent programming, the FCC needs to hear from you -- right now.
The FCC may allow the three largest cable companies to control up to 90 percent of the cable TV and broadband market in the United States.
Cable costs are growing at more than five times the rate of inflation. But giant cable companies aren’t content to merely gouge you. As they control access to more American homes, big cable will have final say over the shows and channels you can watch.
In the future, video, telephone and Internet services will all be provided via the same "pipes." Giants like Comcast and Time Warner -- which are poised to get even bigger if the FCC approves their takeover of Adelphia -- are positioning themselves to be the ultimate gatekeepers of the media you’re allowed to access and create.
Tell the FCC not to give more monopoly control to cable giants.
The FCC needs to hear from you. Act now to stop the consolidation of the cable industry.
Onward,
Robert W. McChesney
President
Free Press
www.freepress.net
P.S. The FCC needs to hear from thousands of concerned citizens. Please forward this message to everyone you know.

2005-07-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

Katha Pollitt of The Nation is forcing me to eat some ill-considered words. On July 11, I wrote: "Call me a shortsighted if you will, but abortion is a minor issue. In fact, if Roe v. Wade were reversed, Republicans would suffer. Their main snare for suckering people away from the Democrats would evaporate." Don't bother calling me shortsighted. I'll do it for you.
As Pollitt pointed out, overturning Roe would open the issue in fifty state legislatures. If you think the nation's divided over abortion now, wait till you see that brouhaha. Sure, New York and California would legalize abortion and many others would not. In fact, that was the trend in 1970. New York was easing its ban on abortion, which meant that well-to-do women, no matter where they lived, could travel and get one, but many poor women were out of luck. The disparity is what drove the court to rule as it did in 1973. If Roe were overturned, the same disparity would exist again, with consequences not just for the women involved. I've reported on this blog before that a study done by two university social scientists discovered that twenty years after Roe, the crime rate dropped across the nation. Forcing women to have children they don't want or can't adequately care for has consequences for all of us.
We can't hand the right Roe v. Wade in hopes of watching them stew in their own juices. We're going to have to fight to keep it and find ways to talk to all those who aren't right wing zealots. In that regard, I think Howard Dean has the idea. On May 25, I quoted him:

When I campaigned for this job [as DNC Chair], I talked to lots of Democrats. And there are significant numbers of pro-life Democrats in the South. And one lady said to me, you know, “I’m pro-life. I don’t like abortion. I would never have one. I would hope my daughter would never have one. But, you know, if the lady next door got herself in a fix, I’m not sure I should be the one to tell her what to do.” Now, we call that woman pro-choice, but she thinks of herself as pro-life. The minute we start with the “pro-choice, pro- choice, pro-choice,” she says, “Well, that’s not me.”
But when you talk about framing this debate the way it ought to be framed, which is “Do you want Tom DeLay and the boys to make up your mind about this, or does a woman have a right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she gets,” then that pro-life woman says “Well, now, you know, I’ve had people try to make up my mind for me and I don’t think that’s right.” This is an issue about who gets to make up their minds: the politicians or the individual. Democrats are for the individual. We believe in individual rights. We believe in personal freedom and personal responsibility. And that debate is one that we didn’t win, because we kept being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion.

We must argue our case with tact and shrewd tactics--and hope that the Court doesn't do a 180 on abortion.

2005-07-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

Beth Maskow wanted you to see E.L. Doctorow's critique of Bush's uncompassionate conservatism. I especially appreciate Doctorow's final sentence.

An Essay on President Bush and Death --- by E.L Doctorow
Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. He is generally considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the residentially conferred National Humanities Medal.
Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931. After graduating with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army. Doctorow was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Irvine.

I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.
On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn.
He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life...they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it.
So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
This president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing --- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate.
And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children.
He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead; he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills; it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it. But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused over-soul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.
Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective war-making, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

2005-07-25T18:49:00.000-07:00

I seldom care for puns, but the one in the title of Greg Palast's column about Judy Miller uses wordplay to emphasize truth:

MR. ROVE AND THE ACCESS OF EVIL
Tell us your "source," Judy
Not published in The New York Times
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
By Greg Palast

The only thing more evil, small-minded and treasonous than the Bush Administration's jailing Judith Miller for a crime the Bush Administration committed, is Judith Miller covering up her Bush Administration "source."

Judy, Karl Rove ain't no "source." A confidential source -- and I've worked with many -- is an insider ready to put himself on the line to blow the whistle on an official lie or hidden danger. I would protect a source's name with my life and fortune as would any journalist who's not a craven jerk (the Managing Editor of Time Magazine comes to mind).

But the weasel who whispered "Valerie Plame" in Miller's ear was no source. Whether it was Karl Rove or some other Rove-tron inside the Bush regime (and no one outside Bush's band would have had this information), this was an official using his official info to commit a crime for the sole purpose of punishing a real whistleblower, Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband, for questioning our President's mythological premise for war in Iraq.

New York Times reporter Miller and her paper would rather she go to prison for four months than identify their "source." Why?

Part of her oddball defense is that The Times never ran the story about Wilson's wife. They get no points for that. The Times should have run the story with the headline: BUSH OPERATIVE COMMITS FELONY TO PUNISH WHISTLEBLOWER. The lead paragraph should have been, "Today, Mr. K--- R--- [or other slime ball as appropriate] attempted to plant sensitive intelligence information on The New York Times, a felony offense, in an attempt to harm former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who challenged the President's claim regarding Iraq's nuclear program."

A Karl Rove or Rove-like creature peddling a back-door smear doesn't make him a source. Miller's real crime is not concealing a source, but burying the story. A reporter should never, ever give notes to a grand jury, but this information is something The Times owes the public, not the prosecutors.

Why didn't The Times run this story? Why not now? Who are they covering for and why?

Maybe the problem for The Times is that this is the same "source" that used Miller to promote, as fact, her ersatz report before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam truly had nukes and bugs and chemicals he could launch at Los Angeles. That "source" too needs publication, Judy. ....

Miller and The Times have been all too willing to play Izvestia to the Bush's Kremlinesque prevarications. And that is what Miller is protecting: the evil called "access."

Might I add that Judy Miller, far from being the only one who commits this journalistic sin, is only one of that cowed group called the mainstream press.

2005-07-24T18:51:00.000-07:00

Besides Rove/Plame, another "old news" story is coming to a head. Daily Kos reprinted these paragraphs from The Boston Herald, May 8th, 2004:

Signaling the worst revelations are yet to come, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said the additional photos show "acts that can only be described as blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman." [...]

The unreleased images show American soldiers beating one prisoner almost to death, apparently raping a female prisoner, acting inappropriately with a dead body, and taping Iraqi guards raping young boys, according to NBC News.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the scandal is "going to get worse" and warned that the most "disturbing" revelations haven't yet been made public.

Notice the date: 2004. The administration has so far managed to censor those pictures, and in this country (unlike others around the globe) the media refuses to discuss the issue without the pictures. In the blog "Sodomizing Children. For Freedom." Kos bemoans the way our press hogties itself:

I'm tired of all of it. Just tired. I'm tired because the rest of the world has known this for a year, and we refuse to discuss it in this country. And in truth, we can't discuss it in this country without the (heavily censored) pictures, because without the pictures, the horrible, horrible actual pictures, the loathsome, brick-stupid f---ing news media doesn't see a story. And without the pictures, every bloated, pill-popping, corpse-like Rush Limbaugh clone in America will continue to claim it's all lies, all exaggerated, all phony.

Because, God f---ing knows, we would never even abuse even an inanimate Koran, and God help you if you report such a thing without the very pictures to see it happening before your eyes.

So why don't we have the pictures? A year ago, five civil rights groups sued to make them public and have been frantically held off in court since then. In June the administration asked to be given a month to redact the faces of those in the videos to protect the innocent. When the month was up, the administration asked that the videos not be released for the sake of safety for the individuals involved. The court has not ruled on that yet. Knowing the photos will inevitably come out, some Republican senators actually want to legislate stiffer rules for humane treatment of prisoners. Lindsey Graham, John McCain, and John Warner plan an amendment to the $442 billion defense bill, but BUSH THREATENS TO VETO THE BILL if any such amendment is attached. Kos again:

Yes, according to the Bush administration, any attempts by Republican senators to legislate against, say, the sodomizing of detained children are unduly infringing on the president's fight against terrorists.

Senator Talent, who is on the Armed Services Committee (and has presumably seen the pictures), has had nothing to say about the issue, nor has Bond. But you can put in your two cents and see that our senators hear it. The People's E-Mail Network (PEN) is circulating a petition. (You'll have to erase my info.)
Let's see: Rove/Plame, the horrors of Iraq, the Downing Street Memo and now this. How many elements does it take to make a perfect storm?

2005-07-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

In case your eyes glazed over when you began reading the news article Friday about China floating the yuan (or in case you knew enough not to start reading it), here's a left-wing, down-to-earth economist,Greg Palast, to give you the scoop.

CHINA FLOATS, AMERICA SINKS
YUAN KICKS DOLLAR BUTT BY REJECTING "FREE MARKET"
Friday Jul 22, 2005
by Greg Palast

In case you haven't the least idea what the heck it means for China to "float" its currency, let me put it in the language we economists use: China's float don't mean squat.

Yet our President, a guy whose marks in Economics 101 are too embarrassing to publish here, ran out to hail the fact that buying Chinese money will now cost more dollars.

The White House line to the media, swallowed whole, is that by making Chinese money (yuan) more expensive to buy with dollars, Americans will buy fewer computers and toys from China -- and US employment will rise.

This will happen when we find Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Economics Lesson #1: You can't change the value of goods by changing the value of the currency on the price tag. As my comrade Art Laffer wrote me, "If cheap currency makes your products more competitive, all automobiles would be made in Russia." Driven a Lada lately?

Economics Lesson #2: Don't take economics lessons from George Bush. Or Milton Friedman. Or Thomas Friedman. What that means, class, is don't believe the big, hot pile of hype that China's zooming economy is the result of that Red nation's adopting free market economic policies.

If China is now a capitalist free-market state, then I'm Mariah Carey. China's economy has soared because it stubbornly refused the Free – and Friedman-Market mumbo-jumbo that government should stop controlling, owning and regulating industry.

China's announcement that it would raise the cost of the yuan covered over a more important notice that China would bar foreign control of its steel sector. China's leaders have built a powerhouse steel industry larger than ours by directing the funding, output, location and ownership of all factories. And rather than "freeing" the industry through opening their borders to foreign competition, the Chinese, for steel and every other product, have shut their borders tight to foreigners except as it suits China’s own needs.

China won't join NAFTA or CAFTA or any of those free-trade clubs. In China, Chinese industry comes first. And it's still, Mssrs. Friedman, the Peoples’ republic. Those Wal-Mart fashion designs called, chillingly, "New Order," are made in factories owned by the PLA, the Chinese Peoples' Liberation Army.

In an interview just before he won the Nobel Prize in economics, Joe Stiglitz explained to me that China's huge financial surge -- a stunning 9.5% jump in GDP this year -- began with the government's funding and nurturing rural cooperatives, fledgling industry protected behind high, high trade barriers.

It is true that China's growth got a boost from ending the bloodsoaked self-flagellating madness of Mao's Cultural Revolution. And China, when it chooses, makes use of markets and market pricing to distribute resources. However, Chinese markets are as free as my kids: they can do whatever they want unless I say they can't.

Yes, China is adopting elements of "capitalism." And that's the ugly part: real estate speculation in Shanghai making millionaires of Communist party boss relatives and bank shenanigans worthy of a Neil Bush.

It is not the Guangdong skyscrapers and speculative bubble which allows China to sell us $162 billion more goods a year than we sell them. It is that China's government, by rejecting free-market fundamentalism, can easily conquer American markets where protection is now deemed passé.

And that is why the yuan has kicked the dollar's butt.

America’s only response is to have Alan Greenspan push up real interest rates so we can buy back our own dollars the Chinese won in the export game. The domestic result: US wages drifting down to Mexican maquiladora levels.

Am I praising China? Forget about it. This is one evil dictatorship which jails union organizers and beats, shackles and tortures those who don't kowtow to the wishes of Chairman Rob -- Wal-Mart chief Robson Walton. (Funny how Mr. Bush never mentions the D-word, Democracy, to our Chinese suppliers.)

Class dismissed.

P.S. My apologies that yesterday's "New Rules" link didn't work. I just discovered that it didn't, so if you'd like to listen, use this link, then scroll down to Maher's picture and click on New Rules.

2005-07-22T16:54:00.000-07:00

Aside from The Daily Show, the most amusing and honest take on modern politics is Bill Maher's "New Rules". If you've never heard a segment, give yourself a humor break. (Parental Warning: There's one objectionable word in here, so if you object to cussing, you might want to pass.)

2005-07-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

"I have opinions of my own -- strong opinions -- but I don't always agree
with them."
- George Bush

I realize that not everyone is talented with language and that there are many kinds of intelligence. Any car mechanic can make me feel like a dolt. So I ask myself, do statements like the one above prove that Bush is stupid? He's smart enough to play the good ole boy to perfection. He's smart enough to follow the advice of smart slimeballs like Rove. After he blew the first debate last fall, he shaped up and acquitted himself much more convincingly in the last two.

Obviously Bush's grip on the language is tenuous, one of the few things about him that amuses me. But it isn't proof positive that he's stupid. His self-righteous arrogance, on the other hand, is less amusing, and about that trait I have no doubts.

2005-07-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

America has more than a trade deficit; it has a truth deficit. So says William Greider, writing in The New York Times.
You can't keep spending more than you earn. It's as true for nations as it is for any household, and other advanced nations DON'T. The U.S., though, not only spends more than it earns, it has refused to talk about the problem. When Warren Buffett warned that the United States is on its way to being, not "an ownership society" but "a sharecropper society", Washington elites ignored him. But the truth has a way of insisting on being noticed. "Now that [our debt] is too large to deny," Greider says, "they concede that the trend is 'unsustainable'. That's an economist's euphemism which means: things cannot go on like this, not without ugly consequences for American living standards."
In one sense, only Americans are suffering from this trade (and truth) deficit.

Western Europe, whatever its problems, manages economic policy to maintain modest trade surpluses. Japan manages to insure far larger surpluses in recessions (its export income subsidizes inefficient domestic employers). China strives to acquire a larger, more advanced industrial base at the expense of worker incomes and bank profits. Germany and Japan, despite vast differences, both manage to keep advanced manufacturing sectors anchored at home and to defend domestic wage levels and social guarantees. When they do disperse production and jobs overseas, as they must, they do so strategically.

By contrast, Washington gives our multinationals a free hand, so they are raking in the profits. Wages here suffer as jobs are outsourced to the poorest countries without regard for the consequences on our economy.

American producers are generally free - and even encouraged by Washington - to shift production to low-wage locations. Companies regularly use this cost-cutting technique as a competitive weapon without regard to the domestic consequences. The practice works for companies and investors, but not so well for a nation.

Our country is like others worldwide, though, in one important respect: wages are depressed across the globe even as more and more capital accumulates in the hands of a few. As John Kenneth Galbraith once noted: "Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason." It is myopic not to pay workers enough so that they can afford to purchase your goods. It's stupid to let your greed destroy your market. Greider feels that "governments must together shift the balance of power so labor incomes can rise in step with rising productivity and profits." In order to prevent global recessions and financial crises, the United States needs to lead in giving workers the world over a bigger share of the pie; and for its own good, the U.S. needs to rein in the damage our multinationals are doing to our citizenry.
Unfortunately, since our government is controlled by myopic corporations, such reform is unlikely.

2005-07-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

Hundreds of lobbyists, acting as pimps for corporate America, have designed a series of new bills and Republican whores in Congress are ready to prostitute themselves by voting in favor of them:
Let's consider first the prospective loss of hundreds of thousands more American jobs. CAFTA is NAFTA extended to the bottom of Central America, with results just as detrimental to our workers as the Clinton trade treaty was. The House is scheduled to vote on CAFTA July 28. You can let your representative know what you think of this bill by clicking here.
Then there's the Energy bill, which has two provisions that will cost ordinary taxpayers a hunk of change. The first is repeal of PUHCA. I'll let Molly Ivins explain it:

We are about to repeat one of the huge mistakes of the 1920s and '30s because we have forgotten why PUHCA (pronounced Pooka) was instituted in the first place. PUHCA is the Public Utility Holding Company Act, passed in 1935, which prevents concentration of ownership of power plants. Both the House and Senate versions of the energy bill contain a repeal of PUHCA.
As Kelpie Wilson points out in an article for Truthout, "For 50 years we have had reliable, cheap electric power that has allowed strong economic growth, and no PUHCA-regulated energy holding company has ever gone broke."
PUHCA was partially repealed in the '90s, and even that much deregulation was part of what led to Enron, Westar and other slight mishaps.
PUHCA puts utilities under strict regulation by both state and federal governments. It restricts ownership of utilities to public or private companies that are in the business of producing power.
The most likely candidates to take over power companies are the big oil companies, now awash in cash. There goes the electrical grid: Why fix it when you can charge more for doing nothing?

And speaking of all those oil profits, the framers of the Energy bill are determined to protect every last cent of it for Exxon and Mobil. The People's E-Mail Network (PEN) explains the second trick the whores will turn:

This year again the administration is trying to deliver a huge payoff
to their corrupt oil company campaign contributors, absolving them of
any future liability for polluting our water supplies with MTBE, an
insidious smelly solvent infiltrating water systems all over the country.
Let me get this straight, the oil industry, which is rolling in so much
windfall profits cash that their biggest problem is they don't know what to do
with it, THAT oil industry can't afford to clean up after their
environmental disasters? This measure barely passed the house but not in the
Senate and will now be settled in conference.

PEN makes it easy to register a protest on these two issues.
And finally, to make it easier for Republicans to continue getting elected so that they can do the bidding of their procurers, they are rolling back the campaign finance laws on soft money. Public Citizen has the story:

This legislation not only would legalize unlimited “soft money” once again by repealing parts of the recently passed Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, it would even erase some of the critical reforms enacted in 1974 after the Watergate scandal. Richard Nixon and Tom DeLay would both love this bill.
Here’s one flagrant example: Currently, wealthy individuals can give a total of no more than $101,400 to all candidates and parties in a two-year election cycle. The Ney-Pence-Wynn bill would raise this limit to $3 MILLION – a 30-fold increase. Imagine the corruption that a lobbyist for the big drug companies or the energy industry could buy with that kind of money!

Mainstream media usually just love a good sex scandal, but they won't touch these. I read about them on the internet, not in the newspaper. The brother and sister who got kidnapped in, what was it, Montana? The Post is still writing about them, but the New-Pince-Wynn bill? Nada.

2005-07-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

Now that I've started typing this, I've finally closed my mouth, but I was agog at a Common Dreams article that United for Peace and Justice e-mailed. (By the way, United for Peace and Justice is one of the organizations mentioned in a news article today about how FBI anti-terrorist units monitored protest groups before the Republican convention last summer.)

Below is a summary of the article:

COMMENTARY: Comcast & Symantec blocked pro-impeachment e-mail without telling anyone
Written by Abe DeJamminen
Sunday, 17 July 2005
Will you receive this and be able to read it? -- It all depends on the whims of the gods at Comcast and Symantec, it turns out. -- David Swanson, a co-founder of After Downing Street and a writer and activist, discovered last week that Comcast was, without notifying the parties concerned, blocking "any Email with 'www.afterdowningstreet.org' in the body of the Email," on the grounds that they had received thousands of complaints (of which they refused to produce even one). -- As a result, the effort to organize July 23 impeachment houseparties has been significantly impeded. -- Since "Comcast has a near monopoly on high-speed internet service in much of this country, including much of the Washington, D.C., area," writes Swanson, "Many members of the media and many people involved in politics rely on it. . . . Comcast effectively censors discussion of particular political topics, and impedes the ability of people to associate with each other, with absolutely no compulsion to explain itself." ...

2005-07-17T20:18:00.000-07:00

An article in the Sunday New York Times describes the shift among Washington Democrats toward consciously framing ideas in order to stop two Republican initiatives in their tracks:

By the time Washington's attention turned to the Supreme Court earlier this month, rejuvenated Democrats actually believed they had developed the rhetorical skill, if it came to that, to thwart the president's plans for the court. That a party so thoroughly relegated to minority status might dictate the composition of the Supreme Court would seem to mock the hard realities of history and mathematics, but that is how much faith the Democrats now held in the power of a compelling story. ''In a way, it feels like all the systemic improvements we've made in communications strategy over the past few months have been leading to this,'' Jim Jordan, one of the party's top strategists, said a few days after Sandra Day O'Connor announced her resignation. ''This will be an extraordinarily sophisticated, well-orchestrated, intense fight. And our having had some run-throughs over the past few months will be extremely important.''
The most critical run-through for Democrats, in light of the test ahead, was the defense of the filibuster, and for that reason, it offers some useful clues to how Democrats may try to frame the Supreme Court fight as well. The battle began late last fall, when Senate Republicans, feeling pretty good about themselves, started making noises about ramming judges through the Senate by stripping Democrats of their ability to filibuster, a plan the Republican senators initially called ''the nuclear option.'' The fight was nominally over Bush's choices for the federal bench, but everyone knew it was in fact merely a prelude to the battle over the Supreme Court; the only way for Democrats to stop a confirmation vote would be to employ the filibuster.
In January, Geoff Garin conducted a confidential poll on judicial nominations, paid for by a coalition of liberal advocacy groups. He was looking for a story -- a frame -- for the filibuster that would persuade voters that it should be preserved, and he tested four possible narratives. Democratic politicians assumed that voters saw the filibuster fight primarily as a campaign to stop radically conservative judges, as they themselves did. But to their surprise, Garin found that making the case on ideological grounds -- that is, that the filibuster prevented the appointment of judges who would roll back civil rights -- was the least effective approach. When, however, you told voters that the filibuster had been around for over 200 years, that Republicans were ''changing rules in the middle of the game'' and dismantling the ''checks and balances'' that protected us against one-party rule, almost half the voters strongly agreed, and 7 out of 10 were basically persuaded. It became, for them, an issue of fairness.
Garin then convened focus groups and listened for clues about how to make this case. He heard voters call the majority party ''arrogant.'' They said they feared ''abuse of power.'' This phrase struck Garin. He realized many people had already developed deep suspicions about Republicans in Washington. Garin shared his polling with a group of Democratic senators that included Harry Reid, the minority leader. Reid, in turn, assigned Stephanie Cutter, who was Kerry's spokeswoman last year, to put together a campaign-style ''war room'' on the filibuster. Cutter set up a strategy group, which included senior Senate aides, Garin, the pollster Mark Mellman and Jim Margolis, one of the party's top ad makers. She used Garin's research to create a series of talking points intended to cast the filibuster as an American birthright every bit as central to the Republic as Fourth of July fireworks. The talking points began like this: ''Republicans are waging an unprecedented power grab. They are changing the rules in the middle of the game and attacking our historic system of checks and balances.'' They concluded, ''Democrats are committed to fighting this abuse of power.''
Cutter's war room began churning out mountains of news releases hammering daily at the G.O.P.'s ''abuse of power.'' In an unusual show of discipline, Democrats in the Senate and House carried laminated, pocket-size message cards -- ''DEMOCRATS FIGHTING FOR DEMOCRACY, AGAINST ABUSE OF POWER,'' blared the headline at the top -- with the talking points on one side and some helpful factoids about Bush's nominees on the other. During an appearance on ''This Week With George Stephanopoulos'' in April, Senator Charles Schumer of New York needed all of 30 seconds to invoke the ''abuse of power'' theme -- twice.

The article is lengthy but thought provoking and informative. For example, the author, Matt Bai, wonders whether the Democrats' desire for quick fixes is tempting them to oversimplify Lakoff's ideas and even whether Lakoff himself contributes to that tendency. Furthermore, Bai submits the possibility that Democrats need better policy ideas than they have had and that no amount of linguistic facility will compensate for a dearth of ideas. For example the 1994 Republican "Contract With America" offered provocative ideas like reforming welfare and slashing budget deficits. The current Democratic agenda is vaguer, for example making health care affordable for everyone and fully funding education. Bai likens those plans, metaphorically, to a cotton ball--same old familiar fluff. Who could disagree with those proposals, but what do they really mean?
I don't necessarily agree with Bai's criticism, but I appreciated his thoughtful approach to a crucial subject, so I found his article worth taking the time to read carefully.

2005-07-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

A classic novella called "The Picture of Dorian Gray" depicts a beautiful young man who never ages. On an easel in his studio sits a self portrait, always covered. As the years pass, only the portrait shows Dorian Gray's true age and his corrupt soul. Our wholesome-looking, handsome young governor reminds me of Dorian, handsome and every bit as corrupt.
This month alone he has signed three bills that hurt consumers and protect his business cronies. A Post-Dispatch editorial condemns them:

MISSOURI CONSUMERS: Ouch!
07/15/2005
GOV. MATT BLUNT poked consumers with his bill-signing pen this week, and quite a few ordinary Missourians will be yelling ouch because of it.
The governor signed into law a bill that will help squeeze low-price discounters out of the home real estate business. He signed another that will make it harder for new home buyers to sue builders. And he topped it off with another that will help insurance companies hide misdeeds from nosy reporters and plaintiffs lawyers.
In all, it was a grand slam for business lobbyists in our state capital.

Blunt is even thumbing his nose at his own legislature by vetoing an ethics bill they passed overwhelmingly. Since he's due up before the Ethics Commission next month on a campaign finance beef initiated by the State Democratic Party, Fired Up theorizes that he's making a political point before facing the tribunal for accepting an illegal contribution from his Transportation Commissioner, Mike Kehoe:

By vetoing their bill, Blunt was flexing his gubernatorial power in full view of the Ethics Commission. If he can kill their legislation, what else could he do to them? Perhaps the Commission will think twice before taking enforcement action against Blunt and Kehoe.
And what if the Commission hangs tough, does its job and holds Blunt and Kehoe responsible for their illegal activity? Blunt's veto last week provides him his talking points: "The Ethics Commission's action today is petty retribution for my recent veto of their flawed legislation.”

Then there's all the pork he's shoving at Johnson Controls, but I'll spare you the details. Let me just say that this is the Show Me state and Blunt is showing us exactly how corrupt he is. He flaunts it and turns arrogant when State Auditor Claire McCaskill tries to do her job. Again, Fired Up:

State Auditor Claire McCaskill met with Gov. Blunt yesterday in an attempt to get his Department of Revenue to stop stonewalling on her requests for information.
McCaskill's office is aggressively monitoring the Blunt Administration, just as she did the previous three Democratic administrations. The whining of the Blunt folks to the contrary is just that, political whining.
The Blunt Administration simply does not believe that they are accountable to the public for their actions. They give away contracts to their buddies, and then if someone wants to know if they gave state equipment too, Blunt's people ask in a huff, "Why is that any of your business?"

During the legislative session, Blunt's flagrant disregard for most Missourians registered in the consciousness of voters. His approval ratings plummeted to 33 percent. Unfortunately, his latest sins are getting less press. He's edged up to 35 percent.

2005-07-13T14:04:00.000-07:00

Arianna Huffington neatly exposes Bush's schizoid thinking about terrorism:

Well, there goes that theory...
Odds are we probably won't be hearing for a while the Bush mantra that the reason we're fighting them over in Iraq is so we don't have to fight them here at home. For the last few months, this ludicrous shibboleth has been the president's go-to line -- his latest rationale for slogging on in Iraq.
Here he was on July 4th: "We're taking the fight to the terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home." ...
The attacks in London proved how absurd this either/or logic is when fighting this kind of hydra-headed enemy.
Not only was this flypaper theory empirically disproved by the London carnage, it directly contradicts the president's other most often used justification for the war -- that we invaded to liberate the Iraqi people. So let me get this straight: we invaded them to liberate them... and to use them as bait to attract terrorists who we could fight on the streets of Baghdad rather than the streets of London and New York?

Actually the "fight-them-there-so-we-don't-have-to-fight-them-here" canard is just a corollary of the bigger lie: "They hate us because of our freedom." Tony Blair echoed that thought after the London bombings when he said "They will never succeed in destroying what we hold dear." Mr. Blair, they don't give a good hoot about destroying what you hold dear. That's not why they bombed you. They're not trying to destroy your liberty or ours. They're trying to get us out of their part of the world.
The Post-Dispatch recently made that point clear by citing University of Chicago political scientist Robert A. Pape, whose new book:

Dying to Win: the Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, reports the results of the first systematic survey, funded in part by the Department of Defense, of all 315 suicide terrorist attacks that occurred between 1980 and 2003.
His conclusions:
--Religion is often used as a tool for recruiting by terrorist organizations but is rarely the root cause of terrorism.
--The overwhelming majority of suicide terrorist attacks are not expressions of blind hate but instead the manifestation of political objectives, most often the expulsion of foreign armies of occupation.
--The U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states was the most important factor spawning the 9/11 attacks.
--The "sustained presence of heavy American combat forces in Muslim countries," including Iraq, "is likely to increase the odds of the next 9/11.

Four sentences sum up Pape's conclusions, and yet getting that simple message through the thick skulls of Bush and Blair is like trying to prevent some catastrophe in a bad dream, one where our leaders stride with bland smiles toward doom while we slog through waist-high wet cement, screaming with silent voices. Maybe one of these nights, that nightmare will turn to sweet dreams: I'll reach George Bush, shake the living bejeebers out of him, and awaken him to the nightmare he has created, a nightmare in which thousands of deaths have served only to heighten the tension and hatred between Muslims and Westerners.

2005-07-12T11:57:00.000-07:00

Mainstream media, owned by the wealthy, has always dragged its feet about exposing the high crimes and misdemeanors of those in power. They and the ruling elite had about fifty "smoking guns" regarding Watergate before--fearful of serious public disorder--they decided to "discover" THE tape that was used to impeach Nixon. Everybody had known Tricky Dick was guilty. That was old news.
Thirty-one years later, with another presidential felon still in office, the media is doing a foot-dragging redux, claiming Bush's misbehavior is just an old story. I mean, everybody knew he was fibbing about trying to avoid war with those U.N. sanctions. Quit making such a commotion about it.
Some of us aren't having their soothing, parental attitude. With the blogosphere fomenting unrest, the press is having a harder time stonewalling us with the "old story" line. In fact, ImpeachBush.org/VoteToImpeach has collected more than 500,000 signatures to an impeachment petition. They hope to have at least twice that number before September 24. That's the date for which they and anti-war groups have obtained permits for a mass protest on both sides of the White House.
ImpeachBush.org said in their most recent newsletter:

[R]ecent polls show a dramatic spike in support for impeachment. According to the most recent Zogby Poll, 42% of voters - 25% of whom consider themselves Republicans - would support impeachment if Bush lied about Iraq. The tide is clearly turning, but we need to work with ever-greater vigor.

If you haven't already done so, please sign the petition.

2005-07-11T12:14:00.000-07:00

From the inception of this nation, an undercurrent--sometimes a powerful undertow--of disagreement has tugged at us about the wisdom of giving ordinary people too much power, and nowhere has that conflict been more apparent than in the Supreme Court. The Federalists felt that Hamilton had it right when he told Washington, "Sir, your people is a beast." So they were gratified when a unanimous 1803 Supreme Court decision in the case of Marbury v. Madison took power from the legislature, the people's representatives, and gave it to the Supreme Court. The constitution had not granted that court the power to decide which laws were or weren't constitutional. The Court, under the Federalist Chief Justice Marshall, decided that the Supreme Court DID have that power. In other words, the court rewrote the constitution by fiat. Jefferson was horrified. He wrote Abigail Adams that if the court was filled by the wrong people, "it would make the judiciary a despotic branch."
But for better or worse, the Court prevailed on this issue. It surely did lasting damage to our democracy, for example, when it ruled that corporations be granted protection as "persons" under the fourteenth amendment. The fourteenth was written after the Civil War to grant blacks the rights of citizenship, but at the end of the nineteenth century, the Court allowed corporations to hijack the amendment, gaining rights as individuals that were corrosive to our economy and our democracy.
Since the New Deal era, on the other hand, the Court has often affirmed the rights of ordinary citizens and so gained the support of political liberals. Many of us are puzzled, therefore, and even outraged, at right-wing carping about "judicial activism". And indeed, if the courts were packed with conservative judges, no doubt right-wingers would zip their lips on this issue. In the meantime, though, they want to roll back the judiciary to pre-Marbury v. Madison days. For example, the Post-Dispatch printed a letter that said, in part:

When the Constitution in its original meaning does not speak to an issue (and that includes most of the great social and moral issues of our day), then the issue belongs in the Legislative Branch, where we the people can debate the matter and make decisions. As things now stand, we the people have to sit and wait for the latest edict to come down from nine unelected, in-for-life individuals to determine how millions of Americans will live their lives.

If Bush succeeds in appointing two more Scalia-style judges to the Court, we lefties will be singing this letter writer's tune. And I'm not particularly worried about abortion, either. Call me a shortsighted if you will, but abortion is a minor issue. In fact, if Roe v. Wade were reversed, Republicans would suffer. Their main snare for suckering people away from the Democrats would evaporate.
No, what concerns me is the damage that a more pro-corporate Court could do. Even more potentially disastrous than that are the fascist leanings of Gonzales and other right-wing ideologues. Thomm Hartmann, in a Common Dreams column titled "Supreme Court--Media Ignores Possible 'Fascist' Play" warns of something far more dangerous than abolishing the right to abortion:

An administration that can use the final imprimatur of the Supreme Court to "disappear" dissidents, corral Democratic Party campaigners into "free speech zones" with guns and bayonets, and declare a perpetual "war on terror" to prevent any investigations of its failures and crimes doesn't need to worry about the politics of abortion. Or John Conyers snooping into voting machine irregularities in Ohio. Or any other political debate, for that matter. ...
Thus, the nomination of Gonzales, or another candidate with strong fascistic leanings but no clear abortion record, will probably be trumpeted in the mainstream corporate media as a triumph of "moderation" on the part of Bush ....
In fact, it could mark the end of our 200+ year American experiment in democracy.

2005-07-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

David Corn, the D.C. editor for The Nation, wrote this morning on his blog:

July 10, 2005
IT'S HERE! NEWSWEEK DOES NAIL ROVE
The Newsweek story I described below is out. Reporter Michael Isikoff has obtained a copy of an email that Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper sent his bureau chief, Michael Duffy, on July 11, 2003--three days before conservative columnist Bob Novak first published the leak that outed CIA officer Valerie Wilson/Plame. In that email, Cooper wrote that he had spoken to Rove on "double super secret background" and that Rove had told him that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's "wife...apparently works at the agency on wmd issues." "Agency" means CIA. Read the full Newsweek piece here, and read my item below on why it is so important. There now is clear-cut evidence that Rove was involved in--if not the chief architect of--the actions that led to the outing of Plame/Wilson. If he's not in severe legal trouble, he ought to be in political peril. I explain in full the ramifications of this smoking email below.
July 9, 2005
NEW EXPLOSIVE ROVE REVELATION TO COME?
TIME TO FROG-MARCH?
Time to get ready for the Karl Rove frog-march?
I don't usually log on Saturday evenings. But I've received information too good not to share immediately. It was only yesterday that I was bemoaning the probability that--after a week of apparent Rove-related revelations--it might be a while before any more news emerged about the Plame/CIA leak. Yet tonight I received this as-solid-as-it-gets tip: on Sunday Newsweek is posting a story that nails Rove. The newsmagazine has obtained documentary evidence that Rove was indeed a key source for Time magazine's Matt Cooper and that Rove--prior to the publication of the Bob Novak column that first publicly disclosed Valerie Wilson/Plame as a CIA official--told Cooper that former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife apparently worked at the CIA and was involved in Joseph Wilson's now-controversial trip to Niger.
To be clear, this new evidence does not necessarily mean slammer-time for Rove. Under the relevant law, it's only a crime for a government official to identify a covert intelligence official if the government official knows the intelligence officer is under cover, and this documentary evidence, I'm told, does not address this particular point. But this new evidence does show that Rove--despite his lawyers claim that Rove "did not tell any reporter that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA"--did reveal to Cooper in a deep-background conversation that Wilson's wife was in the CIA. No wonder special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald pursued Cooper so fiercely. And Fitzgerald must have been delighted when Time magazine--over Cooper's objection--surrendered Cooper's emails and notes, which, according to a previous Newsweek posting by Michael Isikoff, named Rove as Cooper's source. In court on Wednesday, Fitzgerald said that following his receipt of Cooper's emails and notes "it is clear to us we need [Cooper's] testimony perhaps more so than in the past." This was a clue that Fitzgerald had scored big when he obtained the Cooper material.
This new evidence could place Rove in serious political, if not legal, jeopardy (or, at least it should). If what I am told is true, this is proof that the Bush White House was using any information it could gather on Joseph Wilson--even classified information related to national security--to pursue a vendetta against Wilson, a White House critic.

Scott McClellan has called any idea that Rove was involved "ridiculous" and Bush publicly said that if anyone in his administration was responsible he would "take care of that person". (Wink, wink.) So IF the press doesn't simply ignore or downpedal this information, the situation should be embarrassing, to say the least. Of course, so far not one member of the White House press corps has asked McClellan diddly about the hot rumors on Rove, so the mainstream press could choose to cop out once again.
Corn emphasizes another much-speculated on legal angle to this story:

And there's another key point to consider: whether Rove told the truth when he testified to Fitzgerald's grand jury. Rove's attorney, Robert Luskin, has acknowledged that Rove appeared before the grand jury, and Luskin has said that Rove did speak to Cooper prior to the publication of the Novak column. But what did Rove tell Fitzgerald and the grand jury about this conversation with Cooper? And--here's the big question--does Rove's account jibe with the new documentary evidence that Newsweek is scheduled to disclose. If it does not, Fitzgerald would have a good start on a perjury charge against Rove.
At a public meeting in the summer of 2003, Joseph Wilson, responding to a question about the leak, quipped that it would be interesting "to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs." He then had to pull back from that comment and concede he had no evidence to support his hunch that Rove was one of the leakers. (By the way, Novak cited two unnamed Bush administration officials when he published the Plame/CIA leak.) With Newsweek's latest article, we may be getting closer to frog-marching time.

2005-07-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

The Progressive magazine prints a monthly column of short, wry news items under the heading "No Comment". Three of this month's items caught my eye:

SLIMING BUSH
A pair of scientists has named new species of slime mold beetles after George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld. The conservative entomologists say this is a tribute. "I'd be honored to have a slime mold beetle named after me," scientist Kelly Miller told The Salt Lake Tribune.

HARD SELL
An army recruiter left an intimidating message on a potential enlistee's cell phone in an attempt to sign him up. He said it would be a violation of federal law if the prospect did not show up to a meeting, which is untrue. "You fail to appear, and we'll have a warrant," he said, according to KHOU-TV in Houston, which obtained the voice mail message.

HARD-CORE REPUBLICANS
Hard-core porn producer Mark Kulkis and porn star Mary Carey will attend a National Republican Congressional Committee event called the "President's Dinner and Salute to Freedom," reports The Washington Post. "I'm especially looking forward to meeting Karl Rove," said Carey. "Smart men like him are so sexy." In a press statement, Kulkis said, "Republicans bill themselves as pro-business. Well, you won't find a group of people more pro-business than pornographers."

2005-07-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

We need to turn Missouri blue before the following declaration takes effect:

Dear Red States,
We're ticked off at the way you've treated California, and
we've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own
country, and we're taking the other Blue States with us.
In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, Oregon,
Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and
all the Northeast. We believe this split will be beneficial
to the nation, and especially to the people of the new
country of New California.
To sum up briefly: You get Texas, Oklahoma and all the
slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches.
We get Elliot Spitzer. You get Ken Lay.
We get the Statue of Liberty. You get OpryLand.
We get Intel and Microsoft. You get WorldCom.
We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.
We get 85 percent of America's venture capital and
entrepreneurs. You get Alabama. We get two-thirds of the
tax revenue. You get to make the Red States pay their fair
share.
Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22 percent lower than
the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families.
You get a bunch of single moms.
With the Blue States in hand, we will have firm control of
80 percent of the country's fresh water, more than 90
percent of the pineapple and lettuce, 92 percent of the
nation's fresh fruit, 95 percent of America's quality wines
(you can serve French wines at state dinners) 90 percent of
all cheese, 90 percent of the high tech industry, most of
the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and
condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard,
Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.
With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to
cope with 88 percent of all obese Americans (and their
projected health care costs), 92 percent of all U.S.
mosquitoes, nearly 100 percent of the tornadoes, 90 percent
of the hurricanes, 99 percent of all Southern Baptists,
virtually 100 percent of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh,
Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.
We get Hollywood and Yosemite. Thank you.
Additionally, 38 percent of those in the Red states believe
Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62 percent believe
life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or
gun laws, 44 percent say that evolution is only a theory, 53
percent that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61 percent of
you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals
than we lefties.
By the way, we're taking the good pot, too.
You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico.
Sincerely,
Author Unknown in New California

2005-07-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

I'm going to post this news release from Jack Cardetti at Missouri Dems, then I'm going to wash my hands to make sure none of the stink is clinging.

BLUNT'S ECONOMIC DEVELOPER HAS CRIMINAL CONVICTION FOR THEFT; SHE NOW IS IN CHARGE OF STATE'S TAX CREDITS AND BUSINESS INCENTIVES
Jefferson City, MO --- The person Gov. Matt Blunt put in charge of recruiting new businesses and jobs to Missouri has previously been criminally convicted of theft. As Missouri’s Director of Business Development and Trade, Randa A. Hayes oversees millions of dollars in public funds that are used as incentives for businesses to move to Missouri or to expand in the state, as well as the state’s international trade offices.
In 1997, Hayes, then going by her maiden name Randa A. Ismail, spent time in jail after being charged in Cook County, Illinois with two felony counts of theft, two felony counts of forgery, and one misdemeanor count of theft. She later reached a plea bargain and pled guilty to misdemeanor theft and paid more than $36,000 in restitution.
“Matt Blunt has made Missouri the laughing stock of the country by sending a criminal to recruit businesses to this state,” said Missouri Democratic Party spokesman Jack Cardetti. “Gov. Blunt should immediately fire Randa Hayes and disclose to the taxpayers what he knew about her background.”
In an apparent attempt to conceal this information from the public, the court file was ordered sealed on May 31 of this year. Therefore, details of Hayes’ theft and forgery are now hidden from the public.
“The public has a right to know if the Blunt administration had anything to do with covering up this embarrassing episode,” Cardetti said.
Despite Hayes’ graduation from law school, she was unable to receive her law license in Illinois or Missouri. Both states have minimal ethical standards that must be met before an applicant can be seated to take the bar exam.
Although the Missouri and Illinois Bar Associations didn’t see fit to give Hayes a law license, Gov. Matt Blunt has given Hayes plenty of responsibilities in his administration. Besides overseeing the Division of Business Development and Trade, Hayes currently manages the Hawthorn Foundation, which is a private 501 c (6) corporation, whose investors include many of Missouri's most prominent corporations and business leaders, according to the Department of Economic Development’s web site.
Hayes also staffs the state’s Military Preparedness and Enhancement Commission, which Blunt appointed only after the Pentagon announced recommendations to close several Missouri military installations, potentially costing Missouri 3,700 jobs.
“Gov. Blunt needs to assure taxpayers that public funds were not misused under Randa Hayes’ watch at the Division of Business Development and Trade and the Hawthorn Foundation,” Cardetti said.
While Hayes lacks the experience of the state’s previous Director of Business Development, who was selected from a national search of economic developers, she more than makes up for it in political connections. Her husband, David Hayes, is an alderman for the city of St. Peters. Also, according to Blunt’s campaign web site (http://mattblunt.com/cgi-data/news/files/34.shtml) Hayes hosted a $50,000 fundraiser for Blunt last fall.

2005-07-05T14:52:00.000-07:00

The July 4th St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran an editorial that was a history lesson, describing the depths of deprivation and uncertainty that Yankee soldiers suffered during the Revolutionary War. My husband, Connie, who is as suspicious of military glory as he is about the religious right (see July 1st blog), wrote the Post-Dispatch, presenting another point of view:

Dear Editor,
After reading the July 4th editorial in Monday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch extolling the courage of George Washington and his commanders, I could almost hear the fife playing and the roll of the drum. I was about to reach for my combat boots and pre Vietnam M-1 rifle when I remembered how some of Washington's troops were treated after the Revolutionary War. Troops expecting to be rewarded for their efforts in the War for Independence instead found themselves hauled into debtor's courts. Because they had not been paid regularly during the war, many of them were unable to pay their property taxes and were forced to sell their belongings for a pittance of what they were worth. At first they tried to reason with the new government but found no ally in their Commander in Chief. Instead they faced the new government's militia. With these thoughts in mind, I found the martial music waning. I dropped my rusty rifle and slumped back into my easy chair. Besides, I thought, Canada and Australia achieved independence without warfare.

Cornelius P. Alwood

2005-07-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

This Rove/Plame story is nothing as simple as "Rove leaked the name. That's a felony." Having said that, though, I'll add that Rove seems to be in water so hot it's close to the boiling point.
Time magazine is giving up reporter Matt Cooper's notes, and they will show that Rove talked to Cooper about the matter three or four days before Novak's story broke. What's less clear is whether Rove, at that point, identified Plame as an undercover CIA agent. Before Cooper's story appeared, Novak outed Plame, but Novak is not the one on the special prosecutor's hotseat because he apparently made some kind of deal with the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. What Novak gave him, nobody knows. In the meantime, Rove has testified before a grand jury and maintains that he did not leak the Plame information. Newsweek's online magazine has the story.
Joshua Marshall's Talking Points Memo makes a trenchant observation about the direction of the grand jury investigation. He believes it's implicit that:

the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald is after Rove for some felony arising out of the case (perjury after the fact? conspiracy?) but not the immediate and original act of leaking the name.
There's one other point worth noting here. As we've seen, federal law recognizes no reporters' privilege or confidentiality. But if recollection serves, there are DOJ guidelines which say that prosecutors should exercise a great deal of discretion when trying to compel testimony from journalists. They're not supposed to do it just to tie up a few loose ends, but only if there's real and significant crime they're trying to prosecute. And before they do so, they're supposed to have exhausted all other possible ways to get at the information. ...
So just a question: Would Fitzgerald have pushed to get Cooper and Miller in the slammer if some other party in the White House weren't in a lot of trouble?

Looking ahead, how will Bush react to the headlines? He's famous for (misplaced) loyalty. Why else would Rumsfeld still be in office? Even if Bush weren't so bullheaded, he could hardly just dump his deputy chief of staff. Bush hates to look craven and, besides, Rove is like J. Edgar. You know he's got enough dirt on this White House to bury them six feet deep. We'll see if the bad publicity forces Rove out. Aside from collateral damage to Bush's image, Rove's resignation would be about the most felicitous consequence we Dems could hope for. After all, if he is charged with some felony, I see a pardon in his future.
So let's hear it for collateral damage. RAH!

2005-07-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

A quirky little blog called "Oliver Willis: Like Krytonite to Stupid" says the story is about to break that Karl Rove leaked the Plame identity. Willis has good sources. Here's what he says:

Frog March Watch
July 2nd, 2005 | 1:05 pm
Short version: In retaliation for Joe Wilson debunking the Bush administration’s war claims, an administration official outed his wife’s classified position to members of the media. Apparently said official is going to be revealed as Karl Rove, who seems to have sworn under oath that it wasn’t him. Also known as perjury.
Lawrence O’Donnell has more.

Go to the website. He gives links to his sources, and they look convincing.

YESSSS!!!

2005-07-02T09:27:00.000-07:00

Last May, I wrote:

When it comes to planting the seeds of Democracy, the United States does not have a green thumb. It's not like growing squash. You can't just pull up a few weeds and pat a little soil down over the seed of Democracy. Everytime we try it, instead of getting squash, we get the bride of Frankenstein: Vietnam, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq.
But last week in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote two columns describing the current political mood of Iran, and both were surprisingly upbeat. Left to themselves, Iranians seem to be finding their own way to democracy and changing their minds about the Great Satan.
These days most Iranians love America. Kristoff pointed out: "One opinion poll showed that 74 percent of Iranians want a dialogue with the U.S. — and the finding so irritated the authorities that they arrested the pollster. Iran is also the only Muslim country I know where citizens responded to the 9/11 attacks with a spontaneous candlelight vigil as a show of sympathy."
Young Iranians, especially, are disgusted with repressive mullahs and determined to enjoy life. And since the mullahs themselves exhorted people to be fruitful and multiply, sixty percent of the population is now under twenty-five. Young women have found ways to make their chadors and headscarves sexy. For example, they slit the chadors up the leg to the hip and sew elastic around them under the bust. Kristoff wryly observes that "young women in such clothing aren't getting 74 lashes any more — they're getting dates."

But despite changed attitudes toward the West among the youth, the mullahs aren't giving up the top dog slot without a struggle. They engineered the recent election to give themselves absolute power. The problem is that, if one includes those who boycotted the rigged voting, seventy percent of the electorate doesn't want the mullahs in power and ignoring their wishes carries consequences. First, it has created the most serious rift among the ruling mullahs since the revolution. Perhaps even more important will be the economic consequences. Because of high unemployment, Iran needs large infusions of capital, but the new president has criticized stock markets as gambling, something that has no place in a true Islamic society. The day after Ahmadinejad's election, the Iranian market took its biggest plunge ever. If the mullah's policies create a continuing downward economic slide, it'll be harder for them to keep their grip on power.
The hardliners are determined to stay on top, but they should take care lest they find themselves astride an untamed stallion with the bit in its teeth.
By the way, do you notice any parallels between their hardliners and ours?

2005-07-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

Apropos of the recent Supreme Court decision on The Ten Commandaments, my husband wants to know why nobody fights to post the Beatitudes in public places.

2005-06-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly has some fascinating background to add to the news story about Tom Cruise denying that mental illness is a result of a chemical imbalance in the brain and asserting that, of course, there are aliens. In a posting titled "TOM CRUISE'S DANGEROUS CLOWN SHOW" Drum begins by quoting CNN.com, then proceeds to nail Scientology:

Hollywood actor Tom Cruise not only battles creatures from outer space in his latest film "War of the Worlds", he also believes aliens exist, he told a German newspaper on Wednesday.
Asked in an interview with the tabloid daily Bild if he believed in aliens, Cruise said: "Yes, of course. Are you really so arrogant as to believe we are alone in this universe?
....Many scientologists feel they are unfairly criticized, arguing that although many believe in the concept of aliens, it is not such an unreasonable proposition.

I'm actually getting a little tired of Cruise — and Scientology — being treated as some kind of cutesy human interest story. If someone wants to really interview Cruise about space aliens they should ask him a few questions like these:
Mr. Cruise, do you believe that 75 million years ago an evil galactic ruler named Xenu deposited trillions of paralyzed alien bodies on earth and then destroyed them with H-bombs?
Mr Cruise, do you believe that the souls of these creatures, known as "thetans," inhabit the bodies of present day humans?
Mr. Cruise, do you believe that "clearing" our bodies of these thetans is the key to mental stability? Is that the reason Scientologists believe that psychiatry and antidepressive drugs are damaging and unnecessary?
This is crackpot stuff, and there's plenty more available on the internet about Scientology and the origins of its decades long crusade against the mental health profession — all accessible with a few minutes of googling to any reporter willing to take the trouble. If the media stopped treating this like a bit of chuckleheaded fun and asked Cruise some real questions, Americans might be a wee bit less tolerant of his dangerous and dishonest clown show.

2005-06-29T18:30:00.000-07:00

If you haven't already, you might want to add Fired Up to your favorites list. The site comments on Missouri politics and Republican hypocrisy, often with style and wit. To wit:

Matt Blunt: "Patient Abuse Has Gone On For Too Long; I'll Stop It--- Next Year."
Remember back in January when Matt Blunt announced that he would close the Bellefontaine Rehabilitation Center to save the state money. Well it turned out that the rookie Governor failed to factor federal funding into the cost saving calculation. After someone did that for him, it turned out that closing the Center would actually cost the state money.
So the Governor That's Never Wrong then shifted his rationale--- the state should close the Center because of... patient abuse.
While the Center has had a spotty record on patient treatment, parents and families rose up and fought to block Blunt's closure plan. They won that fight in the legislature.
But Blunt hasn't given up. A spokesman said Monday that Governor Blunt still intends to propose closing down Bellefontaine in his next budget next year. "There's been just a sad history of violence and abuse committed on the residents of Bellefontaine by the workers there," said Spence Jackson. "And those workers are state employees."
If the Governor were so concerned about patient abuse, wouldn't he be taking steps now to protect them, rather than waiting until the start of Fiscal Year 2007? Blunt's plan looks more and more like a face-saver, rather than a life-saver.

2005-06-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

Frank Rich, columnist for The New York Times, believes the proposed fund cuts for public broadcasting are a smokescreen. They'll never happen, because the real aim isn't to "kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them." The Bush administration wants to turn CPB into a propaganda arm for its ideology. Proving it is as easy as following the money, in this case the relatively paltry sum of $14,170 that Kenneth Tomlinson, Bush's hatchet man on the CPB board, paid to Fred Mann to monitor NOW. Stephen Labaton of the Times reported on the money trail, and Rich asks and answers the pertinent questions that arise:

Now, why would Mr. Tomlinson pay for information that any half-sentient viewer could track with TiVo? Why would he hire someone in Indiana? Why would he keep this contract a secret from his own board? Why, when a reporter exposed his secret, would he try to cover it up by falsely maintaining in a letter to an inquiring member of the Senate, Byron Dorgan, that another CPB executive had "approved and signed" the Mann contract when he had signed it himself? If there's a news story that can be likened to the "third-rate burglary," the canary in the coal mine that invited greater scrutiny of the Nixon administration's darkest ambitions, this strange little sideshow could be it.
After Mr. Labaton's first report, Senator Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, called Mr. Tomlinson demanding to see the "product" Mr. Mann had provided for his $14,170 payday. Mr. Tomlinson sent the senator some 50 pages of "raw data." Sifting through those pages when we spoke by phone last week, Mr. Dorgan said it wasn't merely Mr. Moyers's show that was monitored but also the programs of Tavis Smiley and NPR's Diane Rehm.
Their guests were rated either L for liberal or C for conservative, and "anti-administration" was affixed to any segment raising questions about the Bush presidency. Thus was the conservative Republican Senator Chuck Hagel given the same L as Bill Clinton simply because he expressed doubts about Iraq in a discussion mainly devoted to praising Ronald Reagan. Three of The Washington Post's star beat reporters (none of whom covers the White House or politics or writes opinion pieces) were similarly singled out simply for doing their job as journalists by asking questions about administration policies.
"It's pretty scary stuff to judge media, particularly public media, by whether it's pro or anti the president," Senator Dorgan said. "It's unbelievable."
Not from this gang.

Rich then details the ultraconservative bonafides of this gang, which is determined to make National Pravda Radio fair and balanced.

2005-06-27T09:13:00.000-07:00

I admit that when I first read the now famous phrase, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy", I was underwhelmed. Was there any sensible person who didn't know that? Indeed, Eric Mink, a generally left-leaning Post-Dispatch columnist, recently called those of us up in arms about it "hyperventilating liberals". Mink points out that, whatever platitudes Bush may have spouted about diplomacy, nobody took those mouthings seriously:

A lengthy Time magazine story published in March 2003, barely a week after the war's start, opened with this salty Bush quote from one year earlier: "F--- Saddam. We're taking him out." The remark, made in a White House meeting, was the president's dismissive response to talk about coalition-building and possible U.N. actions.

Mink's got a point, but so does Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst who testified at the Conyers hearing. McGovern knew, of course, about the intelligence fixing because of Cheney's 8-12 visits to CIA headquarters. When asked if it was unusual for a sitting vice-president to come there in person, he replied that "it wasn't unusual. It was unprecedented." But McGovern points out that, whatever people may have suspected about what the administration was thinking, we didn't expect to get it documented like this, and Paul Krugman believes we'd be foolish not to use it:

We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.

But the hoopla has all been about that one phrase, and Michael Smith, the reporter who uncovered the memos, thinks people are focusing on the wrong sentence. In the L.A. Times he says that the memos:

were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.

Despite the prescient advice, and because he knew the war was illegal, Blair fished for a way to bait Saddam:

Downing Street had a "clever" plan that it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.
Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about "wrong-footing" Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.
British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.
....Another part of the memo...quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that "the U.S. had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime." This we now realize was Plan B.
Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

When ten tons of bombs a month in August didn't work, 54.6 tons were dropped in September, before Congressional approval of war. Smith concludes:

The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.

So instead of focusing only on "intelligence fixed around policy", we need to dish up for this nation large portions of the cold porridge of lies and miscalculation.
In fact, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne deems the self-delusion of Bush and Cheney the most dominant ingredient in the gruel. We see their foolishness in:

recently disclosed documents in which British officials warned that "there was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." The British worried at the time that "U.S. military plans are virtually silent" on the fact that "a postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise."

Dionne contends that the administration believed it was invincible. Just before the war, Tim Russert, interviewing Cheney, painted the possibility of post-war chaos and insurgency. Cheney kept insisting we'd be greeted as liberators.
So maybe they're not liars, only arrogant incompetents.
These egotists thought they could igore facts. Ron Suskind bragged, "When we act, we create our own reality." Suskind et. al. need to take care about turning their backs on other people's reality lest it bite them in the heinie. If Democrats do their job, the G.O.P. ought to be whirling defensively toward every point of the compass to defend themselves over the multitude of lies and miscalculations revealed by the Brit memos. As Eric Mink concluded:

In fabricating a house of cards, there inevitably comes a moment when weight trumps architecture, and the structure falls in on itself. The Bush house of cards is not collapsing, but it is increasingly precarious.
And the wind's picking up.

2005-06-24T12:37:00.000-07:00

Republicans are hogs at the trough, as this Washington Post article makes clear:

To the great growth industries of America such as health care and home building add one more: influence peddling.
The number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled since 2000 to more than 34,750 while the amount that lobbyists charge their new clients has increased by as much as 100 percent. Only a few other businesses have enjoyed greater prosperity in an otherwise fitful economy. ...
"There's unlimited business out there for us," said Robert L. Livingston, a Republican former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and now president of a thriving six-year-old lobbying firm. "Companies need lobbying help."
Lobbying firms can't hire people fast enough. Starting salaries have risen to about $300,000 a year for the best-connected aides eager to "move downtown" from Capitol Hill or the Bush administration. Once considered a distasteful post-government vocation, big-bucks lobbying is luring nearly half of all lawmakers who return to the private sector when they leave Congress, according to a forthcoming study by Public Citizen's Congress Watch.

$300,000 for a lobbyist is paltry when you consider the payoff:

Take the example of Hewlett-Packard Co. The California computer maker nearly doubled its budget for contract lobbyists to $734,000 last year and added the elite lobbying firm of Quinn Gillespie & Associates LLC. Its goal was to pass Republican-backed legislation that would allow the company to bring back to the United States at a dramatically lowered tax rate as much as $14.5 billion in profit from foreign subsidiaries. The extra lobbying paid off. The legislation was approved and Hewlett-Packard will save millions of dollars in taxes.

This congress and its president are handing out goodies at a rate undreamt of by "tax and spend" Democrats:

The Republicans in charge aren't just pro-business, they are also pro-government. Federal outlays increased nearly 30 percent from 2000 to 2004, to $2.29 trillion. And despite the budget deficit, federal spending is set to increase again this year, especially in programs that are prime lobbying targets such as defense, homeland security and medical coverage.

2005-06-23T16:55:00.000-07:00

Kevin Drum, blogging at The Washington Monthly, is my new favorite online source.

Donald Gregg and Don Oberdorfer write in the Washington Post that North Korea's Kim Jong Il might be more willing to make a nuclear deal than we think:

"During a visit we made to Pyongyang in November 2002...we were given a written personal message from Kim to Bush declaring: "If the United States recognizes our sovereignty and assures non-aggression, it is our view that we should be able to find a way to resolve the nuclear issue in compliance with the demands of a new century." Further, he declared, "If the United States makes a bold decision, we will respond accordingly."
We took the message to senior officials at the White House and State Department and urged the administration to follow up on Kim's initiative, which we have not made public until now. Then deep in secret planning and a campaign of public persuasion for the invasion of Iraq, the administration spurned engagement with North Korea. Kim moved within weeks to expel the inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and reopen the plutonium-producing facilities that had been shut down since 1994 under an agreement negotiated with the Clinton administration."

All we have to do is sign a nonaggression pact? Hell, that's all North Korea has wanted ever since we stopped the "police action" there in 1953. There's still no treaty. Drum speculates about the consequences of signing such a pact and
sees no downside.

2005-06-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

Now that Bolton's nomination has been foiled again by Dem senators, Bush is reported to be considering an end run: as soon as Congress goes on recess, he'll give Bolton an interim appointment, good for eighteen months without congressional approval. That would be a shame. If Bolton were to lose the mustache and grow pointy hair, he could give Dilbert's boss lessons in doing it wrong. The Washington Monthly sheds new light on his incompetence.

Good news! Now that John Bolton has left his previous job where he was in charge of arms control, we're suddenly making great progress on arms control! Laura Rozen has the details.
For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.
Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs.
The prospective revival of the plutonium disposal project underlines a noticeable change since Bolton's departure from his old job as arms control chief. Regardless of whether the Senate confirms him as U.N. ambassador during a scheduled vote today, fellow U.S. officials and independent analysts said his absence has already been felt at the State Department.
This is really quite incredible. By so many measures Bolton has been a destructive force for stated Bush administration policy objectives. And as taking Bolton out of the loop furthered US policy goals on Russia's loose nukes, so did Rice's taking him out of the loop on Iran help that sensitive negotiation as well, the WaPo report continues:
"But Bolton was shut out of Iran after Rice's ascension, according to two U.S. officials, and his policy was reversed. In early January, officials from France, Britain and Germany flew secretly to Washington for a brainstorming session on Iran. Bolton was not invited, European diplomats said...
'We weren't the ones who wanted to keep the meeting secret,' one European diplomat said. 'It was the American side that didn't want him there.'"
It's almost laughable.

Wonder if Condi will be in hot water with the boss now that word's out she snubbed his boy. Anyway, just so Bush doesn't put him back in charge of arms control. I'm going to rest easier knowing more is being done about those loose nukes.

2005-06-21T11:23:00.000-07:00

Earlier this month, Dean spoke the truth about Republicans. Last week, Dick Durbin spoke the truth about Guantanamo. Now Maxine Waters, D-CA, is calling the president out for "the Big Lie" (great framing!). She spoke after Conyers' Downing Street Memo hearings on behalf of the newly formed Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus. Fifty representatives have joined in order to "to take on this president in a real way."
Talk about red meat rhetoric. Ms. Waters makes Dean and Durbin look tame.

Your president is a liar. There is now and never was any weapons of mass destruction. Dick Cheney, the chief architect of the big lie, is not only a liar, but he's a thief. He is responsible for the no bid contracts of Halliburton. He is responsible for the fact that Halliburton has been cheating the American public. He is responsible for giving them a big bonus for being thieves. Condoleeza Rice is a liar, a thief, and a betrayer of the public trust.

Hoowhee. And it's even better when you can hear Waters' emphatic speech and watch her jab the air with her finger to punctuate her words.
You'd think her fightin' words would draw Republican fire, but she's not a high enough profile target, at least not yet. But here's the plan:

"The Out of Iraq Congressional Caucus is a newly formed effort whose sole purpose is to be the main agitators in the movement to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. Our efforts will include the coordination of activities and legislation designed to achieve our goal of returning our troops home. Through floor statements, press conferences, TV and radio appearances and other actions, we will provide leadership for the American Public who has been waiting too long for our collective voices against the war."

So if she's lucky, her comments will draw enough media attention to force Republicans to paint a target on her as they've done on Dean and Durbin. Give 'em hell, Maxine.
My Democratic contressman, Lacy Clay, is not a member of the caucus. I will write and urge him to join. If you want to know whether your representative belongs, check the list here.

2005-06-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

From The Nation magazine:

(July 4, 2005 issue)
Cheney Says Iraq Insurgents Are in 'Last Throes'
Calvin Trillin

When rockets fly and battle smoke is thick,
It's good to hear from "Four Deferments Dick."
He's always sure. He knows what warfare is--
Enough to know it's not for him or his.
Insurgents somehow, though they're in the throes,
Kill more GIs--but no one Cheney knows.

2005-06-18T08:49:00.000-07:00

Today's Post-Dispatch devotes an entire page to letters about Howard Dean, mostly in his defense. Here's the beginning of my favorite:

Surely if you are so disapproving of Howard Dean's statements, you must be burning about the Downing Street Memo, a document that proves that our president had planned to go to war with Iraq from the beginning of his term in office and "fixed" the intelligence to support that intention.
I can understand that you may be becoming so used to distortion and falsification on the part of this administration that you believe the Downing Street Memo to be ho-hum and not worthy of comment. However, if I had to pick misbehavior to skewer, I would choose impeachable offenses ....

For your reading pleasure, here's a link to the page.
Now let's see what a professional can do with the topic. William Rivers Pitt of Truthout will delight you even more.

DEAN WAS RIGHT
If the leadership qualities of those in charge of the national Democratic Party could be squeezed into a shampoo bottle, the directions on the back of the bottle might read something like this: “Make tentative statement. Offer equivocation to avoid appearing adamant. Scramble for cover when colleague offers stinging critique of opposition. Stab colleague in back in public. Palpitate and fret, hem and haw. Lather, rinse, repeat.”
Quite a recipe for success, yes? Not lately.
For the last several years, the Democratic Party has been, for the most part, leaving skid marks on the street as they have retreated from confrontation after confrontation with the radicals who now control the Republican party. This retreat has gone from the ridiculous to the sublime to the utterly outrageous.
Here and there resistance has been put forth - on the Social Security issue, on the stem cell legislation, on the nomination of Bolton as UN ambassador - but all too often the most effective resistance to these and other disastrous policy initiatives has come from other Republicans, and not from the Democrats. It was the eloquence of Republican Senator Voinovich that threw sand in the gears of the Bolton nomination, and it was Republican Senator Specter’s promised override of any Bush veto of the stem cell legislation that has made that issue a problem for the White House.
And then along comes Howard Dean, chairman of the DNC, outspoken and uncompromising, swinging Willie Stark’s meat ax with a will and a purpose. He dared to say that he hates Republicans, that the leadership of that party hasn’t worked a day in their lives, that the GOP has become a radical hothouse of right-wing Christians, almost all of whom are white, and that House majority leader Tom DeLay should go back to Texas and get his looming prison sentence over with. Insert palpitations. Suddenly, Democrats like Joe Biden and Bill Richardson start knocking over furniture and old ladies in their rush to get to a microphone so they can distance themselves from the wild man.

Please don't deny yourself the pleasure of reading the rest.

2005-06-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

From the June 27 issue of The Nation, I give you first some doggerel by Calvin Trillin:

WILLIAM DONALDSON IS
REPLACED AS CHAIRMAN
OF THE SECURITIES AND
EXCHANGE COMMISSION BY
CHRISTOPHER COX
Though Donaldson came from the Street,
He plainly was policing his beat.
And so they replaced him with Cox.
The henhouse goes back to a fox.

Then the opening paragraphs of an article titled "Surrender at the SEC":

The appointment of Representative Christopher Cox to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission is as shameful as sending John Bolton to the United Nations, and should arouse a comparable swell of objections. Cox is a wholly owned agent of the financial and corporate interests the SEC is supposed to regulate. His political career has been financed by the same sectors--banking, accounting, corporate--that produced scandals like Enron and WorldCom. In return, he's worked to shield his patrons from the scrutiny of the government regulators, whom they duped, and the shareholders, whom they swindled.
Bush and his White House are beyond shame, of course. Their "code of honor" is as straightforward as the Mafia's: Always protect ideological kinfolk; always reward monied friends. What's public policy got to do with it? Or a decent respect for public values? The Bush cynics are assuming they can fog this one past Congress without awakening the public. Many Americans were deeply injured by the criminal collaborations of financiers and money-crazed CEOs. Yet the SEC is not well-known, its crucial role in policing Wall Street not widely understood. If the cynics prove correct and Cox is confirmed, replacing resigning chairman William Donaldson, George W. Bush will become an unindicted co-conspirator in this looting.

2005-06-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

DFA of northern California sent out this message:

Howard Dean is under attack. A few of his comments have been taken out of context and used to discredit him--and by doing so, to keep Democrats and progressives down.
No one can stand the kind of critical scrutiny given to Dean: he's under a microscope where every pore and mole is made to look like a disfigurement, while the President of the United States is viewed through reverse binoculars with vasoline on the lens.
But the worst part, the WORST part is that Democrats have been adding fuel to the fire, criticizing Dean when we need to stand together. Our elected officials are fiddlling about Howard Dean while the Republican party burns America.
We at Sonoma County DFA are proposing an outreach effort to all Democratic activists to make a big splash to enhance our visibility and demonstrate our fund-raising and organizational capabilities: Support Howard Dean Day -- June 15th.
So let's do the following and encourage others to do likewise on or before June 15th:
Give money to the DNC or go to Democrats.org. It doesn't matter how you give. They're getting the message.
Call your Democratic elected officials. Let them know that Democrats are tired of making jokes about "the circular firing squad": we stand behind Chairman Howard Dean and expect them to refrain from ripping into him in public. If they disagree with him on strategy or tactics, they should tell it to Dean directly, not air it to a hostile media.
Sign the Dean Speaks for Us Petition.
Write letters to the editor.
Spread the word to your friends and family.
Will Rogers famously said: "I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat." Well, that ship has sailed. If we don't become an organized political party right now, this nation is finished. In fact, Democratic change is past due, and Dr. Howard Dean is giving the party CPR. We shouldn't stand by while he's being undercut by the very folks who haven't been speakig up for us against the Republican juggernaut.

2005-06-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

An op-ed piece in USA Today has it right about Howard:

Instead of muzzling Howard Dean, Democrats should give him a bullhorn. Rather than urging him to retreat from his attack on Republicans, party leaders ought to send him off to a political war college — preferably the one the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater attended.
As chairman of the Democratic Party, which is teetering between political renewal and functional extinction, Dean should be making war, not peace. But that's exactly what his critics within the party seemed to be suggesting last week when they admonished him for his tough talk about Republicans.

The writer, DeWayne Wickham, contrasts Democratic cowering over Dean's remarks with how Republicans embraced Lee Atwater after his Willie Horton ads deep-sixed Dukakis.

Ironically, Dean's negative talk is something Atwater, who managed the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, turned into an art form. When the story broke that Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer, raped a white woman and assaulted her fiancé while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison, Atwater went on the attack. He vowed to link Horton so closely to Bush's opponent, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, that people would think the career criminal was the Democratic candidate's running mate.
Republican leaders, eager to extend their party's control of the White House beyond the eight years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, didn't chastise Atwater for playing to racial fears and stereotypes in linking Horton to Dukakis. Instead, they made him party chairman. ...
The time has come for Democrats to give as good as they get.

2005-06-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

On May 22, I wrote:

When three million people, including many conservatives, lobbied the FCC last year to protest new rules allowing more conglomeration, we stopped it. The board members didn't think there were three million people in this country who even knew the FCC existed. Who would have believed that such a geeky topic as FCC rules changes would attract such widespread attention? Internet communications drove that protest, and they can do so again.

Now is the time. We need to apply that same pressure, on the House of Representatives in this instance, over another geeky, crucial issue. Free Press.net, which sponsored the recent National Conference on Media Reform, sent me this notice:

A bill just introduced in Congress would take away the right of cities and towns across the country to provide citizens with universal, low-cost Internet access.
Giant cable and telephone companies don’t want any competition -- which might actually force them to offer lower prices, higher speeds and service to rural and urban areas.
U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) -- a former telephone company executive -- has introduced a bill (HR 2726) that would let cable and telecom companies shut down municipal and community efforts to offer broadband services.
You can stop this outrageous bill. Send a letter to your representative now.
Next, forward this message to everyone you know ...
No less than the future of all communications is at stake. In a few years, television, telephone, radio and the Web will be accessed through a high-speed internet connection. Low-cost alternatives to telephone (DSL) and cable monopolies are emerging across the country, as cities, towns, nonprofits and community groups build low-cost "Community Internet" and municipal broadband systems.
Companies like SBC, Verizon and Comcast have been introducing laws state by state that would prohibit municipal broadband, undercut local control and prevent competition. But we've been fighting back -- and winning.
An alliance of public interest groups, local officials, high-tech innovators and organized citizens have defeated anti-municipal broadband measures in nine of the 13 states where they've been introduced this year.
What the industry couldn't pass in the states, they're trying to push through in Washington. Sessions' bill -- the "Preserving Innovation in Telecom Act" (an Orwellian title if there ever was one) -- would prevent state and local governments from providing "any telecommunications service, information service or cable service" anywhere a corporation offers a similar service.
Congressman Sessions worked for telephone giant SBC for 16 years, and his wife currently serves as a director of Cingular Wireless, an SBC subsidiary. SBC and its employees have been Sessions' second-biggest career patron, pouring more than $75,000 into his campaign coffers.
We can stop this legislation and send a clear message to Congress that local communities -- not the giant telephone and cable companies -- should determine their own communications needs. But you must act now.
Please send a letter opposing HR 2726 -- and forward this message to everyone you know, asking them to do the same.
Onward,
Josh Silver
Executive Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net

Free Press is right when it says, "Media IS the issue." And progressives are finally catching on. We aim to forestall these ruinous bills rather than find out eight years later that we let Congress royally screw us.

2005-06-10T12:04:00.000-07:00

Common Dreams has a first-class BUYCOTT suggestion:

Published on Monday, May 16, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Buy Your Gas at Citgo: Join the BUY-cott!
by Jeff Cohen
Looking for an easy way to protest Bush foreign policy week after week? And an easy way to help alleviate global poverty? Buy your gasoline at Citgo stations.
And tell your friends.
Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela. The President is Hugo Chavez. Call him "the Anti-Bush."
Citgo is a U.S. refining and marketing firm that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company. Money you pay to Citgo goes primarily to Venezuela -- not Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. There are 14,000 Citgo gas stations in the US. (.Click here to find one near you.) By buying your gasoline at Citgo, you are contributing to the billions of dollars that Venezuela's democratic government is using to provide health care, literacy and education, and subsidized food for the majority of Venezuelans.
Instead of using government to help the rich and the corporate, as Bush does, Chavez is using the resources and oil revenue of his government to help the poor in Venezuela. A country with so much oil wealth shouldn't have 60 percent of its people living in poverty, earning less than $2 per day. With a mass movement behind him, Chavez is confronting poverty in Venezuela. That's why large majorities have consistently backed him in democratic elections. And why the Bush administration supported an attempted military coup in 2002 that sought to overthrow Chavez.
So this is the opposite of a boycott. Call it a BUYcott. Spread the word.
Of course, if you can take mass transit or bike or walk to your job, you should do so. And we should all work for political changes that move our country toward a cleaner environment based on renewable energy. The BUYcott is for those of us who don't have a practical alternative to filling up our cars.
So get your gas at Citgo. And help fuel a democratic revolution in Venezuela

2005-06-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

Concerned about the pummeling its reputation has taken lately, Wal-Mart has designated half of its ads for PR that shows happy employees talking about their wonderful careers there. Wal-Mart execs have been making soothing "we want to do the right thing" noises, but, in fact, "Wal-Mart is as concerned about doing the right thing as Tobacco companies are concerned about the health of Americans," says Paul Blank, director of the Wake-Up Wal-Mart Campaign.
Only by exposing its execs' smug lies can we turn its customers in another direction and put the hurt on its sales figures. Unless we can affect their bottom line, none of their behavior will change, but it won't be easy. Even union laborers are addicted to saving pennies on Charmin and Tide at the smiley face place. Thirty second sound bytes are inadequate to convince them that the motto of Wal-Mart ought to be "Always High Costs. Always."
The first step each of us should take is the obvious one: Don't shop there. There's an upside to swearing off Wal-Mart. Not only will you be helping local businesses and almost surely getting better service, you'll be spared the depressing ambiance and cart traffic snarls in the narrow aisles. Boycotting W-M is a relief, even sometimes a joy. A friend of mine cut up her Sam's card and presented the pieces of it to the clerk at the service counter at Costco. They both got a laugh out of it. (See the Jan. 12, 2005 blog for info on Costco.)
As far as a broader strategy, the Wake-up Wal-Mart Campaign is pursuing a variety of strategems. First, some legal jockeying could lay the groundwork for a more effective campaign. For example, it would be useful to pass laws in as many states as possible requiring that the state report how many workers of a given company are on any government assistance program. Such reporting would enable citizens to quickly assess how much taxpayers are subsidizing Wal-Mart.
Pop quiz: Where is the most effective place to find Wal-Mart customers so as to inform them of Wal-Mart's real costs? Umm, at Wal-Mart? Of course. But the corporation deems its parking lots to be private property and keeps activists off its land. The Wake-up Wal-Mart Campaign plans to research which parking lots were partly paid for with public money (say, for the lighting, for example). If taxes paid for the lights or any part of building the lot, then it's public space, and activists could make a case for being allowed to leaflet there.
Another possible legal tactic, to be used against Supercenters, is getting them declared "out of classification". There's a limit on how many groceries a department store can carry.
In short, those going after the megaretailer realize that the task will require not only persistence but also craftiness.
Until now, St. Louisans have been spared the worst ravages of the Biggest Box because the corporation considered St. Louis too unionized and unfriendly. That's changed, and Wal-Mart considers St. Louis friendly enough now so that it plans to open two Supercenters in St. Charles. As a result, it's likely that the Wake-Up Wal-Mart Campaign will target St. Louis. UFCW officials hope to meet with Charlie Dooley to discuss limiting Wal-Mart's inroads. The campaign also plans to doorknock throughout St. Charles County to inform residents about the true costs of the pending Supercenters. It will be looking for grassroots activists to help, so if you've been missing knocking on doors since last October, pine no more.
If you're willing to help out with this campaign, it's easy to sign up.
Despite the fact that recent attacks have made Wal-Mart skittish enough to begin fighting back, I'm sure Goliath feels cocky. It's our job to take aim with the pebbles from thousands of slingshots.

2005-06-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

Wal-Mart executives are so versed in duplicity that you'd think they'd leave a trail of slime like a slug when they walk.
H. Lee Scott, the CEO, as part of Wal-Mart's PR campaign to combat the rising tide of bad publicity, visited Good Morning America and denied all company wrongdoing. He averred, for example, that there's no evidence of any company policy to pay women employees less than men. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show smirked over that one and agreed there was no written policy as such, "just a rich oral tradition." Scott also insisted that Wal-Mart pays every worker for every hour worked. That's not how the workers tell it:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. After finishing her 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift, Verette Richardson clocked out and was heading to her car when a Wal-Mart manager ordered her to turn around and straighten up the store's apparel department.
Eager not to get on her boss's bad side, she said, she spent the next hour working unpaid, tidying racks of slacks and blouses and picking up hangers and clothes that had fallen to the floor. Other times after clocking out, she was ordered to round up shopping carts in the parking lot.
Some days, as soon as she walked in a manager told her to rush to a cash register and start ringing up purchases, without clocking in. Sometimes, she said, she worked for three hours before clocking in.
"They wanted us to do a lot of work for no pay," said Ms. Richardson, who worked from 1995 to 2000 at a Wal-Mart in southeast Kansas City. "A company that makes billions of dollars doesn't have to do that."

Class action and individual lawsuits in 28 states allege that such pay cheating is common. And until the court stopped the practice a couple of years ago, some Wal-Marts locked overnight workers in, not allowing them to leave even for medical emergencies.
Nevertheless, CEO Scott insists that the company has lots of good jobs and that 74 percent of its workers have full time jobs. Of course, he fails to mention that at Wal-Mart 28 hours a week is considered a full time job. That works out to less than $12,000 a year.
In addition to its shabby treatment of its employees, Wal-Mart makes a habit of strongarming its suppliers. Holton Meat is a local company that provides a typical example. Holton signed a contract to make hamburger patties for Wal-Mart. A year later, Wal-Mart dictated a price for the patties that was below Holton's cost. Only by cutting corners with sanitation and safety regulations could Holton have made any profit, so its management refused to continue working with Wal-Mart. Overnight the company went from 400 employees to seventy. Now it's back up to 500 employees and was recently offered another contract with Wal-Mart. No day, no way, Holton said.
Wal-Mart has bilked its workers out of millions, stiff-armed its suppliers and, oh yes, pretty much destroyed the fabric of small-town America.
Tomorrow's blog will describe ideas for making people aware of all this perfidy.

2005-06-07T11:42:00.000-07:00

Today's blog is quoted straight from AMERICAblog.

Why is it that Democrats just love to attack their own? Howard Dean makes a fairly innocuous criticism of Republicans. The response? He gets dumped on by leading Democrats, John Edwards and Joe Biden, both of whom are (surprise, surprise) thinking about running for President themselves. The "controversy," such as it is, is over these remarks, as reported by AP:
While discussing the hardship of working Americans standing in long lines to vote, Dean said Thursday, “Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives.” Dean said later his comments did not refer to hard-working Americans, but rather to the failure of Republican leadership to address working-class concerns.
Dean also said he thinks Tom DeLay should be in jail. So what's the problem? The GOP doesn't care about working class concerns and Tom DeLay probably will be in jail (and certainly should). So, again, what's the big deal?
This looks like another one of those cases where the Right Wing media machine ginned up over Dean's comments... fed them to the media.... who then got Democrats (who conveniently are running for president, so they want to knock Dean out of the picture) to bash Dean. Seriously, the GOP must just sit back and laugh over how easy it is. Our people fall for it every time. They got this headline from AP: "Dems Blast Dean For GOP Remarks".
Joe Biden, appearing on "This Week," jumped on Dean.
Dean “doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats,” Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Sunday on ABC's “This Week.”
John Edwards got on the Dean-bashing bandwagon, too:
Responding to Dean's initial remark, Edwards said Dean “is not the spokesman for the party.”
....
Meanwhile, as we posted below, judges are under attack. Leading Republicans and their top allies have condoned violence against the Judiciary... now THAT is harsh language most would consider very serious. And what's the GOP response. Pretty much nothing.
The GOP will hardly criticize each other over really vital life and death issues. Democrats leap to eat their own every chance they get. It's easier. And, if you're John Edwards or Joe Biden, criticizing Dean keeps your face on the TV.
Here's an idea for Democrats. Stick together for a change. It's what the Republicans do... and they control the White House, the Senate and the House. You might be better off standing up to the right wing and even the media, instead of beating the crap out of your own party chair.

I sent Biden a short, irate letter about his behavior. Maybe you'd like to do the same. Here's his contact info:
e-mail: senator@biden.senate.gov
phone: 202-224-5042

2005-06-04T15:49:00.000-07:00

There are no free lunches, they say. The hell there aren't, I say. Wal-Mart rakes in $2.5 BILLION a year in tax and insurance breaks from the federal and state and local governments. Okay, their lunch isn't completely free. Wal-Mart contributes to plenty of Republican campaigns, a little over a million dollars last year. But hey, those donations are a pittance compared to the payoff. You couldn't even liken it to just paying the tax on their free lunch because sales tax is seldom less than 5 percent. Their campaign contributions come to less than a tenth of a percent of $2.5 billion. If their lunch isn't free, then you'd have to call it a steal.
And the freebies are only part of the problem. Most of their employees get poverty wages, and 52 percent of them have no health insurance. Unfortunately, the giant's business model is a greedy inspiration to other corporations. If Wal-Mart can get away with it, so can we, they reason. In fact, if we don't behave the same way, Wal-Mart will sink us. In only one case so far has the biggest Box of them all faced serious resistance. Wal-Mart is currently the defendant in the largest class action lawsuit ever filed against a private company. A sex discrimination suit has been filed on behalf of its 1.6 million current and former women employees. Last year, it was thought that the possible payout could exceed a billion dollars. I don't know whether the tort "reform" (read "corporate bottomline protection") act will affect the size of damages.
In any case, something has to be done about Wal-Mart. Unions would love to get a toe in Wal-Mart's door, but they have to be realistic. A drive to unionize the retail behemoth is not practical at this point. Union-busting is almost a religion among Wal-Mart executives. I wrote as much last June:

Managers are taught how to screen potential employees to weed out the union troublemakers of the future. And before anyone is hired, she must sign a paper saying she'll never try to organize a union. That's illegal, but nobody's enforcing the laws against it. Inevitably, of course, some employees do try to organize. When that happens, a "'labor relations team'" is sent out by private plane to the offending store, "often the very day the call comes in." The only successful group ever to organize in the States was in Jacksonville, Texas, in 2000. Ten meatcutters voted 7 to 3 to unionize. Two weeks later, Wal-Mart switched to prepackaged meat in all its stores and assigned the butchers to other departments.

In fact, the only occasion on this continent where a store voted the union in was in Quebec recently. Wal-Mart immediately closed down the store.
So rather than beat their heads on the union-organizing wall, United Food and Commerical Workers (UFCW) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) plan instead to wage a PR campaign to educate Americans about how expensive it actually is to shop at Wal-Mart. Specifically the campaign will focus on health-care. Scrooge would nod approvingly over Wal-Mart's stingy health-care benefits, but taxpayers everywhere should be irate. In Montana, for example, forty percent of its employees are on Medicaid. The state of Arkansas--small as far as population and far from rich--spends $17 million a year on Medicaid for Wal-Mart employees alone.
The cost of public assistance for its employees and lost taxes because of TIF arrangements must be figured into the price of goods at Wal-Mart, and I, for one, am galled that I have to buy five-star lunches for the Walton heirs even though I refuse to shop at their stores. This campaign intends to inform Americans that Wal-Mart rakes in $10 billion a year in profits. It can afford and should be expected (or forced) to behave like a responsible corporate citizen.
Dave Cook of the UFCW spoke at the St. Louis meetup Wednesday night. He emphasized that taking on Wal-Mart cannot be just a union initiative. Wal-Mart would jump on a union drive as a chance to paint itself as a victim and win public sympathy. No, this drive must be supported by a broad grassroots coalition, and so the unions are moving to forge alliances with grassroots groups like DFA to challenge Wal-Mart about its dismal health-care policies.
I'm far from being through with this topic. In blogs to come, I'll be describing further cause for our indignation with W-M and offering suggestions for how you can help loosen the grip of this leech on our body politic.

2005-06-02T12:26:00.000-07:00

Today is another of those times when my blog is a letter I just e-mailed to the Post-Dispatch. Amy White's column today raised my blood pressure sufficiently to merit an answer:

Somebody needs to clean the fairness filter in Amy White's brain because it is currently allowing only right-wing propaganda to pass through. She muses smugly about the growing distrust of the media among Americans, a distrust that the Bush administration fosters and delights in, and she criticizes media blunders by Dan Rather and Newsweek. White never mentions, though, the deliberate, constant lies and attempts to mislead from the right.
Here's an abbreviated list of items that couldn't get past her clogged filter: Unlike the lively British press, the American (supposedly liberal) press has ignored the Downing Street Memo, which recently came to light in London. That memo describes meetings between top level American and British figures in 2002, and it states that Bush was deliberately manipulating intelligence to justify attacking Iraq. All those lies we heard about WMD were exactly that--lies. British headlines have been screaming about the memo. Our press, on the other hand, not only failed to adequately investigate Bush's WMD claims before the war, but is currently failing to report this important information. And yet our media is still not tame enough to suit him or Amy White. Only Fox News and the like, which report his every distortion as scripture, are considered sufficiently "truthful".
So this administration deems it necessary to undermine what little press independence remains. They planted an operative named James Guckert in the White House press corps--even gave him an alias, Jeff Gannon. His assignment was asking softball questions to divert attention from any embarrassing questions other reporters might ask. On the Q.T., they paid Armstrong Williams $250,000 of taxpayer money to spew propaganda about the failed No Child Left Behind program. Bush even used millions in taxpayer funds to produce fake news segments which were frequently aired on TV stations across the country with no disclaimer that they were administration propaganda.
Amy White's unquestioning bias over the past couple of years has further sullied the reputation of the media, but she dares criticize the integrity of Bill Moyers? The woman lacks an irony gene.

2005-06-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

William Rivers Pitt of Progressive Democrats of America just saved me a time consuming task. Last week I promised to summarize two articles from The Progressive Magazine, one speaking for the necessity of remaining in Iraq, one calling for withdrawal. I knew the best course of action lay somewhere in between and PDA is asking us to sign a petition backing Rep. Lynn Woolsey's (D-CA) House Resolution calling for an exit strategy. Woolsey has pinpointed a workable "somewhere in between".
Pitt lays out the dangers inherent in rushing our of Iraq in a cloud of dust:

Last week, DNC Chairman Howard Dean stated that the United States must remain militarily engaged in Iraq. "Now that we're there, we're there and we can't get out," Dean told an audience of nearly 1,000 at the Minneapolis Convention Center on Wednesday, April 20th, as reported in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. "The president has created an enormous security problem for the United States where none existed before. But I hope the president is incredibly successful with his policy now that he's there."
Potential Security Threats
Chairman Dean cited three potential threats to American security that, in his opinion, require a continued American presence in that nation. The threats he enumerated were that an American withdrawal could open the door for a fundamentalist Shiite theocracy which could be worse than that which currently controls Iran; could precipitate the creation of an independent Kurdistan in the north and destabilize the neighboring Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iran, and Syria; and could cause Iraq to become an operational base for terrorist organizations in the fashion of pre-war Afghanistan.
Threats Self-created?
Clearly, these are well-reasoned concerns that cannot and must not be dismissed out of hand. The Bush administration's catastrophic Iraq policy, beginning with their wide-ranging disinformation campaign regarding weapons of mass destruction, to their wildly inaccurate belief that American invasion forces would be welcomed with open arms, to their ham-fisted and massively corrupt handling of the occupation, has created the threats we now face.
Simply put, Iraq was not a hotbed of terrorism and threats to American security until the invasion and occupation. We were told Iraq was a threat to us, which was a lie. The invasion and occupation, which was supposed to destroy those threats, has in fact created those threats where they did not exist before. This reality, and the threats to our security that have been created by Bush's disastrous policies, cannot be ignored. ...
Other Credible Options
We at Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) do not agree with Chairman Dean's assessment of the situation. The three scenarios outlined by the Chairman which, in his opinion, require our continued presence in Iraq would come to pass only if the United States fled willy-nilly out of that country and left it in its current chaotic state. There are other options besides 'Remain indefinitely' and 'Withdraw immediately.'

You can read the four points in Woolsey's resolution and sign a petition which will be delivered to Chairman Dean this week.

2005-05-31T13:49:00.000-07:00

Today is a reprint of a reprint, so to speak. Molly Ivins reprinted a speech by a Texas state legislator, and I'm reprinting Ivins's column.
'Today is one of the all-time low points'
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate

AUSTIN - Rarely are the words of one state legislator worth national attention, but when Senfronia Thompson, a black representative from Houston, stalks to the back mike with a certain "get-out-of-my-way" look in her eye, it's Katie, bar the door.
Here is Thompson speaking against the Legislature's recent folly of sending a superfluous anti-gay-marriage amendment for the Texas Constitution out to the voters:
"I have been a member of this august body for three decades, and today is one of the all-time low points. We are going in the wrong direction, in the direction of hate and fear and discrimination. Members, we all know what this is about; this is the politics of divisiveness at its worst, a wedge issue that is meant to divide.
"Members, this is a distraction from the real things we need to be working on. At the end of this session, this Legislature, this leadership will not be able to deliver the people of Texas fundamental and fair answers to the pressing issues of our day.
"Let's look at what this amendment does not do: It does not give one Texas citizen meaningful tax relief. It does not reform or fully fund our education system. It does not restore one child to CHIP who was cut from health insurance last session. It does not put one dime into raising Texas' Third World access to health care. It does not do one thing to care for or protect one elderly person or one child in this state. In fact, it does not even do anything to protect one marriage.
"Members, this bill is about hate and fear and discrimination. When I was a small girl, white folks used to talk about 'protecting the institution of marriage' as well. What they meant was if people of my color tried to marry people of Mr. [Warren] Chisum's color, you'd often find the people of my color hanging from a tree. Fifty years ago, white folks thought interracial marriages were 'a threat to the institution of marriage.'
"Members, I'm a Christian and a proud Christian. I read the good book and do my best to live by it. I have never read the verse where it says, 'Gay people can't marry.' I have never read the verse where it says, 'Thou shalt discriminate against those not like me.' I have never read the verse where it says, 'Let's base our public policy on hate and fear and discrimination.' Christianity to me is love and hope and faith and forgiveness ....
"You want to pass this ridiculous amendment so you can go home and brag -- brag about what? Declare that you saved the people of Texas from what?
"Persons of the same sex cannot get married in this state now. Texas law does not now recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions, religious unions, domestic partnerships, contractual arrangements or Christian blessings entered into in this state -- or anywhere else on this planet Earth.
"If you want to make your hateful political statements, then that is one thing -- but the Chisum amendment does real harm. It repeals the contracts that many single people have paid thousands of dollars to purchase to obtain medical powers of attorney, powers of attorney, hospital visitation, joint ownership and support agreements. You have lost your way. This is obscene.
"I thought we would be debating economic development, property tax relief, protecting seniors' pensions and stem cell research to save lives of Texans who are waiting for a more abundant life. Instead we are wasting this body's time with this political stunt that is nothing more than constitutionalizing discrimination. The prejudices exhibited by members of this body disgust me.
"I have listened to all the arguments. I have listened to all of the crap. I want you to know that this amendment [is] blowing smoke to fuel the hell-fire flames of bigotry."
Then they passed the amendment.

2005-05-30T19:44:00.000-07:00

I'm a little surprised that the Post-Dispatch printed, albeit on the back page, an article headlined: "Forces in bloody Uzbek crackdown were U.S.-trained". As Bill Moyers pointed out in his speech at the Media Reform conference, news is whatever the powers that be want to keep hidden, and the Post doesn't print a lot of that kind of news. The AP article didn't connect any dots, though. It didn't mention that teaching foreign soldiers how to control upstart rebels is a service we've been providing countless dictators for decades.
When the Spanish empire fell apart at the turn of the twentieth century, we had a national debate about the morality of stepping into the vacuum as empire builders. Those opposed lost the battle of ideas, and we fought a bloody war to suppress Phillippine independence. Since then, however, we've opted as much as possible for more covert tactics for controlling small countries with resources we covet. The 1973 coup in Chile is a textbook example. There are still those who will argue we weren't behind Pinochet's ruthless ouster of socialist president Salvador Allende.
In any case, the right argues that such propping up of dictators (or bringing down of socialist governments) stabilizes the world. And in the present world climate, that argument is easier to make than it was in 1954, for example, when we got rid of Guatemala's president, Jacobo Arbenz, because he was standing up to United Fruit, allowing banana pickers to unionize. Today, the right can point to the growing Muslim extremist movement and justify supporting a dictator who boils people in oil, on the grounds that the rebels want to install yet another Muslim government.
The Left argues that propping up unpopular governments just helps Muslim extremists recruit suicide bombers and that we landed ourselves in our present pickle in the Middle East, in large part, because we've consistently supported corrupt governments in that region.
Anyway, the question of whether to support dictators or not has little to do, really, with stability, and more to do with empire. I did not say "our" empire because much of the looting of the goods of third world countries is done by multinationals with the aid of the IMF and the World Bank. We're a key player, but not the only one. In the case of Uzbekistan, though, we do seem to be the principal player. We're the nation President Karimov favors to help his country develop its oil resources. Since the money that flows into Uzbekistan as the oil flows out will go to whoever controls the government, Karimov will kill as many dissidents as necessary to maintain control. The failure to mention these motives is another unconnected dot in the AP article.
Our government doesn't give a rat's patootie how many rebels are killed or tortured, but it has to pretend to be offended, so our man there, General Abizaid, vowed to scale back military operations at a base in the southern part of the country. "But officers at the base told a visiting Associated Press reporter that they hadn't noticed any reduction in movement there."
Abizaid's promise is a harmless little lie, just a tactic to stonewall nosy people who ought to butt out. After all, as Abizaid's superiors proved in the last election, at least half the country prefers being lied to and spared unpleasant truths. Thus we continue down the path of supporting the bad guys, forfeiting the moral high ground that we like to claim but seldom attain.

2005-05-27T19:29:00.000-07:00

FINALLY. AT LAST. IT'S ABOUT TIME.
Someone (otherwise known as Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich.) is raising a large public stink about the Downing Street memo of 2002, an important piece of news which the corporate media in America has been busily ignoring.

The Downing Street Memo
May 27, 2005
Dear Friend:
As many of you are aware, a classified memo was recently disclosed in Great Britain that I believe has serious ramifications for the integrity of the United States Government. Dubbed the “Downing Street Memo,” but actually comprising the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and other top British government officials, the memo casts serious doubt on many of the contentions of the Bush Administration in the lead up to the Iraq war. With over 1,600 U.S. servicemen and servicewomen killed in Iraq, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and over $200 billion in taxpayer funds going to this war effort, we cannot afford to stand by any longer.
Along with 88 of my colleagues, I wrote to the President requesting answers about this grave matter. Thus far, our search for the truth has been stonewalled and I need your help. I believe the American people deserve answers about this matter and should demand directly that the President tell the truth about the memo. To that end, I am asking you to sign on to a letter to the President requesting he answer the questions posed to him by 89 Members of Congress.
I will personally insure that this letter is delivered to the White House.
You can read the letter here and sign on to it below. You and I know the White House is just hoping that this matter will fade away, but in a few short weeks, with our steadfastness, the memo has found its way into leading newspapers and White House press briefings. With your help, we can hold this Administration accountable.

I hope you will sign the letter and I hope you will forward it tout de suite to everyone else you know who'd like to.

2005-05-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

There is something to be said for disapproving of the filibuster deal seven Democrats made with GOP senators and AlterNet says it well:

The Democrats chose to make the fight on Bush's judicial nominees about saving the filibuster rather than stopping right-wing extremists from being given lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Indeed, in the last two weeks we heard nary a word about the deficiencies and the dangers of the nomination of the Gang of Three: Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor and Priscilla Owen.
At stake, the Democratic Party encouraged us to believe, was not the future of the federal judiciary but the future of the Senate. ...
Given this reticence by the Democratic Party to educate people about the dangers to our Republic if individuals like Priscilla Owen get to interpret the law of the land, one can't blame the Americans for thinking that the Democrats' threat to filibuster is simply much ado about nothing.

Harry Reid said the Dems had 49 votes. Perhaps if they had held firm, they'd have swayed two more moderate Republicans, but even if not, they weren't without weapons:

With unity comes power. They had threatened, vaguely, to "shut down the Senate" if the filibuster were eliminated. That was clearly within their capacity. Each Democratic Senator has at least an hour to speak on any amendment, any bill, any procedural call. That means 44 hours of every week could be spent on just a single motion.
But to shut down the Senate and gain the nation's support, the Democrats first must educate Americans that what they are fighting against are evil ends, not unfair means. The filibuster fight did not serve that educational purpose.
Only when the Democratic Party exhibits real backbone, only when it demonstrates that it is willing to take large individual and collective political risks, only when it is willing to do everything within its power to stop evil, only then will it rally the country to the task of stopping the nationwide lurch toward fanaticism.

2005-05-26T20:47:00.000-07:00

William Rivers Pitt, who writes for the online magazine Truthout, describes how the overweening tactics of movement conservatives (read, fundamentalist activist Christian base of the GOP) is splitting the Republican Party on half a dozen fronts simultaneously. The neocons have been using movement conservatives as "useful idiot" shock troops, but now, acting on the belief that they alone delivered the election to Bush, evangelicals are overstepping their bounds, determined to reap payback. Their two point men, DeLay and Frist, started the evangelical campaign to seize control of our government with the Schiavo debacle and handed Democrats a public relations coup. Many old line conservatives, otherwise known as moderates, were embarrassed and angry at being lumped in with the fundies over that fiasco and also over being pressured to support--count 'em--the filibuster, the federal ban on stem cell research funds, the Bolton nomination, and Social Security "reform". They've been breaking ranks on all these issues. And there's one more major issue where they might be persuaded to desert the fold: Iraq. They're aware that our invasion there has been a blood-bath catastrophe.
Pitt suggests that "those who have watched the White House and Congress run roughshod over the best traditions and ideals of this nation can do two things while this fight unfolds: Sit back and enjoy the rift, or exploit it." Pitt votes for Option B, specifically for exploiting the rift over Iraq:

The time has come to mount a bull-throated charge to get American troops out of Iraq. Eleven U.S. troops have died in the last 48 hours, bringing the total to 1,647. Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into the sand to no avail. The public dialogue on Iraq is paralyzed, locked between those who believe we have to stay and those who think slogans like 'Out Now!" with no plans to augment the sentiment are the only proper response. It is Vietnam all over again.
Rather than leave the dialogue stuck in this rut, the time has come to develop an intelligent, effective plan for the removal of troops from Iraq and the delivery of that nation back into the hands of the people who live there. Democratic leaders Reid, Pelosi and Dean must be made to see this as the only intelligent choice. More to the point, Republican old-schoolers who are disgusted with the neo-cons and their 'useful idiot' movementarian shock troops can be brought on board as a part of their insurgency against their rotten leaders.

Sounds good to me, and to further Pitt's suggestion that we think constructively about how to leave Iraq, two postings next week will be summaries of opposing articles on that question from The Progressive Magazine, one of which recommends staying and the other leaving quickly. Both articles have arguments that merit attention and that could contribute to a reasonable plan for our exit.

2005-05-25T14:38:00.000-07:00

Blogger Jack O'Toole thinks Howard Dean hit the nail on the head in his Sunday interview with Tim Russert. Dean would like to see Dems strike the words "abortion" and "choice" from the way they frame the debate:

When I campaigned for this job [as DNC Chair], I talked to lots of Democrats. And there are significant numbers of pro-life Democrats in the South. And one lady said to me, you know, “I’m pro-life. I don’t like abortion. I would never have one. I would hope my daughter would never have one. But, you know, if the lady next door got herself in a fix, I’m not sure I should be the one to tell her what to do.” Now, we call that woman pro-choice, but she thinks of herself as pro-life. The minute we start with the “pro-choice, pro- choice, pro-choice,” she says, “Well, that’s not me.”
But when you talk about framing this debate the way it ought to be framed, which is “Do you want Tom DeLay and the boys to make up your mind about this, or does a woman have a right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she gets,” then that pro-life woman says “Well, now, you know, I’ve had people try to make up my mind for me and I don’t think that’s right.” This is an issue about who gets to make up their minds: the politicians or the individual. Democrats are for the individual. We believe in individual rights. We believe in personal freedom and personal responsibility. And that debate is one that we didn’t win, because we kept being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion.

O'Toole praises Dean's take on the issue and expands on his theme:

Dean’s right. There’s a huge difference between taking the principled position that this difficult, often painful choice should ultimately rest with the woman involved, and trying to make the utterly fatuous argument that giving birth and getting an abortion are, in the main, morally equivalent actions that demand equal respect from the public at large. They aren’t and they don’t. And the only way that we Dems are going to be able to successfully defend the first proposition — the Constitutional Option, if you will — is by explicitly rejecting the second.
That’s going to be an unpleasant rhetorical shift for some of our most committed supporters, particularly those who somehow, somewhere got it into their heads that we have a duty as Americans to celebrate people’s choices rather than simply to tolerate them. But shift we must. And Dean deserves a great deal of credit for looking the base of our party in the eye and saying so.

Here's my two cents. Dean framed the issue artfully: “Do you want Tom DeLay and the boys to make up your mind about this, or does a woman have a right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she gets?" I always appreciated the use of "boys" from him as in "Ken Lay and the boys", in other words the good old boys who think they deserve to rule the rest of us. "Make up her own mind" appeals to the individualist in everyone. And finally, he uses "health care" instead of the hot button word "abortion."
Dean has, I think, a commonsensical knack for framing ideas.

2005-05-24T15:20:00.000-07:00

>Daily Kos has a thorough, succinct analysis of the filibuster compromise, the best I've seen:

There are those who think any compromise is a sign of weakness, and there's little that can be said to change their mind.
But here are the plain, unspun facts:

--Democrats hold 44 seats in the 100 seat Senate. One independent sides with the Democrats, giving Dems a 10-seat deficit.
--Reid had 49 votes. He needed 51 to defeat Frist's nuclear option.
--Reid needed at least two of four undecided Republicans.
--Had Reid come up short, the filibuster would be dead in judicial matters.
--If the filibuster was dead, Bush would've been able to put anyone on the Supreme Court. Anyone.
--Radical Christian Rightist James Dobson is demanding the right to choose the next Supreme Court nominee.
--Dobson's biggest enemy is the filibuster. Hence, he forced Frist to engage in the nuclear option.
--Because of the deal, Dobson can't choose the next Supreme Court justice. Bush's choice, if too extreme, faces the prospect of a filibuster.

In order to save face, Republicans have gotten up or down votes on most of the handful of judges who are currently being filibustered. It's a price, but a relatively small one to pay to protect the filibuster during the next Supreme Court battle.
Given that we have a 10-seat deficit in the Senate, that's no small feat.

And if you still think we got a raw deal, you might feel better if you check out how livid James Dobson is:

This Senate agreement represents a complete bailout and betrayal by a cabal of Republicans and a great victory for united Democrats. Only three of President Bush's nominees will be given the courtesy of an up-or-down vote, and it's business as usual for all the rest. The rules that blocked conservative nominees remain in effect, and nothing of significance has changed. Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Chief Justice William Rehnquist would never have served on the U. S. Supreme Court if this agreement had been in place during their confirmations. The unconstitutional filibuster survives in the arsenal of Senate liberals.

2005-05-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

This Republican administration and its minions are well beyond Alice in Wonderland surrealism. They've hopscotched over Alice and landed in 1984. One of their G.O.P. forebears, Dwight Eisenhower, would be appalled. Among his presidential papers (Eisenhower Presidential Papers, Document 1147) is this quotation:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil
millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

Admittedly, Eisenhower is not the kind of Republican today's G.O.P. would admire, anyway. After all, as he departed the White House, he warned that "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence" by the military-industrial complex. Indeed, I don't think Ike could be a Republican in today's U.S.A. He would be shocked and saddened by the attack on working people, by a useless, counterproductive war, and by erosion of civil liberties that McCarthy and J. Edgar would admire.
The latest on the civil liberties front is a bill designed to make Americans into footsoldiers in the war on drugs:

A senior congressman, James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), is working quietly but efficiently to turn the entire United States population into informants--by force.
Sensenbrenner, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman, has introduced legislation that would essentially draft every American into the war on drugs. H.R. 1528, cynically named "Safe Access to Drug Treatment and Child Protection Act," would compel people to spy on their family members and neighbors, and even go undercover and wear a wire if needed. If a person resisted, he or she would face mandatory incarceration.
Here's how the "spy" section of the legislation works: If you "witness" certain drug offenses taking place or "learn" about them, you must report the offenses to law enforcement within 24 hours and provide "full assistance in the investigation, apprehension and prosecution" of the people involved. Failure to do so would be a crime punishable by a mandatory minimum two-year prison sentence, and a maximum sentence of 10 years.
Here are some examples of offenses you would have to report to police within 24 hours:
--You find out that your brother, who has children, recently bought a small amount of marijuana to share with his wife;
--You discover that your son gave his college roommate a marijuana joint;
--You learn that your daughter asked her boyfriend to find her some drugs, even though they're both in treatment.
In each of these cases you would have to report the relative to the police within 24 hours. Taking time to talk to your relative about treatment instead of calling the police immediately could land you in jail.

Check out the AlterNet article to learn about the other provisions.
Surely nothing as draconian as this bill could pass, but it's disturbing that such misbegotten nonsense is even being crafted.
Ike, I hate to tell you this, but the party of your choice has become the Gog and Magog of my universe.

2005-05-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

When my stepson, Nate, was three, he had no interest in watching t.v.--except for the ads. Those were short and had lots of action, so he'd stand still long enough for ads and then run off to play.
At the Media Reform conference, Christy Glaubke of Children Now, accused commercial t.v. of marinating the brains of our children in advertising: 40,000 ads a year are directed to children under eight. It's an insidious form of child abuse and about to become even more pernicious with the advent of interactive advertising. This latest development, already on the internet, will soon be coming to a t.v. set near you.
It disguises itself as a game, but with a given product, say Lifesavers, displayed at every turn of the game. If, for example, the player makes a mistake, he is directed to go back a screen and read an explanation, which will be conveniently printed inside a Lifesaver. Some of these games also enable advertisers to collect personal information on the kids that play.
The FCC recently unanimously passed rules aimed at protecting children as t.v. networks change from analog to digital formats. What the specifics of those rules are, Glaubke did not say, but she did mention that children's advocacy groups are lobbying the FCC to mandate more information to help parents locate better quality programs and to ban interactive ads.
Since young children are too naive to recognize the persuasive intent of ads or even to distinguish ads from programs, they need and deserve protection. For example, most ads aimed at children are for junk food. It doesn't seem coincidental that child obesity is up 300 percent in the last thirty years. Naturally, though, advertisers won't back off unless they're forced to. After all, children influence $500 billion in purchases in this country every year. They may not have much cash in their pockets, but they have something almost as useful as currency--the nag factor.
As the change from analog to digital communications picks up steam in the near future, progressives need to oppose these cunning interactive ads. We'll need to lobby the FCC to ban these branded environments for children, write op-ed pieces, and create policy briefs to be presented to policymakers and media industry leaders.
In other words, we'll need to make a lot of noise. And here's a fight where conservative parents may well want to join us. That's good. When three million people, including many conservatives, lobbied the FCC last year to protest new rules allowing more conglomeration, we stopped it. The board members didn't think there were three million people in this country who even knew the FCC existed. Who would have believed that such a geeky topic as FCC rules changes would attract such widespread attention? Internet communications drove that protest, and they can do so again.

2005-05-19T14:26:00.000-07:00

There's an upside to blogging, which is that whenever I write a letter to the Post--which they mostly don't print--at least it isn't wasted effort. I can always post it here. Which is what I'm doing today.

Considering Governor Blunt's usual pro-business agenda, it's odd that he and the legislature have decided to screw Missouri's energy consumers--i.e. everyone in the state--just to make the energy lobbyists happy. Even Anheuser-Busch, Boeing, and Monsanto, among others, are protesting. But there's no denying that Republicans passed two bills that will make energy rate hikes easier to obtain. Unwilling to leave any loose ends, now they've fired John Coffman, an attorney highly respected nationally among consumer advocates. His fifteen years of working for Missourians seems to have been a liability.
Having infuriated their religious base by failing to come through with a stem cell research ban and anti-abortion bills, Blunt et. al. are now rankling another major part of their base, businessmen--not to mention all the rest of us. If nothing else, they're a confident bunch.
Asked to justify an unmerited firing that is bound to have deleterious consequences for most Missourians, Blunt's spokesmen pretended they "couldn't recall who had brought up the need to replace Coffman" and blithely asserted that Coffman's fate wouldn't intimidate his replacement. That latter part, at least, is probably true since his replacement isn't likely to represent anybody but the utilities.
I have a question for Michael Sorkind, who wrote the Thursday Post-Dispatch story about Coffman: Did Blunt's spokesman perhaps raise a digit as he was (mostly not) explaining the governor's action? And were you just too polite to mention it?
P.S. Corey Dillon wrote me to explain Blunt's actions. Oh, duh. I had forgotten he had a brother who's a lobbyist--for, guess who. Yes, utility companies. Corey sees it as an early Christmas present for Andy Blunt.

2005-05-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

Time out. I'll get back to media reform info later, but right now you want to hear about The Nation's May 30 cover article.
You may remember the outrage from liberal groups during the fall of 2002 when Bush proposed appointing Dr. David Hager as chairman of the FDA's advisory group on women's health. They felt Hager was an inappropriate appointee because he had been part of an effort to halt distribution of the abortion pill, RU-486. Bush skirted the controversy by appointing Hager to the eleven-member panel (a position that does not require Congressional approval) rather than seeking approval for him as chairman.
It turns out that Hager's own sexual behavior is as much a cause to object to his official position as his public stands on abortion-related issues.The Nation avoids exposes of the private behavior of political figures unless that behavior is relevant to their public role. In Hager's case, his treatment of his wife of 32 years is relevant, involving as it does repeated, forcible sodomy.
During divorce proceedings, his ex-wife, Linda Davis, had not, out of respect for her three grown sons, exposed the behavior of their father. She probably never would have if she hadn't been in the congregation last October when he publicly blamed the breakup of his marriage on his frequent travel in the Lord's work. Having fumed over his syrupy hypocrisy and his sin of omission, she was receptive when Ayelish McGarvey of The Nation asked for an interview. Davis and various people who knew at the time about the ongoing problems in that marriage gave credible evidence of the charges. If the accusations were proven in court, his actions would be felonies.
Having until now been spared his wife's revelations, though, Hager appears to have been disproportionately influential at the FDA. That agency recently considered whether or not to approve over-the-counter sale of a drug called Plan B, which, if taken within 72 hours of intercourse, prevents fertilization and implantation of eggs. Easier access to the drug would probably lower the nation's abortion rate. Although the advisory board voted overwhelmingly in favor of legalizing over-the-counter sale of Plan B, Hager strenuously opposed it on the grounds that it would increase sexual promiscuity in young girls. The FDA has refused to legalize the drug, and The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has called the decision a "dark stain on the reputation of an evidence-based agency like the FDA."
On June 30, Hager is up for reappointment to his post on the advisory board. Considering the firestorm of indignation over Bill Clinton's sexual peccadilloes, surely the right-wing won't let Hager's more heinous behavior pass. ... Surely. .. Don't bet on it.

2005-05-17T00:58:00.000-07:00

You know, we do have excellent left wing radio and television in St. Louis--just not much of it. What we have is Amy Goodman's radio and tv show, Democracy Now. I get her tv show on my Dish Satellite, but if you don't have satellite, there's always trusty KDHX, 88.1 FM at 6:00 p.m. Pacifica network, which produces Goodman's programs is grassroots funded, so she calls her work "trickle-up journalism".
Moyers pointed out Sunday that there are still journalists doing thoughtful, high caliber work in mainstream media, though not many. Goodman's remarks at the opening plenary of the National Conference on Media Reform were less gracious. She looks upon beltway journalism as having "nothing to tell and everything to sell." For example, a research study showed that before the Iraq war, only three out of almost 400 interviews about the coming conflict were with anti-war leaders. That makes us, in her phrase, the silenceD majority. She feels that the Pentagon has "deployed" the U.S. media in this war. (Another speaker described embedded reporters as "in bed" reporters.)
The media's habit of glossing over inconvenient, unpleasant truths has gotten worse, she believes, since Viet Nam. The picture of a naked girl burning from napalm that galvanized this nation back then would simply not appear in print today. Goodman pointed out that gap in modern reporting to one of her guests, Aaron Brown, who replied that censoring those kinds of photos is "a matter of taste," but isn't it war that is tasteless? If American citizens saw in their media, for even just one week, what citizens of other countries routinely see from Iraq, they would be staggered.
Despite the increasingly murky picture of reality our media gives us, Goodman doesn't assume our press was ever particularly honest. After the U.S. bombed Hiroshima, one American reporter went there and documented the horrors of radiation sickness among the population. Lest a realization of what we had done take hold here, the Pentagon secretly commissioned William Lawrence of the New York Times to write a series denying that the people of Hiroshima were suffering. Lawrence received a Pulitzer prize for that series.
If you want the skinny on what's happening worldwide, you need alternative media. On Goodman's show today, she interviews a man who spent years as what he calls an "economic hit man." Working for our government, his job was to lure third world countries who had some commodity we wanted--say, oil or a canal--to accept huge loans they couldn't possibly repay. He gave Ecuador as an example: we wanted their oil, and now fifty percent of their GDP is owed to the World Bank. Ninety percent of the loans given to such countries would come back to Halliburton or Bechtel in the form of contracts to build large infrastructure projects (ports, highways, dams) that benefitted only the wealthy. These loans, usually from the World Bank, were accepted by corrupt heads of state in return for bribes. The rare honest heads of state who resisted taking these bribes tended to be assassinated. Once it became obvious that the loans could not be repayed, our government would offer to forgive some or all of the debt in exchange, for example, for cheap oil. Extracting that oil often meant destroying rainforests and indigenous populations.
That brand of truth telling made some good ole boys in Texas angry when Pacifica first went on the air in 1985, so the KKK there blew up the network's tower three times in one year. After that, they gave up and trusted to public indifference. Although it's true that Pacifica isn't giving CNN or CBS a run for their money, still it is growing. Now is the time when liberal media is poised to grab more and more attention. We need to appreciate the superb work Goodman does and spread the word.

2005-05-16T00:26:00.000-07:00

The National Conference on Media Reform ended with a bang. The best speaker of the three day conference--and that's saying a lot--was Bill Moyers. His beautifully crafted speech skillfully skewered two groups.
First, Moyers pointed out that mainstream journalism uses a format that turns it into a group of mere stenographers. The conventional rules of beltway journalism "divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they've done their job if - instead of reporting the truth behind the news - they merely give each side the opportunity to spin the news."
A major problem with such journalism is that it does not report on anything unless it is pegged to something a government official says first. Jim Lehrer has pointed out that news reporters before the start of the war never mentioned the occupation to come because government spokesmen never used that term. Because they spoke only of "liberation", the question of the coming occupation wasn't discussed. Nor will most newsmen pay attention even to hard facts if those are outside what the government wants discussed. Charles Hadley wrote a 2003 story about prison abuse in Iraq. That was a year before Abu Ghraib, but he was ignored by major American newspapers. Thus government officials control the news.
Second, Moyers lambasted right wingers for their attempts to control the information Americans receive. They loathe anyone who dissents: "They want your reporting to validate their belief system, and when it doesn't, God forbid." They need to squelch dissent lest it inform the ordinary people whom they daily manipulate and hornswoggle: "They encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so they won't see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets."
Moyers built an argument defending his PBS series NOW and outlining the growing Republican fury with his truth telling that culminated in a rift between himself and the board. PBS is actually, according to two studies, very establishment. Guests on its political shows are usually elected officials, Wall Streets types, or other elitist insiders. The rare alternative speakers like labor organizers or community activists are drowned out by government and corporate voices. Troubled by those studies, Moyers jumped at a 2001 offer to do what he considered real news. He said that "news is what people want to keep hidden, and everything else is publicity." His fair and balanced reporting made "princes and priests uncomfortable", though. The watershed moment came on February 28, 2003, when he did a commentary piece about
lapel flags. It's short, so he read it to us. Do yourself a favor and read it. Anyway, after that night, the right wing went after Moyers in earnest.
Kenneth Tomlinson, a Rove hatchet man, was appointed chairman of the CPB board. He denies carrying out a mandate from the White House, but the evidence says otherwise. The board was originally created to be a "firewall between political influence and program content", but the wall has been breached by ideologues. In fact, the board refused three requests from Moyers himself to meet with them.
This blog is inadequate to convey what Moyers said, but you can get some more information about it from .today's Post Dispatch. Better yet, listen to his speech in its entirety on KWMU. Hearing it will make you proud to have this articulate spokesman for liberal values.
Although he retired six months ago, right wing attacks on him have not abated. They might do well to rein in some of their venom because, as Moyers says, "They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair."

2005-05-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

Even as I was rooting for Air America to fly, I kept hearing last summer that it had trouble finding advertisers because many people considered liberal talk radio just a pre-election fluke that would wither after Nov. 2. Well that was hogwash. The market is there.
Now the question occasionally asked about that network is whether its most grating, sometimes lewd voices will be more of a burden than a boost to Democrats. Jerry Springer has joined the lineup; it remains to be seen what tone he'll take. And nobody would call Janeane Garofalo prissy. Recently, for example, she discoursed on "ass babies."

Ass babies are infants conceived by buttfucking young women who will do anything of a sexual nature except have their hymens broken by a marauding penis before marriage to, presumably, a person of another gender.

No doubt plenty of listeners appreciate Garofalo for exposing hypocrisy, but

with Springer's reputation and Garofalo's mouth, is there a danger that Air America may be a hit among a white-boy, 14-to-24 demographic and Smut America to political fence sitters in Ohio, Washington and New Mexico? Air America could be a commercial success and a political zero.

Even with that question yet to be settled, though, liberal talk radio is here to stay. Whatever course Air America takes--and it may turn out to be a great contributor to the national discourse--Democracy Radio avoids any smuttiness. It will be around, as will Amy Goodman. Progressive radio will grow.
Not that such growth alone will solve our problems. It will help, but we must also concentrate, as Dean so presciently planned more than a year ago, on getting progressives elected. No amount of liberal talk radio could cure the kind of dumb Democratic behavior Molly Ivins recently declaimed against:

I can guarantee you where [the Dems] are going wrong for the next election: 73 Democratic House members and 18 Democratic senators voted for that hideous bankruptcy "reform" bill that absolutely screws regular people. And it's not just consumers who were screwed by the lobbyist-written bill. The Wall Street Journal shows small businesses are also getting the shaft, as the finance industry charges them higher and higher transaction fees. If Democrats aren't going to stand up for regular people, to hell with them.

That's a thorny problem all right, and we'll have to solve it. But right now, I'm getting ready to attend the National Conference on Media Reform at the Millenium Hotel in downtown St. Louis Friday through Sunday. I expect to learn a lot, and even before attending, I know that optimism about media reform is warranted.
Hey, Rush, we're coming.
P.S. No more blogs till next week.

2005-05-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

According to Garrison Keillor, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk are, "evil, lying, cynical bastards who are out to destroy the country I love and turn it into a banana republic, but hey, nobody's perfect." Unfortunately, these less than perfect windbags are spewing about 40,000 hours of misinformation and hate on air every week to our 3,000 hours of liberal talk. A forty to three ratio? Ouch.
But the times, they are a-changin'. The May 23 issue of The Nation is devoted to progressive talk radio. "Calling Air America" describes the two major progressive competitors: Air America and Democracy Radio. They were originally one group in the fall of 2002, but they split in a disagreement about two organizational issues.
The first is whether it makes more sense to be a network like Air America or a syndicator like Democracy Radio. Both are alike in that they supply "the programming in return for which a station allots [them] a certain amount of air time for broadcasting whatever ads it can sell." The difference is that a network sells a whole package. That might include lots of top-notch programming, but it has a downside: it's a lot easier to sell a station one or two programs than nineteen straight hours of programs.
The other major difference between them is that Air America counted on making a big splash with celebrities like Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo. Democracy Radio prefers to go with experienced broadcasters. For example, D.R. recently brought Nancy Skinner back from her radio show in Chicago to her native Detroit for a morning drive-time show. She'll be expected to develop a fiercely loyal following there. A score of other experienced, local A.M. talkers are slated to be dropped into slots in major cities.
Vying for the lead in liberal talk radio are two men who are a study in contrasts:

Democracy Radio's Ed Schultz, a side o' beef radio personality out of Fargo, North Dakota, and Air America's Franken. Schultz [on ninety stations] is a boomer, a fast-talking, ham-fisted, quick-paced table banger with years of radio experience and a perfected technique. Franken [on fifty stations] is an accomplished comedian, a famous writer and liberal headliner who puts on a friendly, slow, NPR-paced radio performance that stamps him as someone who has either not yet learned to be an AM talker or has decided to succeed by being a different kind of talker. ... It remains to be seen if the cerebral Franken, with his cerebral guests ambling cerebrally up the high road, will make it in the long run.

Not that Air America doesn't have its share of high-decibel, pot-banging personalities. Randi Rhodes drove Ralph Nader right out of the studio with a verbal barrage against his candidacy. Mark Maron is wont to rant about the Christo-fascists and Janeane Garofalo behaves "like a confused avenging liberal angel or venomous pixie, depending on your tastes and politics."
I'm more of an NPR, Al Franken cerebral type myself, but I'm grateful for Randi Rhodes and Ed Schultz for reaching out with a rawer, less well-bred message. And by the way, I don't mean to slight Amy Goodman,who's been producing top-notch on-air journalism for twenty years. She has an article in this issue all to herself. We need every talent we can muster to reach the whole population.

2005-05-09T11:23:00.000-07:00

What I just want to know is, howcome Hawaii gets three Air America stations, even Portland, Maine has one, but Missouri? Zippo. Three of our St. Louis Change for Missouri members are working to bring liberal talk radio to this hinterland. They've researched the best way to go about it, and here's what they learned.
First, do a survey to prove to station owners that there's a market. You would think that, given the voting record of St. Louis, that proposition would be self evident, but these three women are doing the job correctly. They've put up a website where you can quickly sign the petition (survey) for liberal talk radio in Eastern Missouri.
Next, they'll talk to businesses to get some to sign letters of interest. These won't be contracts. They'll merely express the businesses' interest in advertising during progressive programming. (Do you know of any businesses they might want to contact?)
Finally, having done the legwork for our local stations, these women will present the petitions and letters of interest, and voila: anti-Rush ideas will start streaming out. We hope.
Please complete the two minute survey and get as many of your acquaintances as possible to sign it as well.
One of these three women, Wendy Foster Dickson, has her own website, by the way, and I think I'll just give it a plug. I have two car magnets on my trunk lid that I bought from her:
The national debt is a BIRTH tax
STOP BLUNT TRAUMA
Governor Blunt is hurting MO
She has plenty more to choose from at commonsensemom@commonsensemom.com. She also has a diary there that's posted on Daily Kos as well, where I just learned that I had gotten mistaken info about Lacy Clay. I had read he voted to repeal the estate tax. Not so. He voted against repealing it.

2005-05-07T16:00:00.000-07:00

As committed Christians, I'm sure Matt Blunt and Cynthia Davis don't utter any coarse expletives in front of Jack Cardetti's name, not even in private--but they'd like to. How frustrating for them.
Jack has earned their ire. In fact, that's his full-time job. As one of the two people in charge of the Missouri State Democratic Party, he spends much of his day on the phone with reporters and editorial writers around the state, giving them the lowdown on the latest Republican scummy scam, and newspapers from Springfield, Hannibal, Columbia, Kansas City, and St. Louis have been printing stories off his tips. Dyan Ortbal-Avalos googled negative news stories about the state G.O.P. and found that between April 29-May 3, there were 43.
What a miserable four days that must have been.
I googled news stories in which Jack Cardetti is quoted and found 24. For sheer "caught-in-the-act" deliciousness, my favorite is the asbestos story. When the papers gave Blunt grief for spending $43,000 to redecorate his offices in a time of Medicaid budget cuts, Blunt repeatedly claimed that mold and asbestos made it necessary. But someone tipped Cardetti that there was basically no asbestos problem, and he in turn sicced a reporter on the governor. Turns out that a plank over a radiator had some asbestos on it, and a workman carried it away. Blunt must have been squirming when the brouhaha made it into an AP wire story. He told the reporter, "I'm not an expert in asbestos removal and handling, so I don't know at what point asbestos really begins to create additional costs involved in a normal renovation." The same reporter quoted Cardetti: "This is yet another example of our new governor being factually challenged."
Less well known than Blunt but more "out there" is Cynthia Davis, the O'Fallon representative who introduced a bill requiring that a chapter on alternatives to evolution be presented in Missouri biology textbooks (Blog St. Louis commented: "In scientific terms, that would be several blank pages.") Ms. Davis hit the news as a result of an ethics violation filed by "the state Democratic party" (aka Corey Dillon), alleging that Davis had paid a thousand dollars in real estate taxes out of her campaign fund and used campaign funds to buy a $2800 truck that wasn't used for campaign purposes. "Campaign-finance rules are extremely complex, and I will work to see that any inaccuracies are immediately remedied." Actually, the rule is simple: Campaign money "shall not be converted to any personal use." So the Post-Dispatch wasn't buying her tepid apology. An editorial snickered that she feels qualified to judge the merits of evolutionary theory but can't master the basics of campaign finance law.
Corey Dillon says the state party has filed so many ethics violation complaints recently that the clerks in that office call her Corey and know all her basic information.
Our august state party in Jeff City (all both of them) deserves our support. I just joined online ($25 a year). You might wanna do the same.
And I reserve the right to utter any coarse expletive that suits me when I see Blunt or Bush on the tube.

2005-05-06T04:38:00.000-07:00

Like probably every other progressive in the country, I've made scathing comments about the Democratic Party from time to time. So I wondered how I'd react to hearing the executive director of the Missouri party at Wednesday night's meetup.
Corey Dillon is a slim, thirtyish woman with short, dark hair. Her youth and earnest, unaffected manner would get her booted out of smoke filled back rooms. Which is fine with her. She and her colleagues are not interested in being deal makers. They are interested in getting the grassroots of Missouri organized as quickly as possible.
They have a lot of ground to make up. The "State Party" sounds impressive, but it's basically been pretty pitiful. In fact, before 1992 it wasn't even staffed year round. After Mel Carnahan was elected, at least there was staff even in nonelection years, but they were just an extension of the gubernatorial office holder or candidate. Over time the focus of the state party was to get democratic governors either elected or re-elected, with little attention paid to other races or democratic causes.
After Matt Blunt defeated McCaskill, Corey and Jack Cardetti--the only two people in the Jeff City office--took stock of the situation and made some crucial decisions. The first was that as of January, they went into "Attack the Republicans" mode. (Details tomorrow!) The second was that they began contacting every Democratic group they could find in the state to begin talks about what those groups needed and wanted to accomplish in their part of the state. The third was tracking down Howard Dean soon after he was elected DNC chair. Corey and Claire McCaskill drove to Kansas, where Dean was speaking, and wangled a private interview. They explained that the party would either have to close its doors in a couple of months or it would start building, and money would be the deciding factor. Missouri's state party was the FIRST to submit a plan to Dean, and it was among the first four targeted by the DNC. With the money they received from the national party, Corey and Jack were able to begin hiring staff.
They inherited a large data base of people who volunteered to help Democrats in the last election. However, most of those people consider some place other than the party to be their political home base, having correctly concluded that the state party was weak or irrelevant. Change for Missouri, ACT, MoveOn, Progressive Dems, and various other groups have been sticking many fingers in the dike, trying to hold back the Republican flood. These groups would be more effective if they weren't duplicating efforts and tripping over each other. The state party is offering to coordinate.
What they are not offering to do is direct the various groups. Corey says the state office can crunch numbers for local groups, but only local people have a feel for how to make the most productive use of the information. For example, in a given county during the previous two elections, Democrats might expect to garner 63 percent of the vote, but in the last election, they only won 50 percent. Local folks are best equipped to make sense of the discrepancy. Do they need to register more Democrats, or do they first need to go door to door and ID exactly where the Dems are? Jefferson Township, for example, is IDing Democrats and creating a pyramidal communication structure, with one communicator for every thiry Democratic households. Most other areas in the state are not, unfortunately, so well organized--at least not yet.
Coming up with a plan for the state is uncharted territory, and Corey will be the first to tell you that nobody knows exactly what the organizational map will look like six months from now. The staff in Jeff City is feeling its way, contacting local people, looking for liaisons, and offering to coordinate local efforts.
I just assumed the state party, like the national one, was headed by bureacratic insiders, mostly indifferent to my opinions. Turns out, they're more like the Wizard of Oz, desiring to empower us so we can take our state back.

2005-05-06T00:35:00.000-07:00

Like probably every other progressive in the country, I've made scathing comments about the Democratic Party from time to time, so I wondered how I'd react to hearing the executive director of the Missouri party at Wednesday night's meetup.
Corey Dillon is a slim, thirtyish woman with short, dark hair. Her youth and earnest, unaffected manner would get her booted out of smoke filled back rooms. Which is fine with her. She and her colleagues are not interested in being deal makers. They are interested in getting the grassroots of Missouri organized as quickly as possible.
They have a lot of ground to make up. The "State Party" sounds impressive, but it's basically been pretty pitiful. In fact, before 1992 it wasn't even staffed year round. After Mel Carnahan was elected, at least there was staff even in nonelection years, but they were just an extension of the gubernatorial office holder or candidate. Over time the focus of the state party was to get democratic governors either elected or re-elected, with little attention paid to other races or democratic causes.
After Matt Blunt defeated McCaskill, Corey and Jack Cardetti--the only two people in the Jeff City office--took stock of the situation and made some crucial decisions. The first was that as of January, they went into "Attack the Republicans" mode. (Details tomorrow!) The second was that they began contacting every Democratic group they could find in the state to begin talks about what those groups needed and wanted to accomplish in their part of the state. The third was tracking down Howard Dean soon after he was elected DNC chair. Corey and Claire McCaskill drove to Kansas, where Dean was speaking, and wangled a private interview. They explained that the party would either have to close its doors in a couple of months or it would start building, and money would be the deciding factor. Missouri's state party was the FIRST to submit a plan to Dean, and it was among the first four targeted by the DNC. With the money they received from the national party, Corey and Jack have begun to hire staffers.
They inherited a large data base of people who had volunteered to help Democrats in the last election. However, most of those people consider some place other than the party to be their political home base, having correctly concluded that the state party was weak or irrelevant. Change for Missouri, ACT, MoveOn, Progressive Dems, and various other groups have been sticking many fingers in the dike, trying to hold back the Republican flood. These groups would be more effective if they weren't duplicating efforts and tripping over each other. The state party is offering to coordinate.
What they are not offering to do is direct the various groups. Corey says the state office can crunch numbers for local groups, but only local people have a feel for how to make the most productive use of the information. For example, in a given county during the previous two elections, Democrats might have averaged, say, 63 percent of the vote, but in the last election, they only won 50 percent. Local folks are best equipped to make sense of the discrepancy. Do they need to register more Democrats, or do they first need to go door to door and ID exactly where the Dems are? Jefferson Township, for example, is IDing Democrats and creating a pyramidal communication structure, with one communicator for every thiry Democratic households. Most other areas in the state are not, unfortunately, so well organized--at least not yet.
Coming up with a plan for the state is uncharted territory, and Corey will be the first to tell you that nobody knows exactly what the organizational map will look like six months from now. The staff in Jeff City is feeling its way, contacting local people, looking for liaisons, and offering to coordinate local efforts.
I just assumed the state party, like the national one, was headed by bureacratic insiders, mostly indifferent to my opinions. Turns out, they're more like the Wizard of Oz, desiring to empower us so that we can take our state back.

2005-05-04T09:21:00.000-07:00

Quagmire is the word the administration strives to avoid vis-a-vis Iraq. So I'll substitute other terms--Morass, Quicksand, Slough of Despond. The soldiers know it. Bob Herbert's Monday New York Times column quotes an army guardsman named Delgado who's stationed there:

"Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."
He said he had confronted guys who were his friends about this practice. "I said to them: 'What the hell are you doing? Like, what does this accomplish?' And they responded just completely openly. They said: 'Look, I hate being in Iraq. I hate being stuck here. And I hate being surrounded by hajis.' "
"Haji" is the troops' term of choice for an Iraqi. It's used the way "gook" or "Charlie" was used in Vietnam.
Mr. Delgado said he had witnessed incidents in which an Army sergeant lashed a group of children with a steel Humvee antenna, and a Marine corporal planted a vicious kick in the chest of a kid about 6 years old. There were many occasions, he said, when soldiers or marines would yell and curse and point their guns at Iraqis who had done nothing wrong.

Such random cruelty is the mark of frustrated losers.

2005-05-03T08:58:00.000-07:00

From a letter in last Thursday's Post-Dispatch:

I can only hope that [a veteran spitting in Hanoi Jane Fonda's face] is the forerunner of similar activity against a few of my other favorites: Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, Jessica Lange and all the other slime epitomized by the bottom of the barrel Ramsey Clark.

Whew! Now that's some serious disapproval. And yet, as Frank Rich points out in his Sunday Times column:

Conservatives can't stop whining about Hollywood, but the embarrassing reality is that they want to be hip, too. It's not easy. In the showbiz wrangling sweepstakes of 2004, liberals had Leonardo DiCaprio, the Dixie Chicks and the Boss. The right had Bo Derek, Pat Boone and Jessica Simpson, who, upon meeting the secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, congratulated her for doing "a nice job decorating the White House."

What to do? One solution is a book praising "South Park" for its lampooning of left wing political correctness. Despite the fact that one episode of "South Park" holds the record for the most bleeped out (162) repetitions of a single four-letter word in a half hour show, the book's right wing authors admire, for example, a parody that presents an anti-smoking campaign as fascistic and another satire of anti-war celebrities as dim-witted.
Since "South Park" outdraws even "The Daily Show", finally right-wingers can be hip--so they thought. "But a funny thing happened on the way to the publication of 'South Park Conservatives'": the Schiavo debacle broke, and

the same TV show celebrated by Mr. Anderson and his cohort as the leading edge of a potential conservative victory in the culture wars now looks like a harbinger of an anti-conservative backlash instead.
In the March 30 episode, Kenny, a kid whose periodic death is a "South Park" ritual, lands in a hospital in a "persistent vegetative state" and is fed through a tube. The last page of his living will is missing. Demonstrators and media hordes descend. Though heavenly angels decree that "God intended Kenny to die" rather than be "kept alive artificially," they are thwarted by Satan, whose demonic aide advises him to "do what we always do - use the Republicans." Soon demagogic Republican politicians are spewing sound bites ("Removing the feeding tube is murder") scripted in Hell. But as in the Schiavo case, they don't prevail. Kenny is allowed to die in peace once his missing final wish is found: "If I should ever be in a vegetative state and kept alive on life support, please for the love of God don't ever show me in that condition on national television." ...
The same arrogance that sent Republicans into Terri Schiavo's hospice room has also led them to try to police the culture of sex more rabidly than the left did the culture of sexism. No wonder another recent poll, from the Pew Research Center, finds that for all the real American displeasure with coarse entertainment, a plurality of 48 percent believes that "the government's imposing undue restrictions" on pop culture is "a greater danger" to the country than the entertainment industry itself. Who could have imagined that the public would fear Focus on the Family's James Dobson more than 50 Cent?

Rich's column details some proposed censorship of the airwaves that I was unaware of, including this satisfying irony:

"South Park" is also on this hit list: the Parents Television Council, the take-no-prisoners e-mail mill leading the anti-indecency charge, has condemned the show on its Web site as a "curdled, malodorous black hole of Comedy Central vomit."

That's some more serious disapproval, but I have to ask: Does it make sense for a left-winger to ask whether the right hand and the left hand of the right wing each know what the other's doing?

2005-05-02T16:48:00.000-07:00

When John Kennedy was running for president and passions were running high about whether a Catholic could serve both the American citizenry and Rome, a joke made the rounds about a priest and a minister whose friendship nearly came to blows. Finally the priest phoned his old friend. ''What a pity," he said. ''Here we are, both men of the cloth, fighting over politics." ''It's true," said the minister. ''We're both Christians. We both worship the same God -- you in your way, and I in His."

That rift between Protestant and Catholic is never firmly bridged, yet the most conservative members of these two groups have become tentative allies. It's a shaky coalition since each group really considers the other hellbound. (Rush Limbaugh recently said that "the religious left in this country hates and despises the God of Christianity and Catholicism"--what? he thinks these are two separate groups?) And Pope Leopold XVI, in his Ratzinger incarnation, made it plain that anyone who strays from the true Church is damned. Nevertheless, despite each sect's tacit assumption of the other's fate in the next life, their common enemy unites them. Rush again: "Liberals consider themselves more powerful than God."
So they are marching together into battle, and their foe is nothing less than the enlightenment. So says Robert Kuttner in an American Prospect column titled "Whose Nation under God?"

I never thought I'd live to see a time when the Enlightenment -- the Enlightenment! -- was politically controversial. Democracy, like science, depends on debate, tolerance, and evidence. And in a democracy, nothing is scarier than a political force convinced it is getting irrefutable truth directly from God.
Mercifully, religious extremists do not represent anything like a majority. We still have a proudly independent judiciary -- in the Schiavo case, Governor Jeb Bush could not find a single Florida judge willing to overturn the testimony of countless doctors. And mainstream denominations like the Presbyterians have begun speaking out vigorously on behalf of religious tolerance and pluralism.
But let's be clear: Our very democracy is under assault. History is filled with cases where a small minority was able to overturn democratic institutions.
Zeal on behalf of tolerance seems almost a contradiction. But the large American majority that believes in freedom of conscience and inquiry had better get organized with the same enlightened passion that drove America's Founders.

I won't be introducing myself as Jo Etta the Zealot, but that doesn't mean the spirit of democracy isn't moving within me and all of us.

2005-04-30T20:01:00.000-07:00

Carl Hiassen, newspaperman and novelist, complains that newspapers have become "strenuously tepid and deferential." If deferential can be stretched to mean parroting misrepresentations, then Hiassen is correct. Media Matters details instances of the press mindlessly repeating Bush's whitewash job of his new Social Security plan.

While television news reports acknowledged that Bush called for benefits cuts for "wealthier workers" or "higher-income" earners, many failed to report that these cuts would also impact lower-middle and middle-class workers. As Media Matters for America has noted, the Bush proposal would likely cut the level of guaranteed benefits promised under the current Social Security system for all workers making over $20,000 a year -- or just above the poverty threshold for a family of four with two children under 18 -- while leaving guaranteed benefit levels for those making under $20,000 unchanged.

The bottom line isn't difficult to comprehend. I could make a ten year old grasp it in less than two minutes: If someone makes less than $20,000, he'll get the same benefits. If someone makes more than that, his benefits will be cut.
Now, nobody thinks $21,000 a year makes you wealthy, and yet Fox News repeatedly said that only the wealthy would have benefits cut. Well, no surprise there, but so did CBS, NBC, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times. For example: NBC White House correspondent Norah O'Donnell reported that Bush's proposal "could mean, in the future, a cut of benefits for more wealthy Americans."
Besides the "wealthiest Americans" perversion, the press also swallowed Bush's fabrication that his plan only slows growth of benefits. Media Matters again:

Cable news channels adopted Bush's characterization of his proposed benefit cuts as a proposed slowdown in the rate at which benefit levels go up. In fact, Bush proposed an actual cut in promised benefits for all but the lowest income workers, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
CNN host Wolf Blitzer reported that Bush "did make a case ... that lower-income Social Security recipients would get more increases more rapidly than the higher income Social Security recipients." [CNN, press conference coverage, 4/28/05]
Pundits on all three cable news channels falsely suggested that low-income workers would receive greater Social Security benefits under Bush's proposal than they are promised under the current Social Security system.

You can look at the list of who said what that really wasn't so. I wouldn't call these pundits sycophantic brownnosers, but I wouldn't call them responsible journalists either.

2005-04-27T09:22:00.000-07:00

Wendy Dickson offered the piece below for the blog. I'm sure any Republican who reads it would echo the pointed haired boss in Dilbert: "Don't get all mathy on me." Yeah, well that's what you say when the math supports the other side.
Nuclear Option is Tyranny of the MINORITY!
I DID THE MATH. With population numbers from the 2000 Census and a calculator, I confirmed my suspicion that Republicans represent fewer Americans in the Senate than Democratic Senators even though they are outnumbered by 10. The 55 Republicans Senators represent states with a population of 112,858,577 residents or 49%, while the 45 Democratic and Independent Senators represent States with a total of 117,657,044 residents or 51% of the population. I divided population numbers equally in states with divided party representation. (Yes, I included the District of Columbia with Democrats even though they are technically not represented. Without DC the numbers only change by a tenth of a percent, but more importantly, since DC votes nearly 90% Democratic, their views are clearly represented by Democratic Senators.)
But what about the 2004 election with Republican landslides in Congress and Bush¹s so-called "mandate" with the SMALLEST winning margin of any re-elected President. Well, first of all, Bush was not elected King, so he is NOT entitled to "absolute power" or 100% of his judicial nominees.
Then I tried another angle and added up the votes received by each winning Senator in the 2004 election and came out with a surprising result. Even though Republicans won 19 of the 34 Senate races last year, Republican Senators received fewer votes than Democratic Senators.
Democratic Senators won 15 seats in 2004 with 26,480,865 votes.
Republican Senators won 19 seats in 2004 with 25,148,676 votes.
That is a difference of 1,332,189 votes or 2.6%.
We all understand that the Senate was set up as a "check and balance" to the inherently more politically populace driven House of Representatives. By choosing Senators by State instead of population, the founding fathers hoped to protect the rights of the minority against the "tyranny of the majority." But if population is considered, or the vote count received by each Senator, there is no doubt that our founding fathers' fear is being turned on its head.
Republican Senators, in fact, represent a minority of Americans. If the "nuclear option" is utilized to strip Democratic Senators of their right to dissent, when they represent the majority of Americans, then we will have, in fact, A TYRANNY OF THE MINORITY!
Thomas Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.

2005-04-25T19:51:00.000-07:00

Missouri Democrats have come out with a report card for Matt Blunt's first 100 days in office, and they give him an F. That's unfair. After all, Blunt took heat from his religious base for vowing to veto the bill to criminalize stem cell research. So, fair is fair. An F is too low. On the other hand, after looking at the list below, I can't give him more than an F+. Most of what he's done is selfish and hypocritical.
F on Healthcare
--Cutting healthcare for 100,000 Missourians
--Eliminating the First Steps program
--Voting to end Missouri's Medicaid program by 2008
--Drastically cutting the state's children's health care program (CHIPS)
F on Education
--Giving $0 in new discretionary education funding
--Withholding $100 million in education funding
--All but assuring courts will be running our schools after failing to reform the state's education funding system
F for Hurting Families:
--Taking away rights of all workers injured on the job and rewarding businesses that keep unsafe workplaces
--Cutting support for adoptive parents
--Cutting home-delivered meals for senior citizens
F for Justice
--Rationed justice for Missourians injured by negligent corporations
F for Integrity
--Proposed a budget that is $240 million out of balance
--Gave $3.6 million in no-bid state contracts to the family of the federal prosecutor responsible for investigating corruption in his administration
--Awarding of fee offices to political cronies and campaign donors led to investigations of both state and federal ethics violations
--Let lobbyists handpick his cabinet, allowing insurance execs to select the state's chief insurance watchdog
--Spent $117,000 redecorating his personal offices, at the same time he was demanding state agencies slash their spending and he had called for gutting health coverage for 100,000 Missourians
--Had the state buy two brand new SUVs for him and his family to use at the same time he enacted a ban on new vehicle purchases for the rest of the state government
F for Keeping Promises
--Reduced Medicaid eligibility
--Failed to address the school foundation formula
--Cut aid to Missouri's most vulnerable rather than rooting out waste and fraud
--Withheld education money from Missouri's colleges and universities

2005-04-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

Frank Rich's Sunday New York Times column about tonight's "Justice Sunday" t.v. presentation, starring Bill Frist, discloses that "activist judges" is code for gay.

Back [in the sixties, George] Wallace called for the impeachment of Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge in Alabama whose activism extended to upholding the Montgomery bus boycott and voting rights march. Despite stepped-up security, a cross was burned on Johnson's lawn and his mother's house was bombed.
The fraudulence of "Justice Sunday" begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias," says the flier for tonight's show, "and now it is being used against people of faith." In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It's a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the "left's last legislative body," and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for "outrageous" judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.
The "Justice Sunday" mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore. The real "Justice Sunday" agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the "Tonight" show last week: " 'Activist judges' is a code word for gay." The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight. To paraphrase the "Justice Sunday" flier, now it's the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.
Anyone who doesn't get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of "people of faith." But "people of faith," as used by the event's organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it's a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. ...
Tonight's megachurch setting and pseudoreligious accouterments notwithstanding, the actual organizer of "Justice Sunday" isn't a clergyman at all but a former state legislator and candidate for insurance commissioner in Louisiana, Tony Perkins. He now runs the Family Research Council, a Washington propaganda machine devoted to debunking "myths" like "People are born gay" and "Homosexuals are no more likely to molest children than heterosexuals are." It will give you an idea of the level of Mr. Perkins's hysteria that, as reported by The American Prospect, he told a gathering in Washington this month that the judiciary poses "a greater threat to representative government" than "terrorist groups." And we all know the punishment for terrorists. Accordingly, Newsweek reports that both Justices Kennedy and Clarence Thomas have "asked Congress for money to add 11 police officers" to the Supreme Court, "including one new officer just to assess threats against the justices." The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, has requested $12 million for home-security systems for another 800 judges.

I recommend reading the entire column.

2005-04-22T09:33:00.000-07:00

Radical right wing Republicans have painted themselves into a corner by threatening the nuclear option, and now Rick Santorum is darting his eyes around the room, looking for a way out. He's privately arguing for delay because internal Republican Party polls apparently show a lack of support for eliminating the filibuster. The poll figures aren't being released--which, in itself, tells us that the G.O.P. is worried about what they say. Santorum comes from moderate Pennsylvania, and his extremist rhetoric on Shiavo and "the option" have cost him dearly in state polls. He's up for reelection next year and is currently trailing his political rival 49-35.
Daily Kos, an excellent left-wing blog, quotes Dick Morris, a Republican writer:

With the filibuster decision bookended by the Terry Schiavo case before and a Supreme Court confirmation battle likely following it, the issue has the potential to spell disaster for the Republican Party.
Now that Iraq seems to be more pacified and the war on terror is receding as the key national issue, Bush can no longer count on his success in protecting America to anchor his popularity. His inept handling of the Social Security reform issue further drains his approval ratings.
But an attempt to switch the rules in the middle of the game on judicial filibusters will really make his alliance with the Christian right the main issue in his second-term presidency, with disastrous results.
Americans are simply not on board with his Moral Majority agenda. They voted for Bush twice -- or once -- despite his advocacy of a pro-life position, and his Schiavo posturing alienated moderate voters even more. His attempt to bar a filibuster will be seen as an effort to steamroll America into accepting the radical-right agenda on moral issues and will cost Bush the ballast he needs to appeal to the center of American politics.

When Dems stick together, as they have on this issue and Social Security, they can be an effective opposition party. Two more recent signs of a stiffening backbone surfaced from conservative Democratic senators. Ken Salazar, just elected in Colorado, lit into Focus on the Family last Thursday, saying: "I think what has happened is Focus on the Family has been hijacking Christianity and become an appendage of the Republican Party. I think it's using Christianity and religion in a very unprincipled way."
The same day, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, who has considered himself an evangelical Christian for 25 years, pointed out that theocon tactics threaten "to make the followers of Jesus Christ just another special-interest group. It is presumptuous of them to think that they represent all Christians in America, even to say they represent all evangelical Christians."
A backlash against the prospect of the Moral Majority running our country--now wouldn't that be loverly.

2005-04-21T11:47:00.000-07:00

About some things, I'd like to be wrong, and Iraq is one of them. I listened to the enthusiasm about their election and read a news report about Iraqi soldiers killing 85 insurgents, locating them with the help of Baghdad citizens. I've listened to Bill Maher point out that they've only had a government since January. Give them more than...say, a couple of weeks, he advises, to get a democracy in place. After all, he reminds listeners, our own country didn't even have a constitution for eleven years after the Revolutionary War started. I wish such optimism was justified, but it isn't.
An article in the May 2 issue of The Nation by Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts summed up his visit to Iraq. He came home just as skeptical as ever. He rode into Baghdad in a helicopter between two soldiers pointing their guns down at the ground. He spent most of his only day there (staying overnight was too dangerous) in the heavily fortified Green Zone, listening to the brass try to sell eight members of Congress a bill of goods: Conditions here are improving; we have 147,000 Iraqi troops; we do not plan to build permanent bases here. They admitted to no post-invasion mistakes and just kept repeating, "We're moving in the right direction." One military leader said that he can tell conditions are easing because when U.S. helicopters fly over certain parts of Iraq, people wave.
Considering his own helicopter ride into Baghdad, McGovern asked if perhaps the officer was confusing a wave with a plea not to shoot. The congressman's take on conditions there was 180 from what was being touted.
Conditions are not improving. Iraqi women leaders he talked to said that there was more electricity before the war, and according to the World Food Program, hunger among Iraqis is getting worse. It's true that the recent level of violence has decreased, but it's still unacceptable, and the insurgents use our presence there to recruit members.
We have no plans to draw down our troops because most of the Iraqi troops aren't combat capable, and no one can say when they will be. In fact, even their "85 insurgents killed" headline was, it turns out, likely to have been exaggerated.
The claim that we're not going to build permanent bases there is disingenuous: Congress just appropriated $500 million dollars for that purpose. Oh, and Bush plans to ask for more billions for the war later this year.
In fact, the only honest answers McGovern received while he was there came from the soldiers--who told him straightforwardly that they'd been forbidden to share any complaints with visitors. So McGovern came away feeling that the lies that led to this war and to his mistrust of the Bushies are just continuing.
But Bush's re-election and the supposed good news from Iraq have taken the steam out of the anti-war movement. Unfortunately, our troops will not be coming home until the anti-war movement here revs up again.

2005-04-20T09:58:00.000-07:00

Tom DeLay and
The Courts

by Calvin Trillin

The courts, DeLay believes, have run amok.
He's catalogued the wrongs that must be righted.
If he already rails against the courts,
Just think of how he'll feel once he's indicted.

May 2 issue of The Nation

2005-04-20T00:03:00.000-07:00

Here's a short, timely article from the online magazine, Truthout:

New Pope Intervened against Kerry in US 2004 Election Campaign
Agence France-Presse
Tuesday 19 April 2005

Washington - German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry.
In a June 2004 letter to US bishops enunciating principles of worthiness for communion recipients, Ratzinger specified that strong and open supporters of abortion should be denied the Catholic sacrament, for being guilty of a "grave sin."
He specifically mentioned "the case of a Catholic politician consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws," a reference widely understood to mean Democratic candidate Kerry, a Catholic who has defended abortion rights.
The letter said a priest confronted with such a person seeking communion "must refuse to distribute it."
A footnote to the letter also condemned any Catholic who votes specifically for a candidate because the candidate holds a pro-abortion position. Such a voter "would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for holy communion," the letter read.
The letter, which was revealed in the Italian magazine L'Espresso last year, was reportedly only sent to US Catholic bishops, who discussed it in their convocation in Denver, Colorado, in mid-June.
Sharply divided on the issue, the bishops decided to leave the decision on granting or denying communion to the individual priest. Kerry later received communion several times from sympathetic priests.
Nevertheless, in the November election, a majority of Catholic voters, who traditionally supported Democratic Party candidates, shifted their votes to Republican and eventual winner George W. Bush.

2005-04-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

If we don't get our deficit under control, the economic consequences could be devastating. If foreign investors decide we're not financially responsible enough and stop investing here, the bottom could fall right out of our economy. Oddly enough, though, there's a solution to the deficit quandary--or there would be if the Bush administration weren't a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America--and that would be to get corporations to stop their tax cheating. We could bring in an additional $312 billion to $353 billion a year. An American Prospect column by Robert Kuttner points out that:

Much of [the big tax cheating] is in the form of very complex tax shelters, deliberately designed to make the tax evasion techniques so complicated that auditors have trouble figuring out what's legal and what isn't. Much of the rest happens overseas, where affiliates of U.S. corporations arrange to book their profits in tax havens with which the United States has no enforcement treaty.
Last fall, Citizens for Tax Justice examined federal taxes paid by 275 of America's largest corporations. On average, they paid a rate of 17.3 percent -- lower than the rate paid by nearly everyone who is reading this column. The statutory corporate rate is 35 percent.

Clinton was taking steps to make corporate tax evasion more difficult, but then Bush arrived . . . .

[The Bush] administration, in its first weeks in office, sidetracked an agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration that would have produced greater tax collaboration among nations. The agreement would have required the reporting of financial transactions with nations used as tax havens.
But this sort of international enforcement is strenuously resisted by America's blue chip trade associations, corporate lobbyists, and their political allies. ''This is a crime wave," says McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice, ''facilitated by the most prestigious accounting firms and law firms, with ordinary taxpayers footing the bill."
The Bush administration is willing to invade privacy when the purpose is thwarting terrorists but abets criminals when the purpose is corporate tax evasion. As the folk song ''Pretty Boy Floyd" put it, ''Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen."

Kuttner's column is not long in case you care to read it.

2005-04-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

The Family Research Council insists that using the filibuster to derail radical right judicial nominations is an attack on "people of faith". Not at all. These are not nominations that most people of faith in this country would approve of. Rather these are judges approved by such radical clerics as Jerry Falwell and others like him irrational enough to think that the Tinky Winky teletubby is gay because it's purple and that Bert and Ernie are lovers. It would be irresponsible to let the theocons take over the branch of government that is meant to be independent of voters' passions.
Blocking these nominations is not an attack on all people of faith any more than pulling out an obnoxious weed from your flower bed is an affront against the environment. By weeding out the bad guys, who would use the constitution to suit their limited views, the Democrats are protecting the checks and balances in our government so that people of every faith can have freedom in our country. Radical right Christians, no matter how sincere they consider themselves, are ignoring a basic tenet on which this country was founded. They're acting as if anybody who tries to stop them from taking over the entire government is in league with the devil to keep Christians from running their own country. Do Americans want a theocracy such as the one in Iran, here?

2005-04-15T09:59:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, Paul Krugman wrote a column about the dangers to our economy of many corporations underfunding their pension plans. The warning fell into a black hole. I heard no more about it--until I saw the cover article of the April Harper's magazine: "The $4.7 Trillion Pyramid--Why Social Security Won't Be Enough to Save Wall Street." It turns out that rescuing underfunded pensions may be the lurking motivation in the rush to privatize Social Security. Let me explain.
Until the fifties, few average Americans had money in stocks. IRAs and 401(k)s didn't exist yet. Then in 1950 General Motors set up employee pensions by deducting a percentage from each paycheck and adding a percentage of corporate money. Other businesses followed suit and soon everybody was doing it. The influx of cash contributed to the fifties bull market. From the beginning, though, corporations tended to fudge on their responsibilities by investing the money only in their own stock, thus driving the price up and giving them enough cash to buy out other companies. The problem was that if a company went bankrupt, the pensions disappeared as well. In the seventies, the government required corporations to diversify their pension investments and mandated that all such pension funds had to buy insurance from the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC). Well and good, but as the decades rolled on, more and more corporations began underfunding their pension plans. They justified shortchanging pensions by making wildly optimistic predictions about the rate of return they expected from the market, in essence saying, "This is all we need to invest for our pensions because we expect fantastic returns."

The faster companies projected their funds to grow, the less they had to set aside to pay their retirees. The lower set-asides in turn allowed them to report higher earnings, thereby driving up the price of the company's own stock to "create shareholder value." Faced with a choice between living up to their pension promises or reporting higher net earnings, companies simply decided not to live up to their employee agreements.

Companies could squeak by with that kind of thinking during the nineties, but once the high tech stock bubble burst, corporations began facing consequences. Pension plans for the airline and steel industries, in particular, are in trouble, and the auto industry looks shaky as well. Of course, there is insurance for such problems, but a series of bankruptcies last year pushed the PBGC $23 billion into the red, so if the PBGC had to bail out all the underfunded pensions at once, it would go bankrupt itself.
What these businesses need is a large enough influx of cash into the market to give them great returns on their investments. Enter privatized Social Security accounts. They would keep the Ponzi scheme afloat for a few years more. Eventually, of course, it would collapse, though.
It's not the first time a government has scammed investors. In the early seventeen hundreds, both Britain and France, desperate to pay off public debt, persuaded citizens to invest in stock bubbles that burst and the investors paid dearly. One way or another, the public bids fair to pay for this pension fiasco. Perhaps the G.O.P. take on it is that it's better to put off the day of reckoning. But I think we'd be better off swallowing the bitter pill when pensions go bust and knowing the truth about who was at fault. Keeping the Ponzi scheme going by privatizing Social Security will only create larger disasters in the end.
After the market crash of 1929, F.D.R. put Jack Kennedy's father, Joe, in charge of the SEC and ordered him to craft a series of market reforms. Joe Kennedy had made a fortune in the market in the twenties and more money even as the crash was going on. F.D.R. took a lot of heat for the appointment, but his theory was that it takes a thief to catch a thief, or at least that a thief might know how to prevent future robberies. Considering the never-ending craftiness of corporations, we need a new Kennedy/Roosevelt duo in power in every generation. Without someone to rein them in, corporations, shortsighted in their greed, will always find a way to shoot the whole country in the foot.

2005-04-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

Mike, I want this on a bumper sticker! :)

"The meek shall inherit the earth, just as soon as we kick some right-wing ass."

_______________________________________

Mike Ankelman writes:

At the end of my rant (what? another?), please find a GREAT example of how progressives need to learn to speak to the electorate about complicated issues
like the Terri Schiavo case. I'm not joking. I'm as serious as a hemorrhoidal flare-up on a 100-mile bike ride. This is how it needs to be done.

But first, another example. The Missouri state Republicans (Their Motto: "Making Mississippi look better every day") recently fell all over themselves in
order to pass a bill that would make it illegal to take a picture of any puppy mill without permission, thereby protecting those lawbreakers who operate
illegally substandard puppy mills from any reporters who would dare attempt to disclose their illegalities by securing irrefutable photographic proof.

The Democrats should have compared this bill to making it illegal to take a picture of a criminal robbing a bank, or a drug dealer selling drugs. They
should have held the Republicans responsible for making the disclosure of a crime A CRIME ITSELF. And there's your soundbite for the 5 o'clock news --
"Democrats accuse Republicans of protecting criminal activity for political payback." THEN people would pay attention.

And if you can't make political hay with starving puppies living in their own excrement, hobbling on the painful wire floors of tiny cages with no light or
heat, then turn the freakin' party over to Democracy For America, Americans Coming Together, Move On .Org, and Common Cause.

If we can take pictures of people in their own cars running red lights, if we can take pictures of unsanitary meat-processing practices, it should be legal
to take a picture of a puppy mill or other so-called "animal husbandry facility" to document animal abuse, if admission to said facility was obtained
legally, whether or not by deceit, i.e., going undercover and getting a job at a puppy mill in order to get pictures. 60 Minutes and other news shows do it all
the time. The last time I looked, deceit, itself, was not illegal.

What the Republicans have done, are doing, and will continue to do, is abject political thuggery. It's time to implement some razor-sharp stiletto
tactics, and make Republicans pay dearly for their arrogant audacity.

The meek shall inherit the earth, just as soon as we kick some right-wing ass. (You may quote me.) Here's the afore-promised example (that came to me as a forwarded e-mail, by
the way -- thanks, Beth!) of a great grassroots response to the Terri Schiavo case. It effectively taps the emotive, anti-"guv-mint" sentiments of the
"I.Q.-99-Or-Less-Club" known as the Red State electorate:

New Living Will

I, _________________________ (fill in the blank), being of sound mind and body, do not wish to be kept alive indefinitely by artificial means.

Under no circumstances should my fate be put in the hands of peckerwood Politicians who couldn't pass ninth-grade biology if their lives
depended on it.

If a reasonable amount of time passes and I fail to sit up and ask for a diet Pepsi, it should be presumed that I won't ever get better. When
such a determination is reached, I hereby instruct my spouse, children and attending physicians to pull the plug, reel in the tubes and call it a day.

Under no circumstances shall the members of any Legislature enact a special law to keep me on life-support machinery. It is my wish that these
boneheads mind their own damn business, and pay attention instead to the health, education and future of the millions of Americans who aren't in a
permanent coma.

Under no circumstances shall any politicians butt into this case. I don't care how many fundamentalist votes they're trying to scrounge for
their run for the presidency in 2008, it is my wish that they play politics with someone else's life and leave me alone to die in peace.

I couldn't care less if a hundred thousand religious zealots send e-mails to legislators in which they pretend to care about me. I don't know
these people, and I certainly haven't authorized them to preach and crusade on my behalf. They should mind their own business too.

If any of my family goes against my wishes and turns my case into a political cause, I hereby promise to come back from the grave and make his
or her existence a living hell.
_______________________________________

Signature

__________________________________

Witness

2005-04-13T15:02:00.000-07:00

Couldn't help reporting this hot, just-breaking "story" (Since I'm not a main-stream media journalist, I have to admit it's not totally true up front):

George W. Bush Elected Pope!
Catholic Cardinals Stunned!

Reported by Willie E. Davis

The almost 120 Cardinals from around the world that gathered to choose a successor in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel were stunned and expressed amazement. Cardinal Mohoney the Vatican spokesperson had this to say, "We in the conclave are all shocked. We cast our vote's using these new electronic voting machines.The results overwhelmingly favored George W. Bush over all the Catholic candidates. The last Pope, John Paul, was a superb linguist, fluently speaking 11 languages, this one can't speak fluently in one language. We just don't know what to say."

The White House has announced that Dick Cheney will assume command as President of the world tomorrow morning, when "W' travels to Rome to begin his duties as Pope.

George W. Bush had this to say moments ago as he spoke from the Rose Garden:

"I am honored to be the spiritual lighthouse, and the first War Pope. I promise Evangelical Catho-licks and Prostates alike that I will be embodied in salvation and fair in the performance of my duties. I am a Unitifier, not a Divide-a-cater. I am obliged to try to save as many lost souls as I can, at least the Devout Wealthy Elite Souls, as it is well known that Heaven is a very select place, indeed, it is more exclusive than even the best of country clubs. It is a members only Heaven. I may have to put a fence around it.

I will preform miracles in a fair and balanced manner. Just as God use to wipe out entire races of people without warning, burning whole towns of perverts, killing off an entire nations, and drowning everybody without a ticket to board Noah's Ark, I shall deliver the world from Evil Empires as I unleash the Apocalypse Wrath of Revelations. I will ensure the Rapture and the Reunion with our beloved deceased family members and with our departed purebred pets. I will not allow those awful Liberal Sissy Homosapiens to marry each other and I will put and end to the Clergy marrying Choirboys.

I will lead the Crusades against all them towel-headed heathens demon-possessed
voodoo-hoodoo barbarians who's Pseudo-religions that don't except Christ as the Light of Democracy, and who worship fake, made-up gods. They shall they shall
suffer my Godly Conservative Wrath and I will Destroy them with my Cherubic Armies of Angels and they shall burn for eternity in Hell, because Me and God don't take no prisoners!

Remember, it is written in the Gospel of Luke, or.... maybe it's Larry, ugh, 12, ugh,5 or something, that Jesus told us we are to live our lives in FEAR of God and the Terrorists, for God and the Terrorists have the power not only to kill us, but to torture us forever in Hell.

And to you Non Believers and Democrats, I say, I can't wait to see you burn in Hell, I mean it.....I can't wait!!!"

Thanks to:
http://www.thehandstand.org/archive/april2005/articles/wdavis.htm

2005-04-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

The 1967 movie "A Guide to the Married Man" is a comedy about men cheating on their wives. In one scene, a wife walks in on her husband and his lover in bed. She rails at him, but he never says a word, just gets dressed and goes into another room where he sits down with the evening paper. He doesn't utter that canard, "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?" but that's the point. And after awhile, the wife decides not to believe her lying eyes and asks what he wants for dinner.
Wish I could ask Tom DeLay if he's seen that movie, because it embodies his modus operandus. A recent Associated Press article detailed two fund-raising memos from his office:

One fund-raiser wrote, "What companies that you know of would be interested in tort reform in Texas with asbestos problems?" His memo was prospecting for donors to the Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee, or TRMPAC.
The memo got an answer identifying several large companies and interest groups nationwide, the documents show. ...
Other fund-raising memos mention that Texas racetrack owners needed state permission for video gambling, that banks wanted new Texas home-lending rules and that energy firms wanted less regulation.

DeLay's spokesman responded that "These memos already have been covered in the press, and the conclusions being reached are speculative and unsubstantiated."
In other words, are you going to believe me or your lying eyes? I've watched many a cop show where the drug dealer handed over the goods, took money, and got arrested. The two situations seem analogous to me.
It turns out, though, that 42 percent of Americans aren't even sure who Mr. DeLay is. That's according to an editorial in this morning's Post that lays out the case against him.
So. Maybe it's still too early to successfully get him boosted out of the House Majority Leader position. In fact, some Congressional Dems want him to stay. They'd prefer to have him to point their fingers at when they're campaigning next year.

2005-04-11T21:54:00.000-07:00

I'm aware that Pope John Paul II had many virtues, but the mainstream media has so deified him that I half expect him to rise again in three days and appear on Larry King Live. The April 25 issue of The Nation, on the other hand, gives a balanced assessment of his papacy. Without further ado, I'll let the editors speak:

Pope John Paul II knew, above all, how to seize the historical moment--particularly if it was televised. He condemned exploitation and tyranny, hatred and violence, capitalist globalization, imperialist war and the death penalty. After instructing the Polish Stalinists that workers were not "means of production," he told post-Communist Eastern Europe that Marxism contained a "kernel of truth" in its refusal to make everything in life a commodity. He opposed both wars in Iraq and supported the United Nations, not the American Empire. He insisted on the moral responsibility of the rich Northern Hemisphere to the poorer Southern one and on decent treatment of Third World immigrants to Europe. He apologized for the Roman Catholic Church's terrible past--for the Crusades, the Inquisition, anti-Semitism. He opened dialogue with Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam.
At the same time, however, he lived a step from the Sistine Chapel with Michelangelo's depiction of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and had a sense of sin that constantly threatened his doctrines of hope. He was an inflexible traditionalist in denying equality to women in church and society. He regarded homosexuals as sinners and so legitimized the most primitive of hatreds. These are not just matters of dogma. The Vatican's opposition to birth control programs contributes to the povery of the Third World; its refusal to accept the use of condoms likely facilitated the spread of AIDS; its coalitions with Islamists in international bodies reinforced their capacity to deny rights to women.
Argument and experiment within the church, so creative under John XXIII, gave way to personalized party line. ... Theologian Father Hans Kung declared the papacy of John Paul II a monarchical nightmare. ... The fate of the liberation theology movement is a striking example: In a continent desperate for justice, it was pronounced heretical--setting back reform of Latin American society a generation. ...
Loving concern for the earth and its inhabitants, refusal to accept inequality and abhorrence for violence are themes on which philosophical antagonists can unite, but first their philosophical differences will have to be confronted in dialogue. It is difficult to see how Catholics can engage in that dialogue with secular progressives, and with the other world religions, if dialogue in their own church is so attenuated. The Pope leaves, then, an ambiguous legacy.

2005-04-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

Why is Bush calling government bonds in the Social Security Trust fund IOUs,
as if they were scraps of paper in a shoe box? Why is Bush "implying" that
our government may default on the treasury bonds that will pay future Social
Security? Those "IOUs" Bush loves to talk about, are the ones HE WROTE, with
our credit, when he created the deficit to finance an unnecessary war and
tax cuts for the rich. Is Bush saying that the IOUs he wrote are no good?
Our President wants people to be confused, insecure and afraid, because
there is one thing this President knows how to exploit and that is FEAR.
Remember what happened when Bush "implied" that Iraq had a nuclear bomb? It
didn¹t matter that Iraq never had WMD of any kind; Bush still got his war.
Isn't it ironic that those who question the wisdom of American foreign
policy are ridiculed as unpatriotic and weak. Now our President is
questioning the very solvency of the United States government. Yet, no one
points out how irresponsible and UNPATRIOTIC his actions are or how Bush is
weakening our fiscal power by casting doubt on the "full faith and credit"
of the United States of America.
It is time to stand up to this nonsense. Bush can NOT get away with
preaching that his government is all powerful in foreign affairs, but too
weak to pay it's debt to the elderly and infirm.

Wendy Foster Dickson

2005-04-09T17:16:00.000-07:00

Has anyone in your family suffered from diabetes, cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, MS, sickle cell disease, ALS, or a spinal cord injury? If so, you belong to the more than half of Missouri families who could potentially be helped by stem cell research. Nevertheless, Missouri Right to Life, the most powerful grassroots lobby in the state, is dead set against it. They threatened Republican legislators who've opposed abortion with downgrading them from an A to an F if they voted against the stem cell research ban. Considering that threat, it's surprising how many Republicans opposed the ban. The stakes had to be high for them to risk offending MRL.
Public opinion in this state soundly favors stem cell research by a margin of two to one. That polling data has motivated Republicans to step out on a limb and dare MRL to chop it off. The other motivator is economic. The human genome project has put Washington University on the high tech scientific map. Even science students who don't necessarily plan to study genetics are attracted to Wash. U. (and St. Louis U.) as a result of that kind of reputation. We've got to be graduating those high quality science students if we hope to lure biotech firms to this area, and biotech is the economic wave of the future. Blunt and other Republicans know that. In fact, Sam Fox, a local businessman and the biggest G.O.P. contributor in the state, is disgusted with the anti-science bent of this legislature. Fox contributes money to the science department at Wash. U. and spoke with disgust recently of "religious zealots".
The stem cell ban is dead--for this year, anyway. But the rift it created in the Republican party may have repercussions. The legislators who dreaded offending MRL with their stem cell vote must be heaving a sigh of relief that the bill got shelved. And in fact, some Democrats were hoping for a vote on it just to put those people on the spot and create dissension in G.O.P. ranks. But Republicans who opposed the ban didn't completely dodge the bullet. They got grazed, because the only way to avoid a vote on the issue was to stand up against it during the floor debate and make it obvious that the bill would fail.
This bill ought never to have been proposed. Even though it didn't pass and won't pass, it has a chilling effect on biotech companies looking to locate here. Who wants to be a scientist in Dogpatch? There is an upside, though. Not only is the bill dead meat, it has opened a rift in the state G.O.P. Hallelujah, and let's hope it grows.

2005-04-08T13:58:00.000-07:00

I was pleasantly slackjawed when I discovered that Matt Blunt would not support the ban on stem cell research in Missouri. Then I learned that many Republican legislators share his point of view. Whoa. What's up with this progressivism? It turns out that when legislators learned what was actually involved in--pardon the mouthful--somatic cell nuclear transfer or SCNT, many of them reacted with: "Oh. Is that all it is? Well, that's ... no big deal."
This is not to say, of course, that all Republican legislators think creating new stem cell lines should be allowed in Missouri. Matt Bartle (R-Lee's Summit) is sponsoring a bill to criminalize it here. (Almost four years ago, President Bush declared that no federal funds would be granted for creating new stem cell lines, but he did nothing to criminalize it.)
So what exactly is this process that has state Republicans at odds with each other? Creating a new stem cell line involves removing the nucleus from an egg and replacing it with any ordinary human cell, then activating the egg to begin dividing. From the resulting mass, cells are taken for research. So why all the fuss? Some of it arose from the unfortunate choice of terminology that scientists originally used to describe the process: embryonic stem cell research. "Embryonic" is such a hot button word and, in fact, an inaccurate one. Most medical dictionaries define an embryo as a fertilized egg that has been implanted in the womb. Since these eggs never meet a sperm and aren't implanted in the womb, they aren't embryos. Nevertheless, Bartle et. al. feel that the eggs have the potential for life. Such a protective attitude may seem odd considering how profligate God or Mother Nature--choose your term--is, even with fertilized eggs. Almost half of them are washed out in menstruation. One wag, Katha Pollitt of The Nation, even suggested that if we're truly concerned about fertilized eggs, perhaps we should have funerals for tampons, just to be on the safe side.
Bartle would be horrified at her flip attitude. During Wednesday's debate he pointed out that if senators doubt whether the process results in life, they should "err on the side of protecting human life." Chris Koster (R-Harrisonville), however, argued that "What makes us human occurs in the womb, not the petri dish." Playing on Bartle's own rhetoric, he suggested that if senators cannot verify scientifically that the cells are human life, they should err on the side of protecting people who are definitely alive and hoping for cures.
At the Wednesday St. Louis Meetup, Don Ruben, of Missouri Cures, explained the basics of stem cell research and its political consequences in our state. He was clear and informative. He gave us forms for signing up to support the fledgeling group, and I urge you to go to the website and add your name to their mushrooming group.
Ruben made a point of using either the term SCNT or else "early stage stem cell research". If there was anything about his presentation I would change, it would be those references. What a cold fish term those four letters are and the alternative is just a mouthful. So here's my question for you born again framers of language: what should we call it?
I'll have more to add tomorrow on the political ramifications of this issue.

2005-04-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the Washington Post for the following:
Living will is the best revenge
By ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Perspective Editor
Published March 27, 2005
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Like many of you, I have been compelled by recent events to prepare a more detailed advance directive dealing with end-of-life issues. Here's what mine says:
* In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn't be long enough for me.
* I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.
* I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable vigil at my bedside. I'd be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.
* I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.
* I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.
* I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.
* I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.
There's more if you care to click here.

2005-04-05T18:40:00.001-07:00

In case you've never read it, Daily Kos is a left wing blog worth signing up for. Take a look, for example, at today's entry:
Byron York of the National Review has a new book out "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy". Below is the cover, with what I assume are the players of said conspiracy. Daily Kos is on there. [Click here to see the cover and the comments.]
Problem is, I have never conspired with anyone else on the list. Not that I wouldn't mind doing some conspiring, mind you. But alas, we're still working up to it.
It'll be interesting to see what crazy theories York has cooked up for the book because quite frankly, he's about 2-5 years too early on this. We ARE building a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy to rival the $300 million conservatives spent on theirs every year. But we are but a seedling at this point. Not very "vast", in other words.
One thing I have heard -- York goes after some of our 527s and has a whole chapter devoted to the Center for American Progress. Word is this book is the first salvo of the Right's attempts to destroy our nascent institutions before they can get fully off the ground.
Whatever York has "dug up", expect to be the genesis of many a legal challenge from right wing "watchdog" groups in the coming months.
There are a bazillion comments. I liked these two:
"Potential conspirator here ... Let me know how I can help once this thing gets off the ground. Proud Member of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy."
This is the beginning of a concerted attack by the Right Wing as they conspire to destroy the Left Wing and progressives from effectively organizing into greater relevance and power. Don't be fooled by this as "paranoia". This is just good P.R. thrown out to frighten and squelch any real power developing from the Left Wing. It's NOT funny, and should be taken seriously. Fight back HARD on this to preserve OUR right to grow into a powerful force. Do not assume it's irrelevant because it so off the mark. This is an intentional assault and [full steam] resistance to this should be mobilized. This kind of book is not to be sneered at. It's just the beginning. Be aware!!

2005-04-05T18:40:00.000-07:00