[b]Don't get your hopes up!!! ... Rumsfeld has alot of "dope" on the Big Dope: The Mad King George won't let one of his loyal sycophants be captured, for then he would be vulnerable himself to being de-throned and charged with War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity & Treason ... Unhappily, Bush & Cheney should be in the dock along-side Saddam Hussein, but are not ...[/b]
Alleging responsibility for war crimes and torture at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, a human rights group has filed a criminal complaint in Germany against US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials.
The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Berlin's Republican Lawyers' Association said they and five Iraqi citizens mistreated by US soldiers were seeking a probe by German federal prosecutors of leading US policymakers.
They said they had chosen Germany because of its Code of Crimes Against International Law, introduced in 2002, which grants German courts universal jurisdiction in cases involving war crimes or crimes against humanity.
It also makes military or civilian commanders who fail to prevent their subordinates from committing such acts liable.
[b]"No Other Place to Go"[/b]
"We filed these cases here because there is simply no other place to go," CCR vice president Peter Weiss said in a statement, adding that the US Congress had "failed" to seriously investigate the abuses. "It is clear that the US government is not willing to open an investigation into these allegations against these officials."
The Center for Constitutional Rights noted that while several US soldiers were facing court martial for the abuse and sexual humiliation of prisoners at the US-run Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq, their superiors looked set to escape discipline.
The complaint names Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Steven Cambone, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Brigadier General Janis L. Karpinski and other military officers who served in Iraq.
[b]Five Victims Part of the Case [/b]
"From Donald Rumsfeld on down, the political and military leaders in charge of Iraq policy must be investigated and held accountable," CCR president Michael Ratner said in a statement issued in Frankfurt, Germany.
The CCR said that the five Iraqis it was representing had been victims of mistreatment including electric shock, severe beatings, sleep and food deprivation and sexual abuse.
It noted that Sanchez and other officers involved in the case were based in Germany. Germany's federal prosecutor now has to decide whether the case warrants further investigation.
"Well, I think we made a serious mistake after Saddam was removed from power. We didn't hand the keys to the Iraqis. Instead, we embarked on what became an extended occupation. That was a fundamentally mistaken, it was politically driven."
– Former Pentagon policy adviser Richard Perle, The O'Reilly Factor, 11/29/04,
[i]VERSUS[/i]
"Relax, celebrate victory"
– Richard Perle's post-war policy advice, 5/2/03
[b]Celebrate "victory"??? ... What "victory"??? ... Of course, the insane Bushies' corrupt neo-con cronies (like Perle) are crowing "victory" because they have been victorious in raping the US taxpayer & Iraqi people out of their wealth ... Bush and his neo-con propagandists are traitors, who should be arrested; sent to the Hague; and, put on trial for War Crimes ...[/b]
[u][b]U.S. Officials Say Iraq's Forces Founder Under Rebel Assaults[/b][/u]
Iraqi police and national guard forces, whose performance is crucial to securing January elections, are foundering in the face of coordinated efforts to kill and intimidate them and their families, say American officials in the provinces facing the most violent insurgency.
For months, Iraqi recruits for both forces have been the victims of assassinations and car bombs aimed at lines of applicants as well as police stations. On Monday morning, a suicide bomber rammed a car into a group of police officers waiting to collect their salaries west of Ramadi, killing 12 people, Interior Ministry officials said.
While Bush administration officials say that the training is progressing and that there have been instances in which the Iraqis have proved tactically useful and fought bravely, local American commanders and security officials say both Iraqi forces are riddled with problems.
In the most violent provinces, they say, the Iraqis are so intimidated that many are reluctant to show up and do not tell their families where they work; they have yet to receive adequate training or weapons, present a danger to American troops they fight alongside, and are unreliable because of corruption, desertion or infiltration.
Given the weak performance of Iraqi forces, any major withdrawal of American troops for at least a decade would invite chaos, a senior Interior Ministry official, whose name could not be used, said in an interview last week.
[b]Oh, for goodness sakes ... Please don't blame Aunt Jemima http://www.chron.com/content/... ... After all, unlike Condosleezy Rice, Aunt Jemima was honest, creative and highly competent ... Aunt Jemima excelled at her profession ... Condosleezy Rice is a liar; has no creativity; and is an incompetent at her job (albeit she is quite good indeed at being Bush's ass-licker) ...[/b]
[b][i]The Guardian [/i]reports http://www.guardian.co.uk/usl...,1282,-4624902,00.html : "A radio talk show host drew criticism Thursday after calling Condoleezza Rice an ``Aunt Jemima'' and saying she isn't competent to be secretary of state." But after all, this radio talk show host should be ashamed of himself-- Aunt Jemima definitely deserves an apology!
Many blacks are indeed [i]ashamed [/i]of Condosleezy Rice ... Refer to "What you do with success is what matters" by Dawn Turner Trice, Chicago Daily Tribune on http://www.chicagotribune.com...,1,5014070.column?coll=chi-printmetr o-hed :[/b]
In last Monday's column I wrote about a discussion I had with a good friend.
She wondered why many of us in the African-American community aren't all that thrilled about National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice being asked to be our next secretary of state.
In the column I gave my thoughts on why I believed Rice's ascent hasn't inspired our collective imagination.
Rice will be the first black woman to become secretary of state if she is confirmed, yet our response to this extraordinary achievement has been about as enthusiastic as the response to the re-election of the president who nominated her--that is, 89 percent of voting blacks aren't so tickled.
I decided to follow up on the column because I received an astonishing number of e-mails and letters from a group of Rice supporters who are exceedingly enthusiastic about her appointment. I'll call them the Readers in Support of Black People Like Condoleezza Rice.
I usually get the attention of this group whenever I mention race in the column.
However, there was a palpable intensity and indeed anger that was aroused last week.
Some of these readers often invite me to read the essays of African-American conservatives as though I'd find right-leaning ideas and arguments more palatable because they're coming from black people.
I don't.
The bottom line is that it's not the messenger.
There are heaping portions of the message that are hard to swallow. The packaging becomes irrelevant.
One of the overwhelming sentiments I got last week is this: You're OK as a black person if you don't talk about race. Don't mention it. Pretend we indeed co-exist in a colorblind society.
Of course, we can all keep our racial conversations to ourselves, and it seems that the Readers in Support of Black People Like Condoleezza Rice often prefer I would, but this can't be helpful in the long run for any community.
Some of Rice's supporters rhetorically posed that if I (or other African-Americans) couldn't recognize someone as accomplished as Rice as a role model, then who?
From there they went on to suggest an alternative role model, such as Indiana Pacers forward Ron Artest, who was suspended for the remainder of the NBA season for a completely asinine brawl at the Palace in Auburn Hills, Mich.
Well, just as I don't think Artest should be held up as a role model simply because he is rich, famous and black, I also reject the notion that a person who is black, highly educated and successful in her career automatically qualifies.
We have to ask to what end is that person choosing to use his or her talents.
Cornel West, professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University, said it best on NPR's "The Tavis Smiley Show" when Smiley asked whether Rice or Secretary of State Colin Powell were role models for children considering careers in diplomacy.
"Greatness is telling the truth and being courageous in pursuit of justice," West told Smiley. "The worst thing you could tell young people is to be successful but become well-adjusted to an unjust status quo as opposed to being great and being maladjusted to an unjust status quo."
I cannot argue that Rice has not come a long way to reach this point.
Her political and career moves have earned her fervent support from a non-traditional base. That message came through loudly in your letters.
Her supporters find irresistible the fact that she is bright and articulate. They see her as they see themselves--rugged individuals who, from humble beginnings, pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps. She has found a willing community that will build and maintain this legend.
It shouldn't amaze me anymore how far apart some of us are on various issues, how we struggle to see both sides.
I can tell you that much work remains to be done in the black community, and much of it begins on the home front.
But it's still true that many people don't have the boots let alone the bootstraps to complete the journey.
This isn't a victim mentality. It's a reality.
...---... The Mad King George's Brother: Prince Neil & Silverado ...---...
[b]The Mad King George's sleeze-ball brother Prince Neil is a corrupt embezzler, adulterer, an general piece-of-shit, like the rest of the Bush Crime Family ...[/b]
One upon a time in 1980, Neil Bush married his sweetheart, Sharon, and they moved to Denver, Colorado, away from all the other members of the Bush family. “Neil got a $30,000 job negotiating mineral leases for Amoco. Denver was an oil-fueled boomtown, and soon the handsome son of the vice president was charming the swells at the soirees of Denver's social set,” according to the Dec 28, 03 Washington Post.
In 1982, Neil and 2 of his co-workers quit Amoco and formed their own oil company, JNB Exploration. According to the Oct 29, 2000 St Petersburg Times, although Neil put up only a few hundred dollars, the other two partners made him president. They decided to put Neil in charge of raising money, because "Neil knew people because of his name," partner, Evans Nash said.
Among the people that Neil hit up for cash were a couple of Denver real estate high-rollers, Bill Walters and Ken Good. Walters was a flamboyant “mogul known as "the Donald Trump of Denver." Good owned the largest home in Colorado, a $10 million mansion with a special plumbing system that pumped Scotch, gin and vodka throughout the house,” according to the WP.
Initially Walters invested $150,000 and set up a $1.75 million line of credit for JNB at a bank he owned. Good invested $10,000 and pledged loans worth $1.5 million. Good also lent Neil $100,000 and said it didn't have to be paid back unless Neil made money.
As President of the company, Neil decided to pay himself a salary of $66,000 a year, more than 2 times what he made at Amoco. Over a period of 5 years, JNB drilled over 25 wells in four states, without finding a drop of oil. The company would have definitely went under if not for the money that Good and Walters poured into it.
The good friend that he was, Bush soon positioned himself in a way that would allow him to repay his 2 buddies. In 1985 he accepted an invitation to sit on the board of directors at Silverado Savings & Loan, which by that time had already lent millions to Walters and Good. As a director, Neil voted to approve loans of over $100 million for his 2 partners.
Neil was on the board from 1985 to 1988, and during that time, Silverado lent Walters an additional $106 million and Good another $35 million, even as it became obvious that their real estate empires were crashing.
Good used some of the money to buy JNB, at a time when it too was losing money. But the sale came with great news for Neil. Good doubled his salary to $120,000 and gave him a $22,000 bonus. He also made Neil a director of one of his other companies which paid him a salary of $100,000 a year.
Life was grand for the Neil Bush family. The coffers were skyrocketing.
[i][b]What The Hell Happened?[/b][/i]
The failure of hundreds of Savings and Loans during the 1980s, as detailed in such sources as Stephen Pizzo's Inside Job, cost taxpayers an estimated $500 billion, according to the July 31, 1990 LA Times.
A US House committee concluded that over three-quarters of all S&L insolvencies appeared to be linked to serious misconduct by senior insiders or outsiders. In 1988, the comptroller of the currency found that less than 10 percent of recent bank failures had been caused solely by economic factors, according to Inside Job, p 305.
One thing is for sure, Neil Bush was one of those insiders. Good and Walters never repaid a dime of their loans, and in 1988 Silverado collapsed. The main reason cited for its demise was their failure to repay the $132 million.
And come to find out, the team’s money-making efforts were not limited to the US. According to the March 16, 2001 Austin Chronicle, Federal banking regulators later followed the trail of defaulted loans to Neil’s oil ventures, in particular JNB International, which was awarded drilling concessions in Argentina -- despite its complete lack of experience in international oil and gas drilling. It probably helped that the Bush family had cultivated close ties with the fabulously corrupt Carlos Menem, former president of Argentina, the Chronicle noted.
When JNB's rights and obligations were assumed by other investors, Neil tried to get another company, Plains Resources, to invest in Argentina. Plains wasn't buying. But it was hiring, and picked up Neil as a consultant for its Argentine market -- because, as Plains executive Carlos Garibaldi told The New York Times' Jeff Gerth in 1992, Neil had "traveled [in Argentina] and played tennis with President Menem," the Chronicle reported.
Learning to play tennis is definitely going to be added to my things to-do list.
[i][b]For God’s Sake, Quit Whining![/b][/i]
When regulators determined that Neil's deals with Good and Walters constituted "multiple conflicts of interest,“ Neil answered the charge by telling reporters that "self-serving regulators" were persecuting him because he was the President's son.
Nobody bought his “poor me” line and in fact, it didn’t take long for Neil to become the Poster Boy for the entire S&L scandal once “Jail Neil Bush” signs started popping up in Washington and Denver.
To this day, Neil claims he did nothing wrong. "I happened to be one of hundreds of other American businessmen and women who served as an outside director on the board of a savings and loan institution that failed during the 1980s," he wrote in an e-mail. "I regret that the institution's failure cost taxpayers so much money," according to the Dec 28, 2003 WP. Well I’ve got news for him, as a taxpayer so do I regret it.
According to Stephen Pizzo in Mother Jones on Sept 1, 1992, “After almost two years of hand-wringing had passed, an expert hired by regulators declared that Neil suffered from an "ethical disability," and he was required to pay a $50,000 fine for his ethical lapses at Silverado.” The deal was so good that Neil decided to drop his appeal of the case. As usual, “family friends” raised money to pay the $50,000 fine.
While 5 other Silverado directors were barred from working for any federally insured institution for life, Neil was only ordered to "desist from any acts, omissions or practices involving any conflicts of interest, unsafe or unsound practices or breaches of fiduciary duty." In other words, quit being a crook. Big deal.
Neil suffered absolutely no consequences. Thomas "Lud" Ashley ... "came to the rescue," Barbara Bush said in her book, and raised money for his legal bills. And Lud sure did. An estimated $250,000 was reportedly paid by the banking-industry lobbyist who was fighting to get banks deregulated, according to Pizzo in Mother Jones. So whether or not it was out of friendship is debatable.
In the end, the fiasco cost taxpayers $1.3 billion all total. But Neil’s now ex-wife Sharon, claims it cost the family as well, "I remember having one chair in the whole living room," said Sharon. "It was a tough time. We had to move and sell the house," according to the Oct 10, 2004 ABC News.
It sounds to me like she should have bought more furniture with our money.
[i][b]About That $100,000 Loan [/b][/i]
Neil ultimately admitted that his seat on the board at Silverado had nothing to do with his expertise. He told Time Magazine, "(I)f I were to sit here and deny that the Bush name didn't have something to do with it," while trying to explain why, at the young age of 30, he was invited to sit on the board of a federally insured institution, at a time when the average age of a director was 57 and only about 1% were under 35. I think the purpose of the invite is more than obvious and requires no further explanation.
In what I’m sure was an oversight, it seems that Neil forgot to list his business relationship with Good on his Silverado conflict-of-interest form when he accepted the $100,000. But then, $100,000 probably didn’t seem like a significant amount of cash, considering that by the time he filled out the form, he had already helped approve over $100 million worth of loans for Good.
Another thing Neil apparently forgot to mention was that by the time the form was filled out, he was completely dependent on Good and Walters as his main source of income. "I know it sounds a little fishy," he said when he testified before members of Congress and told them that the $100,000 did not have to be repaid. What it was, "was an incredibly sweet deal," he said. In 1990, Neil finally got around to reporting the $100,000 as income on his tax return, 6 years late.
A sideline to this tale that is rarely mentioned, is that Neil’s dad directly benefited from the Silverado looting right along with his son. Good gave the old man $100,000 too, for his 1988 campaign at a time when Bush was not only the VP, but chairman of the Reagan’s Task Force on Regulation of Financial Services as well. This cozy little set up renders a whole new meaning to the line about the “fox in the henhouse.”
Apparently $100,000 was the going rate for Bush bribes in the 80s.
[i][b]How Did Neil Stay Out Of Jail?[/b][/i]
Another interesting aside to the story is how the public closure of Silverado was delayed until after the 1988 election. Shortly before the event, when regulators wanted to close the doors, a call from Washington delayed the closing for 45 days which meant the public would not learn about its newly acquired $1.3 billion debt until after Bush won.
So the question remains, how did Neil manage to stay out of jail after regulators determined that his conduct "involved significant conflicts of interest and constituted multiple breaches" of his fiduciary duties? The answer to that question involves a story within a story, and one cover-up covered-up by a second.
To be able to follow this scheme, partial knowledge of the cast and characters is necessary. The Federal regulatory agencies in place during the S&L debacle were the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) and its successor agencies, the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS).
Of course those agencies were stacked with Bush political appointees. For instance, Secretary of the Treasury, Nicholas Brady, was a longtime Bush friend. The guy picked to head the OTS was Timothy Ryan, who served in the 1988 Bush campaign, and whose appointment got approved despite intense Congressional opposition.
The cast of characters includes Neil, Good and Walters and others involved were, Michael Wise, Chairman and CEO of Silverado; Kermit Mowbray, President of the Topeka Kansas Federal Home Loan Bank (directed by the FHLBB in Washington); Dorothy van Cleave, S&L Examiner; and Terry Sandefur, S&L Analyst.
Although the media, for whatever reasons, let the public believe that President Bush had remained neutral while his son's shady dealings were bubbling under the radar screen, the old man’s fingerprints were all over the mess was from start to finish.
At the time, Steven Wilmsen, the Denver Post financial reporter, did write several key stories about the scandal for the Post and the Denver Business Journal, and he later wrote the book, “Silverado, Neil Bush and the Savings and Loan Scandal.”
Wilmsen says Silverado was engaged in fraud as early as 1984, and that Kansas Federal Home Loan Bank "actually approved most of Silverado's illegal and wildly imprudent transactions" from 1984 to 1988. The man responsible for "those approvals was Kermit Mowbray, president of the Topeka bank," Wilmsen says. (p 150)
Regulators actually discovered the illegalities in late 1986, when Dorothy van Cleave and Terry Sandefur were assigned to look at Silverado’s books. That’s when the whole scheme began to unravel. The two regulators soon realized that Silverado had been on the edge for years and wondered why it hadn't been caught before then.
Based upon the documents they had examined, van Cleave and Sandefur began a full-scale investigation with 20 examiners allotted for the task. They later deemed the situation so critical that they could not wait for the examination to be completed, and decided to issue a cease and desist order which would have put Silverado under tight government control.
Then something very strange happened. After a meeting with Silverado's management, and a phone call to Topeka, van Cleave and Sandefur were told that Mowbray said to drop the order.
And more strange things kept on happening. In August 1988 the Colorado savings and loan commissioner issued a capital call, which is the first step in a government takeover. When that happened, Neil resigned immediately, saying that he did not want regulators to be constrained by his presence on the board.
Neil being considerate about not trying to wield influence through his position of power with a father in the WH? What a joke! It was a little late in the game for that phony act. "The truth of the matter" Wilmsen writes, "was that Neil already was under investigation by the regulators." (p 182) On January 27, 1987, van Cleave had asked investigators in Washington look into insider trading at Silverado. That’s when regulators began discovering all the conflicts of interest between Neil, Walters, and Good.
As it turns out, having Neil on the board had allowed Silverado get away with murder for years. According to testimony by the top gun of the banking regulators in June, 1990, his presence on the board was "a material part of the unconscionable delays in taking over Silverado" as far back as 1986. Neil should have known that the scam couldn’t go on forever. I mean its not like they didn’t know they were being watched.
Greed must be a more powerful emotion than fear.
By the fall of 1988, Neil, and his dad, knew they were in deep trouble. Wilmsen believes the Bush campaign would have been seriously damaged if the American people had found out that his son "was in the thick of the greatest financial scandal in the nation's history." He details "some troubling coincidences in the events that unfolded in the months between Neil's resignation and Silverado's closing" on December 9, 1988. (p 182).
For instance, on October 21, 1988, the Colorado S&L commissioner called Mowbray and told him of the plan to close Silverado before the end of October. Mowbray ordered a halt to the proceedings saying a call had come from Washington telling him to hold off closing Silverado for 45 days. No one seemed to know why. Mowbray later told the House Banking Committee that he could not remember who called him or the reasons given by the caller for requesting the 45 day delay. (p 183)
Oh well, that’s understandable in the last days of a presidential campaign with all the excitement. I guess we shouldn’t have expected the poor guy to remember every little conversation he had with people in Washington. But perhaps members of the committee should have at least tried to help jog his memory with phone records from the oval office.
Where was Ken Starr when we needed him?
That 45 days extension cost taxpayers a bundle. According to Wilmsen, the "cost of that delay is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In late September, regulators estimated the cost of Silverado's closure to be between $400 million and $600 million. When the thrift was finally closed December 9, it cost $1 billion.” (p 184)
[i][b]Cover-Up of the Cover-Up [/b][/i]
In 1990, the Bush Treasury Department declared it was mounting a thorough investigation of the entire S&L matter. Here’s what the President told the country about his plans to deal with the S&L scoundrels on June 22, 1990: "We will not rest until the cheats and the chiselers and the charlatans spend a large chunk of their lives behind the bars of a federal prison," he said. I guess he meant every cheat, chiseler and charlatan except for his son.
The truth is that by using the power of the White House, Bush was able find ways to sabotage both the investigations and the prosecutions of wrongdoers in order to keep Neil out of prison. When FBI field offices said they needed 400 more agents to help with the 21,000 uninvestigated S&L fraud referrals in their files, Bush only approved half the number of agents requested and he actually reduced the amount of money Congress had authorized to spend on criminal prosecutions.
Not long after Clinton took office, it became obvious that high ranking people in the Bush regulatory agencies had engaged in activities that definitely warranted investigation. However, because of the Republican smoke-screen thrown up with Whitewater, Clinton’s hands were tied. Any attempt to investigate the RTC and OTC would have been touted as an attempt to interfere with the Whitewater investigation.
At one point, the Treasury Department did ask the FBI for an investigation into the Bush White House pressure put on federal regulators to delay the closing of Silverado until after the election. But it went nowhere once it was presented to Bush's good friend, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh.
In the end, Bush was able to block every attempt to hold Neil responsible for his action.
[i][b]The End [/b][/i]
Neil (but not his wife) lived happily ever after (free from prison), and the moral of the story is, contrary to what many people believe, crime does pay. At least for corporate crooks named Bush.
"The survival of the world depends upon our sharing what we have and working together. if we don't, the whole world will die. First the planet, and next the people." - Fools Crow, Ceremonial Chief of the Teton Sioux
[b]With the election won, the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies are moving rapidly ahead with plans to radically revamp the country's environmental laws with the general aim of making it cheaper and easier for corporations to pollute.[/b]
The favors are already being parceled out, as Ari Berman reported recently http://www.thenation.com/blog... in [i]The Daily Outrage[/i]. This month Congress authorized drilling in the protected Yukon Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, opened up the East Coast's largest undeveloped island for commercial exploration, defeated an amendment eliminating subsidies for timber corporations, and slashed clean water spending by $242 million.
Moreover, in keeping with its first-term rejection of the Kyoto Accords on climate change, the White House is working to keep an upcoming eight-nation report from endorsing broad international policies designed to curb global warming, as Juliet Eilperin revealed recently in the Washington Post.
Fortunately, there are plenty of groups determined to protect the environment from the Administration, and it's critical that they receive support to carry on these next four years. The widely known organizations like Greenpeace http://www.greenpeaceusa.org/... , the Sierra Club http://www.sierraclub.org/ , the NRDC http://www.nrdc.org/ and the League of Conservation Voters http://www.lcv.org/ are all gearing up for the fight of their lives. There are also hundreds of other grassroots environmental groups vowing to resist Bush's second-term assault on the planet. You can help the environment by helping them.
"We have fought a three-year battle to blunt a string of radical environmental attacks by this Administration and we're not about to stop now," says Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife http://www.defenders.org/ . "Though we fully realize that those fights may get harder in the next Bush term, we stand ready to meet the challenge, and to protect our natural heritage for our children and grandchildren."
Clean Water Action http://www.cleanwateraction.o... is trying to combat various Administration proposals that threaten to undermine the safety of many municipal US water systems. "We made sure our members got to the polls and we will make sure they continue to stand up for healthier communities during the second Bush Administration," said Bob Wendelgass, the group's director.
Environmental Defense http://www.environmentaldefen... , a group dedicated to linking "science, economics and law to create innovative, equitable and cost-effective solutions to society's most urgent environmental problems," is in the forefront of the Living Cities movement http://www.livingcities.org/ , which is organizing support for things like mass transportation, solar-powered stoplights, tax credits for farmers' markets, more green space in new developments, financial incentives to revitalize abandoned industrial lands, and a decrease in the use of fossil fuels generally.
The California Wilderness Coalition http://www.calwild.org/ is the only organization specifically dedicated to protecting California's wild places and native biodiversity. Through advocacy and public education, CWC http://www.calwild.org/ builds support for threatened wild places and works with community leaders, businesspeople, local organizations, policy-makers, and activists in an effort to promote a broader view on the value on conservation.
It's also, of course, more important than ever to stay informed. One of the best ways to keep up on environmental news is by reading [i]Grist[/i], an online magazine http://www.grist.org/ which tackles environmental topics with irreverence, intelligence, and a fresh perspective. The mag's feisty Seattle-based staff publishes new content each weekday, and its reporting, cartoons, interviews with activists, book reviews, and environmental advice column http://www.grist.org/advice/a... offer some of the sharpest eco-news around.
Republican Senator John McCain had it right when he recently criticized the Administration's environmental record as "disgraceful." With a president concerned far more with politics and profits than safeguarding the planet for future generations, a powerful grassroots movement is the only defense against rapid ecological devastation. So join, volunteer with, contribute to and otherwise support one of the many environmental groups operating in the US today.
[b]"But because the Israelis have frequently fended off intense U.S. diplomatic pressure before now, this is probably not the real reason why Tel Aviv would fear any such Iranian move (Iran check-mating Israel who has a nuclear arsenal by obtaining nuclear weapons [i]too[/i]). More important, perhaps, is the possibility that it would pose awkward questions, or even a far-reaching debate, in Washington and amongst the American public in general about the cost to America of an unquestioning loyalty to Israel." - [i]Tel Aviv's concern about an Iranian bomb is more likely political rather than military [/i][/b]
Here’s a challenge to an enterprising investigative reporter: Why is it that the neoconservatives, who are most loudly demanding a showdown with Iran, are the same ones supporting pro-Iranian radical Shiite fundamentalists in Iraq?
Yesterday, on CNN’s [i]Late Edition[/i], I watched Richard Perle, the dean of the neocons, thunder once again against Tehran. Like most of his acolytes, Perle dismissed the talks between the Europeans and Iran; voiced his suspicion that Iran would renege on the deal to halt its nuclear program; demanded that the United States brandish the threat of military action; and called for U.S. support for regime change in Iran by backing Chalabi-style exiles.
At the same time, however, the neocons are increasingly isolated in their overt support for Ayatollah Sistani and the Iran-leaning fundamentalist Shiite parties in Iraq, namely, Al Dawa and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Sistani, backed (it seems) by Dawa and SCIRI, are insisting that the impossible elections be held on Jan. 30. Although virtually the rest of Iraq, and the rest of the world, favors postponing the date, the neocon-dominated United States continues to support Sistani. Why, exactly? The man is a fanatic, and if the Shiites succeed in this election drive, they could spark a civil war, alienate the Kurds and create an Iraq allied to Iran.
In the most stunning action, the two big Kurdish parties broke with Sistani and joined the coalition of Sunnis demanding that the election be postponed. It is truly an amazing piece of news, since the Kurds had previously given little indication that they intended to break with the majority Shiites. But the Shiite insistence on constitutional provisions that would have marginalized the Kurds seems to have scared them.
Now calling for a postponement are the CIA-linked Iraqis, such as Prime Minister Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord and former foreign minister (from the 1960s) Adnan Pachachi, along with virtually all of the Sunni leadership. It’s clear that this Sunni bloc has the support of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, all of whom fear Iranian (and Shiite power). But for two years the U.S. neoconservatives have been demanding that the United States purge the Sunnis and back the Shiites. And of course, the neocons’ favorite Iraqi, Ahmed Chalabi, is one of those leading the Shiite resurgence—in league with the infamous Muqtada Sadr, another Iranian-linked operative and loose cannon.
The CIA, of course, is being purged of those who supported Pachachi, Allawi et al. The pro-Chalabi, pro-Shiite neocons are taking over the Agency, under Porter Goss. The State Department is soon to follow.
But reality may intrude. The resistance can’t stop the elections entirely, but they can render it illegitimate. How long will Washington tie itself to Jan. 30, and to Sistani?
Meanwhile, Allawi is planning talks in Jordan with the Baath Party.
[b]But, then again, the neo-con right-wing hypocrites who laughably call themselves "Christians" [[i]sic[/i]] [i]don't give a rat's ass [/i]about 'Life-[i]Post[/i]-Womb'-- so what the hell do they care??? ...[/b]
([i]Promoted from the diaries. We need to keep watching the story in the coming weeks and months, but this could be one of the biggest medical breakthoughs in, well, ever. Also check out this recent related story http://www.turkishpress.com/n... from Brazil. --Trapper, DailyKos, http://www.dailykos.com [/i].)
This is big news. I haven't been following stem cell research much, but this certainly gives the stem cell argument new life. I'm hopeful that when more of these kinds of stories start to appear, people who are against stem cell research will reconsider. I think the fact that it's on a personal level and people can relate to this woman may change some minds about all this. The article is here http://news.yahoo.com/news?tm... .
SEOUL (AFP) - A South Korean woman paralyzed for 20 years is walking again after scientists say they repaired her damaged spine using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood.
Hwang Mi-Soon, 37, had been bedridden since damaging her back in an accident two decades ago.
Last week her eyes glistened with tears as she walked again with the help of a walking frame at a press conference where South Korea (news - web sites) researchers went public for the first time with the results of their stem-cell therapy.
They said it was the world's first published case in which a patient with spinal cord injuries had been successfully treated with stem cells from umbilical cord blood.
When the Project for a New American Century releases an official statement, you better take a look at what they say... Jim Lobe in Asia Times Online http://www.atimes.com/atimes/... writes that PNAC faxed a statement titled "[i]Toward Regime Change in North Korea[/i]" to reporters and various "opinion leaders" in Washington.
Lobe writes:
... "PNAC issues statements relatively infrequently, so its formal statements are carefully noted. PNAC boasts Vice President Dick Cheney, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney's powerful chief of staff, I Lewis Libby, among a dozen other senior Bush national security officials, as signers of its 1997 charter. "It's clear that they see the transition [between the Bush administration's two terms] and before any new round of the six-party talks, as the time to try to set policy direction," one veteran analyst told Inter Press Service on Monday. [PNAC Chair] Kristol's statement referred in particular to two recent articles, including one published last week by Nicholas Eberstadt, a Korea specialist at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), that appeared in the neo-conservative The Weekly Standard, which is edited by Kristol. The article, "Tear Down This Tyranny", called for the implementation of a six-point strategy aimed at ousting North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-il, in part by "working around the pro-appeasement crowd in the South Korean government", which apparently includes President Roh himself. The second article, published on Sunday in The New York Times, detailed a number of recent indications cited by right-wing officials and the press in Japan -- including high-level defections and the reported circulation of anti-government pamphlets -- that Kim's hold on power may be slipping. The article noted in particular a recent statement by Shinzo Abe, secretary general of Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), that "regime change" was a distinct possibility and that "we need to start simulations of what we should do at that time."" ...
"At the moment, with fighting in Fallujah still raging, and the resistance hitting all over the heartland, this is how Sunni Iraq is reading what the Americans say: If you fight us, we will kill you. And if you don't participate in our elections, you go to jail. No wonder the resistance keeps growing." - The Sunni-Shi'ite Power Play, Pepe Escobar, http://www.truthout.org/docs_...
This weekend, Iraq's Independent Electoral Commission announced the nation would hold elections on January 30. There are serious obstacles http://www.usatoday.com/news/... still to be overcome to meet that objective. Flawed or delayed elections would be a significant blow to Iraq's stability and threaten civil war. USA Today writes, "Analysts who have studied the Iraqi elections process cite worsening violence, logistical problems as mundane as printing and distributing ballots on time, and the fear that many of the nation's potent Sunni Muslim minority will boycott the polls, undermining the legitimacy of the vote." Daniel Serwer, of the U.S. Institute of Peace, concurs, saying, "What you've got here is a very tight schedule that would be difficult to meet even under ideal circumstances. It's just not clear if it can physically be done."
[b]SECURITY CONCERNS:[/b] William Taylor, the director of reconstruction at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, admits security in the Sunni Triangle and the northern city of Mosul is worse than it was six weeks ago, adding he was worried that in some areas "it would now be difficult to have elections." Air Force Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of U.S. Central Command, agrees, saying, "I will tell you that the intimidation campaign that is ongoing is very effective." The challenge U.S. troops now face is taking the power to intimidate away from the insurgents, "so that people can freely get out…to vote and not go back and expect their families to be killed just because they go out and vote."
[b]LOGISTICAL CONCERNS:[/b] Holding an election takes an enormous amount of logistical planning. Over the next two-and-a-half months, political parties must register, candidate lists have to be certified, ballots must be printed and distributed to 28,000 polling places, and candidates must campaign. Registration has been delayed in many parts of the country over the past few weeks, however, as about 90 of the country's 540 registration centers were shut down due to potential violence. Also, the U.N. presence in the country is cripplingly limited; "in contrast to Afghanistan's October elections, for which the U.N. deployed 266 election workers, there are only 10 U.N. staffers now in Iraq, a number expected to increase to 25 in December."
[b]MORE IRAQI TROOPS NEEDED:[/b] Security on January 30 is crucial to ensuring legitimate election results. The White House has said it plans to rely on Iraqi security forces to protect Iraq's 9,000 polling places. There still is, however, a drastic shortage of trained Iraqi security officers. The New York Times reports, "American commanders say that only 145,000 Iraqi security personnel will be trained and ready by election day…far short of the 270,000 that Iraqi officials say are needed."
[b]MILITARY COMMANDERS SAY MORE U.S. TROOPS NEEDED:[/b] Senior military commanders in Iraq say it is "increasingly likely" more U.S. troops are needed in Iraq in order to secure remaining areas of resistance. A substantial number of Marines and Army troops are currently tied up for weeks in securing Fallujah and overseeing the town's reconstruction, leaving a limited number of forces available for routing out insurgents in other areas. The exact number of additional troops necessary is unknown, reports the Washington Post, but it is estimated to be between 3,000 and 5,000 soldiers. These new troops could come by extending the stay of more soldiers or by accelerating the deployment of divisions in the United States; the Pentagon has already ordered about 6,500 soldiers to extend their tours by up to two months.
Readers of this column know that off and on for weeks I’ve been writing about the importance of the conference that begins today in Egypt’s Sharm el Sheikh about Iraq. It’s virtually an all-parties meeting on Iraq’s future, attended by countries as diverse as Iran and France.
The [i]New York Times [/i]finally deigned to mention that it was happening, the very day of the conference itself.
The [i]Times[/i] reports:
... "Washington has tried to ensure that nothing at this conference goes beyond [UN Resolution 1546]. It blocked France, for example, which had pushed hard to include representatives of other Iraqi political parties and non-governmental organizations." ...
But when did the [i]Times[/i] report on those French efforts? When did the American media bother to mention that a big, behind-the-scenes struggle was underway? The French, backed by Egypt and others, wanted to invite the Iraqi opposition to the meeting. Was there any discussion of this in public in Washington? Did the media ask the White House about it? No.
The Bush idea for Iraq is to send the Marines rumbling over the opposition and an election that cements the power of the Shiite fundamentalists. It’s a strategy hardly guaranteed to establish a stable Iraq. If the elections are held at all, they will be a sham, and the outcome will lack all credibility. The conference might have been a way to create a unified Iraqi consensus, minus the outright terrorists. Now, it won’t.
[b]The Revised Constitution of God’s United States
A Patriotic Citizens Bill of Rights and Responsibilities[/b]
([i]Passed by Congress and Ratified in 2009[/i])
[b]Preamble:[/b] We the people of God’s United States, in order to provide for the common defense, in balance with the blessings of liberty and our position as the Freest Country on Earth ™, do ordain the replacement of the Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with law, and ratified as per the original, outdated Constitution of the United States, by two thirds of both Houses of Congress, as well as the Legislatures of three fourths of the fifty states, in the year of our Lord 2009, to hereafter be known as The Patriotic Citizen’s Bill of Rights. The full force of the provisions of these Amendments are effective immediately, and the Judicial Branch of the Government of God’s United States is hereby instructed to interpret any disparity between the original Articles of the Constitution and its original Amendments, and this revised and updated Patriotic Citizen’s Constitution, in favor of the latter.
[b]Amendment I:[/b] With the exception of the state-sanctioned religion of Christianity, Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of any other religion or prohibit the private, non-subversive exercise of any religion. Nor shall Congress abridge the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances; although the President and his appointed agents may do so, in Time of War, or serious threat of war or terrorism, to protect the Country and its people, as he, in his sole discretion, deems fit in the exercise of his duty as Commander in Chief.
[b]Amendment II:[/b] A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state of Patriotic Citizens, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed, unless such people are suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security.
[b]Amendment III:[/b] No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law, as determined by the President and Commander in Chief, and administered by the Department of Homeland Security.
[b]Amendment IV: [/b]Except during Time of War, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. During Time of War, as defined by the President and Commander in Chief, representatives of the Department of Homeland Security may take any and all measures necessary to search the homes, effects, electronic communications or records of suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists, and it shall be a federal crime, as prescribed in federal criminal statute 841 (d) 1, as described in Patriot Act V, to inquire about such searches, or to inform the subjects of such searches, or the public, of any actions taken under this statute by representatives of the Department of Homeland Security.
[b]Amendment V:[/b] No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in Time of War or public danger. With the exception of suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists; no Patriotic Citizen shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation, unless deemed necessary by the President and Commander in Chief or the Department of Homeland Security.
[b]Amendment VI:[/b] In all criminal prosecutions except those involving suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists, Patriotic Citizens accused of crimes shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
[b]Amendment VII:[/b] In suits at common law which do not involve the Government of God’s United States, Government officials, Party Members or Party Institutions, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
[b]Amendment VIII:[/b] Excessive bail shall not be required of any Patriotic Citizen, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted, with the exception of suspected or actual abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists. Should abortionists, illicit drug users, subversives, terrorists, enemy sympathizers or propagandists be found guilty, by any state or federal court, of any criminal offense, then their voting privileges for any public election shall be permanently revoked.
[b]Amendment IX:[/b] The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage such rights to unborn children, from the very moment God Almighty breathes life into their eternal souls. In any and all cases, including rape, incest, and health emergencies, any persons infringing upon the life of the unborn, whether mothers, relatives, health care providers, or their co-conspirators, shall be subject to the full force of state statutes concerning homicide or attempted homicide.
[b]Amendment X:[/b] During Time of War the President, Vice President, and all other elected officials who are members of the Nationalist Party, the only Party found by the American people to be a Patriotic Citizens Party, are exempted by federal, state and local term limit legislation, including Amendment XXII of the outdated Constitution of the United States, prescribing a two term limit to the Office of President.
In Time of War, as determined by the President and Commander in Chief, all political parties, with the exception of the Nationalist Party (“The Party”), are suspect and illegal until such Time of War has passed, and it shall be a criminal federal offense to lobby, propagandize, assemble, or vote for any political person or action that is not part of the official Party. It is henceforth the duty of all Patriotic Citizens to vote for and provide support to the Party, until such time as the President, in his sole discretion, determines that God’s United States is no longer at war.
This Patriotic Citizens Constitution expands the rights, and responsibilities of Citizens in the following manner:
All Patriotic Citizens of the United States shall enjoy the right, and responsibility, of receiving and watching Interactive TV. Such responsibilities include an obligation to watch requisite public service announcements, as determined by the President in Time of War. It shall be a federal offense, in Time of War, to tamper with or disable the security delivery or monitoring functions of any Interactive TV device.
Patriotic Citizens are also entitled to an expanded right of Pharmacological Happiness, and all providers of health insurance must fully cover the cost of providing such Pharmacological Happiness. In the event that the Department of Homeland Security establishes, in it sole discretion, that a citizen is psychologically imbalanced, then representatives of the General of Homeland Security shall have the right, in Time of War, to define Pharmacological Happiness within the context of the needs of God’s United States, and to medicate and/or genetically reform law-breaking criminals as they deem necessary.
[The Newsweek authors] believe that the US military simply cannot win hearts and minds in Iraq. That's a pretty safe conclusion by now. Quite the opposite, it seems clear that more and more Iraqis simply hate the Americans, and especially American troops.
[b]Why? Well, although American media don't play much controversial footage, the replay of footage like the Mosque execution of an insurgent/terrorist/fill in the blank on Arab TV has been a PR disaster (one of many). Before simply blaming the Marine in a vacuuum note Newsweek's summary for the bigger picture: [i]A white flag can be a ruse, a corpse can be a booby trap and a wounded enemy can be a living bomb--or simply a wounded enemy[/i]. The fog of war is thicker than ever. Leaving young soldiers to clean up Bush's political misjudgement is his signature. Nonetheless, you won't win hearts and minds with incidents like this. As written in Juan Cole's piece:[/b]
...the Red Cross http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk... has issued a blistering critique of the US for human rights violations in Iraq, while equally blaming the guerrillas.
[b]More broadly[/b]
1. Although Newsweek and others may decry the Lancet study of ~100,000 civilian deaths, the 4,000 reported by the Western press is likely far too low. The press can't get out to report.
2. Another citation http://www.sundaymirror.co.uk... in the story on Juan Cole's site is the rise in acute malnutrition amongst Iraqi children. Add to that the reports of physicians barred from Fallujah (extenuating circumstances or not, we're talking hearts and minds here), and you've got more negative images.
[b]Iraq Is Not Like Vietnam. Say it again. Point out the ways because there are many. But the similarities are there, and they are chilling. Not least is and will be the growing finger pointing on the right and amongst war supporters regarding how reports like this 'take joy' in how America does badly. Hoe the left doesn't support the troops. Nope. Been there, done that in the '70's. No one takes joy in this. But better to start a diversion than talk about reality. That's right out of the Nixon-Agnew playbook. Was the provision for sensitive IRS data http://www.guardian.co.uk/wor...,1280,-4628320,00.html to be released to Senate and House Appropriations Chairs in the same playbook?[/b]
Pounding on his desk, Stevens said he had given his word and so had Young that neither would use the authority to require the IRS to turn over individual or corporate tax returns to them. ``I would hope that the Senate would take my word. I don't think I have ever broken my word to any member of the Senate."
"... Do I have to get down on my knees and beg," he said.
Both Young and Stevens will cede their chairmanships when the new Congress elected earlier this month takes office in January.
Some Democrats didn't accept the assertion that the provision was a mistake and demanded an investigation.
"We weren't born yesterday, we didn't come down with the first snow," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. ``This isn't poorly thought out, this was very deliberately thought out and it was done in the dead of night.''
[b]More to come on this and on Rep. Ernest Istook, R-Okla http://www3.capwiz.com/y/bio/... (the purported author of the IRS provision). Think I overdid the Nixon thing? Charles Grassley doesn't.[/b]
Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said the measure will "bring us back to the doorstep to the days of President Nixon, President Truman and other dark days in our history when taxpayer information was used against political enemies."
[b]Americans of conscience will continue to write about Iraq. The Administration and their supporters will continue to take steps to deal with the dissenters, some of them over the line. In case you missed them, welcome to the '70s. I do not look forward to having them back.[/b]
Elevated from the diaries by [i]DemFromCT[/i]. Watch this if you can. Ted Stevens has just apologized to the entire Senate and pulled the IRS provision that Stevens said was 'slipped into the bill' by 'some staffer'. The provision apparantly allowed certain Chairs of Senate committees to have access to anyone's IRS data (like the Texas DA going after DeLay). Harken wants to know who the staffer is. Watch the show live. McCain was livid. So was Grassley, both (R).
Sen. Conrad from ND just called the GOP out on this budget bill. Apparently they stuck a provision that removes any expectations of privacy regarding our tax returns in the middle of this 3000 page bill in the middle of the night. They didn't tell the Dems. But they caught them. This is amazing to watch - they're going OFF.
This tactic is NOT new, but getting caught and having Dems throw fits IS.
"If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism." - Vladimir Lenin
[b]The day to day atrocity of occupation (U.S. imperialism)[/b]
She lays dazed in the crowded hospital room, languidly waving her bruised arm at the flies. Her shins, shattered by bullets from US soldiers when they fired through the front door of her house, are both covered by casts. Small plastic drainage backs filled with red fluid sit upon her abdomen, where she took shrapnel from another bullet.
Fatima Harouz, 12 years old, lives in Latifiya, a city just south of Baghdad. Just three days ago soldiers attacked her home. Her mother, standing with us says, “They attacked our home and there weren’t even any resistance fighters in our area.” Her brother was shot and killed, and his wife was wounded as their home was ransacked by soldiers.
“Before they left, they killed all of our chickens,” added Fatima’s mother, her eyes a mixture of fear, shock and rage.
A doctor standing with us, after listening to Fatima’s mother tell their story, looks at me and sternly asks, “This is the freedom…in their Disney Land are there kids just like this?”
Another young woman, Rana Obeidy, was walking home with her brother two nights ago. She assumes the soldiers shot her and her brother because he was carrying a bottle of soda. This happened in Baghdad. She has a chest wound where a bullet grazed her, unlike her little brother who is dead.
Laying in a bed near Rana is Hanna, 14 years old. She has a gash on her right leg from the bullet of a US soldier. Her family was in a taxi in Baghdad this morning which was driving near a US patrol when a soldier opened fire on the car.
Her father’s shirt is spotted with blood from his head which was wounded when the taxi crashed.
In another room a small boy from Fallujah lays on his stomach. Shrapnel from a grenade thrown into their home by a US soldier entered his body through his back, and implanted near his kidney.
An operation successfully removed the shrapnel. His father was killed by what his mother called, “the haphazard shooting of the Americans.” The boy, Amin, lies in his bed vacillating between crying with pain and playing with is toy car.
It’s one case after another of people from Baghdad, Fallujah, Latifiya, Balad, Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba…from all over Iraq, who have been injured by the heavy-handed tactics of American soldiers fighting a no-win guerilla war.
Out in front of the hospital three Humvees pull up as soldiers alert the hospital staff that some of the wounded from outside of Fallujah will be brought there. One of the staff begins to yell at the soldier who is doing the talking, while a soldier manning a machine gun atop a Humvee with his face completely covered by an olive balaclava and goggles looks on.
“We don’t need you here! Get the fuck out of here! Bring back Saddam! Even he was better than you animals! We don’t want to die by your hands, so get out of here! We can take care of our own people!”
The translator with the soldiers does not translate this. Instead he watches with a face of stone.
The survivors of those killed and wounded by the US military in Iraq, as well as those who care for them, are left with feelings of bitter anguish, grief, rage and vengeance.
This afternoon at a small, but busy supply center set up in Baghdad to distribute goods to refugees from Fallujah, the stories the haggard survivors are telling are nearly unimaginable.
“They kicked all the journalists out of Fallujah so they could do whatever they want,” says Kassem Mohammed Ahmed, who just escaped from Fallujah three days ago, “The first thing they did is they bombed the hospitals because that is where the wounded have to go. Now we see that wounded people are in the street and the soldiers are rolling over them with tanks. This happened so many times. What you see on the TV is nothing-that is just one camera. What you cannot see is so much.”
While Kassem speaks of the television footage, there are also stories of soldiers not discriminating between civilians and resistance fighters.
Another man, Abdul Razaq Ismail arrived from Fallujah last week.
While distributing supplies to other refugees he says, “There are dead bodies on the ground and nobody can bury them. The Americans are dropping some of the bodies into the Euphrates River near Fallujah. They are pulling the bodies with tanks and leaving them at the soccer stadium.”
Nearby is another man in tears as he listens, nodding his head. He can’t stop crying, but after a little while says he wants to talk to us.
“They bombed my neighborhood and we used car jacks to raise the blocks of concrete to get dead children out from under them.”
Another refugee, Abu Sabah, an older man wearing a torn shirt and dusty pants tells of how he escaped with his family while soldiers shot bullets over their heads, but killed his cousin.
“They used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud,” he said, having just arrived yesterday, “Then small pieces fell from the air with long tails of smoke behind them. These exploded on the ground with large fires that burnt for half an hour. They used these near the train tracks. You could hear these dropped from a large airplane and the bombs were the size of a tank. When anyone touched those fires, their body burned for hours.”
The comparison of Iraq to Vietnam is becoming more valid by the day here.
[b]This Week's [i]BuzzFlash [/i]Hypocrite of the Week Looked Like A Million Dollars, But the Feds Charge That U.S. Taxpayers Paid for Most of It, Including a Face Lift with Funds Intended for Children and Education[/b]
Welcome back to the [i]BuzzFlash[/i].com GOP Hypocrite of the Week.
Well, Linda Schrenko looked like a million bucks when she entered the federal court house http://www.ajc.com/metro/cont... in Atlanta this week.
Actually, wearing her fur-trimmed jacket and sporting a face-lift, you might say Schrenko looked like $614,000 bucks. That's the amount of money she is charged with embezzling from federal and education funds while she served as the Superintendent of Georgia schools.
The once rising Republican star smiled at the cameras as she faced a 16-count federal indictment for stealing our money and using it -- for among other things -- the cosmetic surgery behind her 54-year-old youthful Republican grin.
The former teacher jumped on the GOP bandwagon in 1994, becoming the first woman elected to statewide office in the peach state. She was re-elected in 1998, as voters were unaware that she allegedly had her hand in the taxpayers' cookie jar.
And the money the government charges her with stealing came from funds for the education of children. We guess Ms. Schrenko will just defend herself by claiming that she was following George W. Bush's example of leaving every child behind.
The head of the Georgia Republican Party says, Schrenko "had a lot of support from the Christian conservatives in the Republican Party, http://www.ajc.com/metro/cont... both in her gubernatorial run and in her tenure as school superintendent." You could feel the love between the radical right creationists and Schrenko. After all, she wanted Bible classes in public schools and she once warned Georgian parents not to join the PTA because it was supposedly too liberal and, aghast, said that it supported gay rights.
You know, George W. Bush must feel nothing but "compassionate conservatism" towards the martyred Ms. Schrenko, now bankrupt and divorced. According to the [i]Atlanta Journal Constitution[/i]:
... "U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Feldman asked Schrenko to describe her level of education. She replied that she had completed a six-year postgraduate program and had obtained a "leadership certificate," which allows her to be a school administrator.
Upon hearing that, the judge said there should be no question about Schrenko's ability to read, write and understand the English language, a common question defendants are asked to make sure they understand the charges against them.
"Hope not," replied Schrenko, who championed phonics-based reading programs as state school superintendent." ...
If Bush's new appointment to head the Department of Education doesn't work out, he's found the right replacement in Ms. Schrenko. Considering how little Bush reads, he'll need all the Hooked on Phonics tapes he can get his hands on. The only question is, can a Republican former school teacher head a federal agency from behind bars?
If so, she's a ringer for a Bush appointee, because there's nothing that Bush likes more than thieves, liars and hypocritical christians. Congratulations Linda Schrenko, you're this week's GOP Hypocrite of the Week.
Until next week, just remember our motto at [i]BuzzFlash[/i].com: So many Republican hypocrites, so little time.
[b]The insane neo-con, neo-fascist Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]claims to be "Christian" ... [i]Fuck! [/i]... What [i]kind[/i] of "Christians" are these torture-[i]luving [/i]goons and murderous-[i]luving[/i] thugs? ... Answer: The hypocritical, lying and traitorous[i] kind [/i]...[/b]
The Times of London http://www.timesonline.co.uk/...,,2089-1357699,00.html has obtained confidential CIA and Defense Department logs that show that the agencies are using an executive jet to fly terrorist suspects to countries where they are certain to be tortured.
The movements of the Gulfstream 5 include over 300 flights to deliver prisoners to countries with poor human rights records including Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is using such regimes to carry out torture by proxy.
Witnesses have claimed that the suspects are frequently bound, gagged and sedated before being put on board the planes. Witnesses described seeing the prisoners handed to US agents whose faces were masked by hoods. The clothes of the handcuffed prisoners were cut off and they were dressed in nappies covered by orange overalls before being forcibly given sedatives by suppository.
Recently released photos of American soldiers abusing and torturing Iraqi prisoners have shocked the world, provoking a global backlash. Join the call from Amnesty International and other groups http://www.moveon.org/torture... for an independent, impartial and public investigation into all allegations of torture.
[b]Of course, whilst the insane neo-con cabal of cowardly arm-chair chicken-hawks who have hijacked our nation and [i]pull-the-strings [/i]of the idiot(s) in the White House, lust for war with Iran-- there is a simply little question that most people fail to ask: [i]How can we afford it???[/i] ... The corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i] has practically bankrupted our nation ... We've got the highest deficits/debts in our nation's history ... We've got a dollar that is sinking in value ... Congressional toadies have immorally raised the limit on the amount of money that the Presidential Swindler can "borrow"[i] on-our-backs [/i](since the rich [i]don't have to [/i]pay any price, or make any sacrifice whatsoever) ...[/b]
The[i] Washington Post [/i]reports http://www.washingtonpost.com... : "The United States has intelligence that Iran is working to adapt missiles to deliver a nuclear weapon, further evidence that the Islamic republic is determined to acquire a nuclear bomb, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Wednesday. ...
"'I'm talking about information that says they not only have these missiles, but I am aware of information that suggests that they were working hard as to how to put the two together,' Powell said, referring to the process of matching warheads to missiles."
Now here's the problem, Colin. Even if you're actually right this time, no one believes you. See what you get for lying to the UN? Not that it matters since your boss will just bomb 'em anyway.
[b]Again, how will we[i] pay[/i] for it??? ...[/b]
Freewayblogger, that icon of free speech from an overpass, has been busy lately—and lots of other people have been, too. Check out the latest crop of clever signs http://www.freewayblogger.com... on everything from voting machines to the draft.
...---... What the World is Saying... About CondoSleezy Rice's Nomination ...---...
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that ... they would try to use an airplane as a missile," CondoSleezy Rice said at the May 2002 press conference.
The 9-11 report released by Congress seven months later listed no less than 12 pieces of intelligence to show she was all wet [In other words, Condi Rice is a bald-faced liar!] – from the al-Qaida plot uncovered in 1995 to crash a plane into CIA headquarters to another plot uncovered in August 2001 to crash a plane into the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. - Condi's Contradictions, http://antiwar.com/sperry/?ar...
Foreign policy in the next Bush administration threatens to be more of the same. On Monday, President Bush named Condoleezza Rice as his replacement for Colin Powell as the United States secretary of state. Rice, soon likely to be "America's face to the world," was a seriously flawed national security advisor; [i]The Washington Post[/i] points out that "[u]many experts consider her one of the weakest national security advisers in recent history in terms of managing interagency conflicts[/u]." http://www.washingtonpost.com... She is, however, a constant, loyal, dedicated Bush devotee, ready to work on "behalf of a boss [u]whose sentences she can finish[/u], (i.e. an ass-licker) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... and who trusts her totally to carry out his wishes." The following is a sampling of commentary in response to the Rice nomination from newspapers around the world.
[b]Belguim[/b]
"With Rice or another hawk at the helm of the State Department, the relationship with Europe will be vulnerable. After his victory President Bush promised that the old feuds would be solved and that there is room for a new trans-Atlantic dialogue. Bush's announcement that he will come to the EU and NATO in February seemed to confirm that intention. Let's wait and see. ... If Bush really wants to enhance the unity in his cabinet and continue to follow the old course, a hawk will strengthen that cabinet--rather than weaken it. In that case, however, it will become immediately clear that the next four years will also be years of conflict and as difficult as the first four years under Bush." [i]Jean Vanempten, De Tijd, November 16, 2004[/i]
[b]United Kingdom[/b]
"Surprisingly little is known about where [Rice] stands on the political spectrum between the hawkish Vice-President, Dick Cheney, and the more moderate, multilaterally minded Colin Powell, whom she will succeed. She inclined at times to the one, at times to the other. Crystal clear, by contrast, is her closeness to the President. ... Closeness to the White House will be of enormous advantage to the new Secretary as she emerges from relative obscurity, at least on the international stage, into the glare of heading one of a superpower's great offices of state. There, she will have to hold her own before Congress and with the wily big beasts of the first Bush administration, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense. In an arena of that size she has yet to prove herself." [i]Editorial, The Daily Telegraph, November 17, 2004[/i]
"On Iraq, Ms Rice played both sides of the argument. She promoted an aggressive line against Baghdad but also gave tacit support for Mr Powell's insistence on taking the issue to the UN. On the few occasions that she flexed her White House muscle, taking over postwar planning for Iraq from the Pentagon and US policy in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the results were poor. Now, the move to the state department will entail having to take even greater responsibility." [i]Julian Borger, The Guardian, November 17, 2004[/i]
[b]Japan[/b]
"Because Secretary of State Powell was one of a few 'multilateralists' within the first Bush cabinet, his announced resignation is bound to strongly effect the course of U.S. diplomacy.... His successor will hold the key to the future direction of Washington's diplomatic conduct. If National Security Advisor Rice, known as a moderate pragmatist, is chosen as the top American diplomat, U.S. foreign policy would not be drastically changed in favor of the hawks." [i]Editorial, Nihon Keizai, November 16, 2004[/i]
[b]France[/b]
"Powell's diplomatic legacy will undoubtedly be the international conference on Iraq November 22 and 23. ... It is ironic that for the victor of the first Iraq war, it is Iraq which later became Powell's insurmountable obstacle. ... Condoleezza Rice will probably show less patience and openness than Colin Powell. But it is certain that she will have more authority over the President." [i]Philippe Gelie, Le Figaro, November 16, 2004[/i]
[b]Lebanon[/b]
"Rice, as a security specialist, thinks of U.S. foreign policy largely in terms of national and strategic interest. She is, moreover, no fan of an America acting as a paternalistic nation-builder. ... But there is more. Rice was also one of the few in the U.S. administration who advocated that Muslim societies were not adverse to democracy, freedom and the rule of law. As a U.S. secretary of state, she would need to emphasize the rule of law over security as a basis for solving the Middle East's many problems. Born and raised under the shadow of racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, Rice has no excuse for not recognizing the vital importance of justice." [i]Editorial, The Daily Star, November 17, 2004[/i]
[b]Australia[/b]
"Condoleezza Rice is a very close and very loyal adviser to President Bush. ... She has proven an effective advocate for positions the President has taken, but has always seemed rather less effective in either guiding the President to good information or good judgments based on good information. Her natural instincts, moreover, are confrontative and oriented towards the exercise of power - a power which US adventurism in recent years has shown to be of immense technological superiority but quite ineffective in reorganizing hearts and minds." [i]Editorial, The Canberra Times, November 17, 2004[/i]
[b]Jamaica[/b]
"The departure of Colin Powell was long expected, so nothing much can be read into it. However his replacement by Condoleezza Rice will hardly please those who valued Powell's diplomatic approach over Rice's willingness to persecute wars. … Any optimism that a second Bush Cabinet might turn over a new leaf and change direction slightly in the face of the apparent failures of the neo-cons -- a worsening war in Iraq, a stalled Middle-East peace process, frosty relations with many allies -- appears to have dissipated. If the rumours turn out to be true, and the appointments go ahead, then we will be getting more of the same. In spades." [i]Editorial, Jamaica Gleaner, November 17, 2004[/i]
[b]Canada[/b]
"Replacing Powell with the more hawkish Condoleezza Rice seems to indicate the Bush administration has no intention of taking a more multilateral approach to foreign relations any time soon. There is, however, some good news. The post of secretary of state - an office held by such luminaries as Thomas Jefferson and George Marshall - has passed from an African American man to an African American woman. Even a decade ago, such an event would have been startling. Today, it's barely worth a mention. And that is progress worth celebrating." [i]Editorial, The Montreal Gazette, November 17, 2004[/i]
[b]Poor Colin Powell:[i] willing or unwitting [/i]dupe??? ... First the[i] "moderate, good-soldier"[/i] pawn, in the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta's[/i] neo-con regime, telling bald-faced lies http://www.smirkingchimp.com/... to the United States, the United Nations and the entire World about phony, non-existent WMDs in Iraq that supposedly represented a threat to our survival (the neo-fascists' [i]casus belli [/i]for their illegal & immoral incursion into Iraq)!!! ... And now, the discredited lap-dog caves[i] again [/i]...[/b]
So Colin Powell, just days after bailing out, has decided to add fuel to the neocons’ Iran fire.
Seemingly taking at face value the likely spurious claims of the neocon-linked People’s Mujahideen—an Iranian exile group with a decades-long pedigree of Chalabi-style exaggeration—Powell issued a vague confirmation of the group’s claims about Iran’s nuclear program.
[i]In Paris, the exile group charged that Iran was still enriching uranium and would continue to do so despite the pledge made Sunday to European foreign ministers. The group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, or NCRI, also claimed that Iran received blueprints for a Chinese-made bomb in the mid-1990s from the global nuclear technology network led by the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. The Khan network sold the same type of bomb blueprint to Libya, which has since renounced its nuclear ambitions[/i].
Powell was quoted in the[i] Post [/i]saying that he has “seen some information that would suggest”—could it be more vague?—that Iran is developing nuclear weapon delivery systems. Worse, more shockingly, Powell endorsed the Mujahideen’s claims. “I have seen intelligence which would corroborate what this dissident group is saying, and it should be of concern to all parties," Powell said, according to the [i]New York Times[/i] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... .
Could it mean that the neocons, flexing their newfound, Bush II muscle, might launch a military strike against Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities? Especially if neocon hawk John Bolton, the arms control specialist, gets the No. 2 post under Condi Rice at State? As one expert told Reuters http://olympics.reuters.com/n... :
[i]"That could happen. It's absolutely feasible," said Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim.
Naim noted that U.S. administrations for decades had employed air strikes as an instrument of policy. Former President Bill Clinton used air power against Serbia and launched missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan.
"There's nothing new about using air strikes. That would be the continuation of a traditional tool of U.S. foreign policy," he said[/i].
[b]From AFP, via the Eurasia Security Watch, comes this:[/b]
[i]The United States is not the only country currently weathering a massive intelligence shake-up. A similar situation is brewing in Israel, where the vaunted Mossad is undergoing an internal crisis of its own. In recent weeks, scores of Mossad employees are said to have tendered their resignations in protest over the policies of the agency's controversial chief, Meir Dagan. Dagan, who was elevated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to the country's top intelligence post in 2002, is being blamed for overly risky foreign counterterrorism operations, and for a precipitous decline in relations with the agency's American counterpart, the CIA. In all, more than two hundred agents and departmental supervisors have reportedly quit the intelligence agency so far[/i].
The CIA’s crisis is getting worse, as evidenced by the memo reported in the[i] New York Times [/i], in which Goss the Boss demands fealty to the Bush administration from CIA personnel. Expect more quittings.
The Mossad’s crisis is interesting, part of a pattern of anti-Sharon resistance from the security services and army in Israel, who don’t like Sharon’s occupation and settlement policies. Many of them, too, were not partisans in favor of the Iraq war, unlike the Sharon-allied U.S. neocons.
Rice was reportedly overheard saying, “As I was telling my husb---” ([i]husband[/i]) and then stopping herself abruptly, before saying, “As I was telling President Bush.”
So, is it possible that Condi has a [i]thing[/i] for Dubya? [If so, she sure as hell [i]ain't that [/i]smart!]
That's Margaret Spellings. If you want substantive discussion on education policy, scroll below for DemFromCT's entry http://www.dailykos.com/story... . This thread is for, er, something else. Is Condi jealous? Is Laura jealous?
Ah, Condi gets her "reward" for doing [i]what exactly [/i]in the Oval Office? ... (Since most experts agree she is the worst National Security Adviser in our nation's history!) ... [i]Poor, poor, poor [/i]Laura ...
[b]Can Republican moderates find the nerve to fight back against the neocons who have hijacked their party?[/b]
The search for the soul of the party, it seems, is not confined to the Democratic faithful, where those belonging to the traditional “base” are gearing up for a fight to wrest influence away from the centrists in the party.
There is a similar battle playing out in the Republican arena as well, where for the past 20 years, moderates have watched their ability to affect the GOP’s national agenda slowly erode. An oppressed band of political optimists, they have subjected themselves to years of abuse in the hope that thoughtfulness and good manners would restore their power in the party.
Referred to as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) by many hard right conservatives, they are respected by the voters in their states, but despised by party leaders in Washington.
Out-organized by neo-conservative groups like the Christian Coalition, the Family Research Council, and the Club for Growth, moderates are no longer viewed as respected members of a philosophically broad-based party. They have, instead, become targets for a group of cannibalistic vigilantes bent on establishing ideological purity.
Drunk with power from their recent electoral victory, these ideologues make no pretense about their intentions. Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, says his organization's goal is to punish moderate Republicans and make them an endangered species. “The problem with the moderates in Congress is that they basically water down the Republican message and what you get is something that infuriates the Republican base,” Moore says.
“They will learn to conform to our agenda or they will be driven from our party,” he says simply.
[b]The “Problem Children”[/b]
In previous years, when party majorities in the House and Senate were thinner, GOP moderates were able to manifest more control over an increasingly extreme Republican agenda. This year’s U.S. Senate elections show how that equation has changed. Candidates with demonstrated hardcore conservative credentials won open seats in Oklahoma and Florida, as well as North and South Carolina. They also defeated Democratic minority leader Tom Daschle in South Dakota. These victories increased the Republican’s majority in the Senate from 51 to 55 seats.
In Pennsylvania, respected Republican senator Arlen Specter narrowly survived a Club for Growth-financed $2 million primary challenge from conservative congressman Pat Toomey. Moore saw the Pennsylvania effort as “serving notice to Chafee, Snowe, Collins and Voinovich and others who have been problem children that they will be next," referring to moderate Republican senators Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and George Voinovich of Ohio.
Ironically, after the last election, this small group of Republican moderates may be all that stands between the country and the total domination of its political agenda by neo-conservatives like Moore — radicals who have spent a decade and a half planning for this moment of ascendancy in American political history.
The moderates hope that as President Bush begins his second term, he will see the light and want to establish a legacy that is more inclusive, more reasonable and more moderate. Regrettably, the president’s actions and the public declarations of party leaders belie such hopes.
Already Porter Goss, the president’s choice to be director of the CIA, is replacing respected intelligence officers with political appointees more in line with this administration’s political agenda. While the retirement of Colin Powell as secretary of state, and the nomination of National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice as his replacement, promises a similar purge in this critical cabinet department. And, rumors abound that the president is already considering nominating Justice Clarence Thomas to be Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court should William Rehnquist retire from that position — a nomination that could change the ideological direction of the court for a generation.
Former New Jersey governor and Bush administration official Christie Todd Whitman said this summer: “If the president wins this election walking away then maybe the country is in a different place than where the moderate Republicans are. If he loses, it is an absolute validation of the fact that you cannot be a national party if you are excluding people.”
The issue facing Republicans may not be a question of inclusion or exclusion, but rather one of polarization. Over the last 20 years neo-conservatives have pushed a radical social and economic agenda. As this program has become increasingly extreme, the country has been driven more and more into an us-versus-them posture. We have seen the emergence of ideological “bases” within the two major parties, and the destruction of the country’s ideological center.
The result has been the defection of millions of Americans voters who no longer identify with either party and have chosen, instead, to become Independent.
[b]The “Civil War” Within [/b]
It is into this political wilderness that a dwindling number of hopeful, but increasingly outnumbered, moderates have been driven. As the neo-conservative majority increases, these moderates are caught between their natural instinct to be loyal but powerless Republicans, and the reality that their concerns are being totally ignored by Senate and House leaders.
When Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, made the mistake of suggesting that judicial nominees who sought to overturn Roe v. Wade would likely face a filibuster by Democrats in the Senate, Republican conservatives immediately moved to deny him the chairmanship of the committee.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) said that he was “disheartened” by Specter’s position and all but withdrew his support for Specter.
The first test for Republican moderates may come on the issue of filibusters. Frist has suggested that Senate filibusters be declared illegal — a legislative move that requires a simple majority to pass, instead of the 67-vote super-majority required to change Senate rules. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) responded that such a move would be viewed as “a nuclear attack” on Democrats by this administration and could have long-range Constitutional implications. Should Frist push such a tactic, will the moderate Republicans capitulate to pressure from party leadership, or align themselves with Democrats to block a blatant Republican attempt to seize long-term control of the Senate.
Jennifer Stockman, national co-chair of the Republican Majority for Choice and a delegate to the 2004 Republican National Convention, sees the prospect for a serious and potentially damaging confrontation. “Election Day brought the mudslinging battle between Democrats and Republicans to a close,” she says, “but an equally brutal battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party is looming. Will President Bush work to unite us, as he promised in his acceptance speech, or will the civil war between GOP party fundamentalists and moderate pragmatists, only serve to eventually ruin the GOP?”
Her concerns raise the serious question as to whether moderate Republicans can rebuild their influence in the party or become an historical irrelevancy — a throwback to a kinder, gentler time?
One longtime Republican analyst in Washington (unwilling to be named for fear of professional retaliation) says: “Moderates have to commit to a fight using the same hard-nosed tactics that have made them such a legislative minority in their own party. At the moment they lack the fire to confront neo-conservatives who are rapidly rewriting the historic principles of their party. A narrower, more focused approach that targets winnable state legislative and congressional seats will allow them to get maximum value for their more limited resources. It will require patience and passion, but a variety of recent surveys indicate that it is a tactic that has a realistic opportunity for success.”
CNN election day exit polling supports this theory. About 45 percent of voters in the last election identified themselves as moderate, and 45 percent of those voters supported Bush. This represents a total of approximately 11,745,000 votes. Also supporting Bush were 13 percent of voters who identified themselves as liberals, or 1,583,400 voters. These numbers demonstrate that while the energy and organizational commitment of the religious right were a critical piece in the president’s victory, it was meaningful moderate support that won him re-election.
A change of 30-40 percent of these moderate votes would have overwhelmed the president’s 3.5 million vote margin and reversed the outcome of the election. In all likelihood, such a shift might also have altered the results of a number of tight U.S. Senate and House races. While such a move would have elected a Democratic president and some Democratic senators and congressmen, it almost certainly would have expanded the ranks of moderate Republicans as well.
Centrists in both parties must decide whether to trade a little partisanship in the interest of restoring ideological balance to an increasingly polarized nation. “As these fissures deepen, they transcend President Bush and Sen. Kerry,” says Alan Murray, Washington bureau chief for CNBC. “They run deeper than disagreements over the Iraq war. They represent a fundamental difference in visions of the country's future.”
“Moderate Republicans have a couple of choices,” says one longtime GOP activist. “We can set the clock back 30 years and begin a process of rebuilding — similar to the one the religious right used to seize power. Start at the school board and county commission level and develop candidates, and then move on to state legislative seats and finally into the Congress. The other option is to wait for a political event so seismic in its proportions that it shatters the present political environment and forces massive political realignment along ideological lines. An example of such an event might be the overturning of Roe v. Wade.”
[b]Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing[/b]
The irony of the current situation is that too many political observers are willing to accept President Bush’s assertion that this election represents an overwhelming “mandate” for his agenda, one that many suggest is the result of almost total evangelical support. This notion appears to be more perception than reality. Exit polling shows that 21 percent of all self-identified evangelical voters supported John Kerry — a total of 2,801,400 votes.
What Republican political strategists did accomplish with the president’s reelection was to expand their strength in the Congress, a very different outcome than building a nationwide coalition prepared to support the new Republican Party’s extreme social agenda, and questionable economic, environmental and foreign policies.
In the near term, Americans must beware of what can only be described as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The religious right “has never been so activated” as it is now, says Andrew Sullivan, a pro-life, gay, conservative op-ed writer for the Washington Times. “They feel as if they are responsible for the president’s re-election, and their strategy now is going to be to appear moderate while pushing their radical social agenda.”
The daunting challenge that all moderates — not just Republicans — must address is how to penetrate the imposing political machine constructed by neo-conservative activists like Stephen Moore, and his extremist allies, and win the support of the millions of moderate voters who re-elected President Bush.
The first step may be a matter of storytelling — of weaving a narrative. Will moderates be able to discredit the illusions Republicans created during this last election? They need to dispel the myths that massive government borrowing creates a sound and healthy national economy, that the outsourcing of millions of good jobs strengthens the financial security of the American middle class, that undermining clean air and water standards is good for the economy, or that packing the U.S. Supreme Court with conservative justices who could overturn Roe v. Wade will protect American women’s personal freedoms.
Improved communications, in and of itself, will not be enough. Republicans and Democrats must begin to forge new coalitions. Hopefully this can be done in quiet, bipartisan ways, but if necessary it must be done in an independent manner that demonstrates a shared concern for America’s long-term political future.
The fact that 55,949,407 Americans supported John Kerry demonstrates that this country is not a bastion for what many in the Bush administration would have you believe is their right-wing agenda. Measured as a share of the popular vote the president won by a margin of 2.9 percent — the narrowest margin in the last 88 years.
As a nation, America has flourished when its political center has been strong and vocal — when its national discourse has been energetic and combative — while remaining respectful and bipartisan. To restore reason, Republican moderates must be prepared to take some small political organizing steps, as well make a major political statement. They must demonstrate that they are no longer willing to submit to bullying by Republican neo-conservatives. “This phenomenon has become a disturbing reality within our party,” said Stockman, “and has been fueling the battle for its heart and soul.”
Of equal importance must be a willingness on the part of Republican moderates to step forward on a regular basis and align themselves with Democrats on issues where they agree, such as: a responsible stewardship of the environment, protection of a woman’s right to choose, meaningful reform of the nation’s health care and educational systems, or federal support for critical stem cell research. This would send a powerful message to President Bush that he has drawn an ideological line they are unwilling to cross.
Such a demonstration will prove to millions of Americans that they are no longer moderates but are, instead, radical centrists capable of, and determined to, the retaking of political ground that is legitimately theirs.
[b]Source:[/b]
Michael Cudahy is a political writer and analyst from Massachusetts. He is a former national campaign staff member for President George H.W. Bush, executive director for Elliot Richardson's Committee for Responsible Government and national communications director for the Republican Coalition for Choice. http://www.alternet.org/elect...
"Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them." - W. Clement Stone
In wide swaths of both "red" and "blue" rural America, right-wing ideologues are beginning to overreach on land policy, alienating hunters/anglers and more conservative "exurbanites," who are concerned with sprawl. The issue is simple: culturally-conservative hunters/fishermen and exurbanites are often just as interested in protecting public lands and public access rights as are progressive environmentalists. A new article by American Progress's David Sirota notes, http://www.washingtonmonthly.... "Hunters can be some of the biggest environmentalists around, even though they don't think of themselves that way." They know that opening more federal or state land to development/drilling, choking funding for maintaining that land, and allowing private landowners to control hunting licenses will endanger their sporting pursuits. As the Bush administration pushes forward with its radical right-wing agenda, the issue could become increasingly important for progressives looking to make in-roads into "red" America.
[b]NEW MONTANA GOVERNOR MADE PUBLIC LANDS CENTRAL:[/b] In the 2004 Montana statewide elections, public lands and hunting/fishing access rights became central. The state has a population of 971,000 people, and according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 723,000 of them fished, hunted or watched wildlife in 2001. Gubernatorial candidate Brian Schweitzer (D) sharply criticized his opponents for attempting to restrict the state's Stream Access Law at the behest of wealthy private landowners. Then, "working with a local outdoorsmen group in Gallatin County, Schweitzer drafted a 9-point plan to protect cherished hunting and fishing access rights on public and private lands." Among other things, Schweitzer called for keeping public lands in the state's hands, spending more money to maintain land for hunters and anglers, and using fees from hunting licenses to buy easements from private property owners, which would give sportsmen easier access to fields and streams. The move helped Schweitzer win the governorship on Election Day.
[b]BUSH COURT CHALLENGE RILES RIGHT-LEANING AREAS:[/b] The Denver Post reports that the Bush administration is trying to reverse a Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule which "precluded government agencies from allowing industrial development – chiefly energy exploration and logging – in designated roadless areas." According to the Post, "the prospect of gas drilling" on the Rocky Mountain front "generally horrifies locals in the Roaring Fork Valley" – a traditionally conservative area. "This is all about quality of life for folks in the Carbondale area – quality of air, water, hunting, fishing, recreation and ranching," said town Trustee Scott Chaplin. A petition protesting the Thompson Creek leases sold in May circulated throughout Carbondale, garnering more than 700 signatures. The town and Pitkin County signed on to appeal the sale.
[b]PRIVATIZING HUNTING LICENSES BRINGS OPPOSITION: [/b]The Craig Daily Press reports the Colorado Division of Wildlife is grappling with "whether to pursue a plan to provide more big-game hunting licenses to private landowners." But, as in other areas, the debate over whether to privatize hunting licenses is creating controversy between hunters/outdoorsmen and wealthy private landowners. Specifically, "sportsmen argue that increasing the licenses landowners receive will unfairly deprive public lands hunters of the opportunity to hunt big game." Meanwhile, wealthy landowners want to be able to sell off the hunting licenses to the highest bidder. Denver Post columnist Charlie Meyers says the new plan could lead to "greatly diminished access to prized bull elk, buck deer and buck antelope for anyone who doesn't pay the increasingly large fees for a privately controlled tag. If taken to its ultimate progression, such a trend takes Colorado hunting increasingly toward the European model of privatization of game."
[b]SCHWARZENEGGER & BUSH POLICIES HURTING PUBLIC LANDS:[/b] The Monterey County Herald reports the one-two punch of Bush and Schwarzenegger administration policies are riling up outdoorsmen who use California's parks. Hamstrung by Bush-imposed budget constraints, "the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies are fighting a never-ending battle to keep the sprawling network of trails and campgrounds" in state and national parks from eroding and being overgrown. And it doesn't end with trails and camps: "The Forest Service has been forced to close a ranger station and fire lookouts, reduce visitor services and hire a concessionaire to manage its developed campgrounds and day-use areas, a move many career Forest Service employees think reduces service." Similarly, at the state level, the Schwarzenegger administration has slashed funding for the Parks Department while "prohibiting the addition of new parks to the system as a way to control maintenance and operations costs."
[b]That’s what Jon Stewart’s[i] Daily Show [/i]called the resignation of Colin Powell. A Powell movement. (They didn’t even touch the possible pun on Colin.)[/b]
That’s how bad it has become. The Bush national security team is now so bad that it is a joke. The[i] Daily Show[/i] noted that Powell was the administration’s “most influential moderate.” He was, at the same time, Stewart noted, also its “least influential moderate.” (See Letterman’s Top 10 comments on Powell below.)
It’s clear to me that the invasion of Fallujah was just a diversionary action. It was meant to distract attention from the real offensive: the [i]blitzkrieg[/i] against the CIA and the State Department. Those two agencies were the locus of opposition to Bush’s reckless foreign policy, and they are no more. The alarmist, war-on-terror people are bashing the CIA for being “risk averse,” which is neocon nonsense, and for having failed to stop the 9/11 attacks, which is more than a little unfair. Now Goss is a giant wrecking ball. The two top officials in the Directorate of Operations walked out yesterday, and more are expected. It reminds me of the six months that James Schlesinger spent as CIA director in 1973, when, a CIA source said, it got so bad that Schlesinger requested an armed guard to accompany him as he strolled the halls at Langley.
Putting Condi Rice at the State Department means that the Cheney-Wolfowitz axis will have a free hand—or, a freer hand. Powell, who will go down in history for his idiotic waving of fake anthrax at the UN Security Council in February 2003 and other show-and-tell fakeries cooked up for him by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, never really managed to stop the neocon juggernaut, whose minions will now invade the CIA and State en masse. History will judge Powell harshly, unless, of course, he decides to run for president in 2008. In any case, my guess is that Powell is too cowardly to go from show-and-tell to kiss-and-tell, so don’t expect Powell to write a tell-all book. He wants to stay friends with the Bush dynasty and the neocons. I hope I’m wrong.
Meanwhile, the Powell editorials are worth noting, though they aren’t as good as the [i]Daily Show [/i]comments. The [i]Post[/i], surprisingly for this hawkish editorial page, says: “It is a measure of the stunning absence of accountability under Mr. Bush that it is Mr. Powell who leaves, while the architects of the failed and even disastrous policies he opposed, from postwar Iraq to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, remain in office.” (What does it mean that Powell opposed “post-war Iraq”? I thought the important thing was that he opposed—secretly, and sans resigning in protest—the invasion itself.) The [i]Times[/i] brings that part up: “There were moments in his tenure when Mr. Powell could have resigned over principle.” But the [i]Times[/i] adds, correctly, that Powell “long ago chose loyalty over leadership.” Alas.
First reactions on Capitol Hill are interesting. The Democrats rushed to the microphones to praise Powell, while the Republicans—except for Sen. Hagel (who is also floating 2008 rumors)—were mostly quiet. So Powell gets the worst of both worlds. He fails to slow down the neocons, and he still gets tarred by the Bush partisans as “not a team player.”
David Letterman’s Top 10 List last night was, of course, about Colin Powell. It was a list of Powell’s top complaints. No. 5: “Tired of Dr. Heart Attack getting all the attention.” No. 2: “Bush constantly asking, ‘So which state are you secretary of?’” Funny. Sad.
Colin Powell, Rod Paige, Spencer Abraham, Anne Veneman. These are names of department secretaries that won't be responsible for four more years of bad policies. Add in John Ashcroft and Don Evans, and that's six empty chambers. Bush has loaded the first bullet with Alberto Gonzales for Dept. of Judiciary, and Rod Paige's spot at Education with the unknown Margaret Spellings, but he has four more... and given the way he's spoken about mandate, none of the surprises are likely to be pleasant.,[i] Jan[/i], AlterNet, http://www.alternet.org
...---... Bush 41's NSA Says Bush 43's Afghanistan, Iraq 'A Failing Venture' ...---...
[b]Security adviser to first President Bush says Afghanistan, Iraq 'a failing venture' [/b]
[[b]AP, 10/20/04:[/b] "Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger," Scowcroft told London's Financial Times. "I think the president is mesmerized." http://www.usatoday.com/news/... ] The national security adviser under the first President Bush says the current president acted contemptuously toward NATO and Europe after Sept. 11 and is trying to cooperate now out of desperation to "rescue a failing venture" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[b]Even some Republicans can see that the Emperor Has No Clothes ...[/b]
...---... Reports: Rice to Replace Powell (No Surprise Here Folks!) ...---...
... "National security adviser Condoleezza Rice emerged as the likely candidate on Monday to replace resigning Secretary of State Colin Powell, Republican sources said. Rice has been President Bush's national security adviser since Bush took office in January 2001 and has been one of his closest confidantes. She was previously the provost of Stanford University.
Knowledgeable Republican sources described Rice as the likely successor to Powell, whose resignation was announced on Monday. A successor to Powell was not expected to be announced on Monday." ...
Powell's reign was marred by the obvious conflict between his integrity and loyalty to the Bush clan (loyalty [i]won[/i], integrity [i]lost big[/i]). Rice starts with [i]no[/i] integrity -- an obvious advantage. Her loyalty to her husband http://www.newyorkmetro.com/n... Bush is absolute. http://www.dailykos.com
Condi Rice is an over-rated incompetent slut ([i]alias[/i] Eva Braun http://www.auschwitz.dk/Braun... ) to Herr Fuhrer Bush ([i]alias[/i] Adolf Hitler) ... So there's[i] no surprise [/i]here Folks!) ...
...---... Cartograms of the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election [Maps] ...---...
University of Michigan's Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/election/ approach the election results via "cartograms" -- maps in which the sizes of states have been rescaled according to their population.
States are drawn with a size proportional not to their sheer topographic acreage -- which has little to do with politics -- but to the number of their inhabitants. States with more people appearing larger than states with fewer, regardless of their actual square mileage Thus, a cartogram of Rhode Island, with its 1.1 million inhabitants, would appear about twice the size of Wyoming, which has half a million, even though Wyoming has 60 times the acreage of Rhode Island.
This map shows Red/Purple/Blue counties, reflecting the intensity of the vote for either party by county. The Redder, the more Republican votes, the Bluer, more Democratic votes. Purple counties reflect a fairly even split:
Now converting this into a cartogram -- controlling for population rather than land mass -- reveals this:
[b]Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign "insurgents". In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our name. By John Pilger[/b]
Edward S Herman's landmark essay, "The Banality of Evil", has never seemed more apposite. "Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on 'normalisation'," wrote Herman. "There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals . . . others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalise the unthinkable for the general public."
On Radio 4's Today (6 November), a BBC reporter in Baghdad referred to the coming attack on the city of Fallujah as "dangerous" and "very dangerous" for the Americans. When asked about civilians, he said, reassuringly, that the US marines were "going about with a Tannoy" telling people to get out. He omitted to say that tens of thousands of people would be left in the city. He mentioned in passing the "most intense bombing" of the city with no suggestion of what that meant for people beneath the bombs.
As for the defenders, those Iraqis who resist in a city that heroically defied Saddam Hussein; they were merely "insurgents holed up in the city", as if they were an alien body, a lesser form of life to be "flushed out" (the Guardian): a suitable quarry for "rat-catchers", which is the term another BBC reporter told us the Black Watch use. According to a senior British officer, the Americans view Iraqis as Untermenschen, a term that Hitler used in Mein Kampf to describe Jews, Romanies and Slavs as sub-humans. This is how the Nazi army laid siege to Russian cities, slaughtering combatants and non-combatants alike.
Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners of the kind that behead people: for example, by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian said to be al-Qaeda's "top operative" in Iraq. This is what the Americans say; it is also Blair's latest lie to parliament. Count the times it is parroted at a camera, at us. No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American and, by all indications, loathed. These indications come from apparently credible polling organisations, one of which estimates that of 2,700 attacks every month by the resistance, six can be credited to the infamous al-Zarqawi.
In a letter sent on 14 October to Kofi Annan, the Fallujah Shura Council, which administers the city, said: "In Fallujah, [the Americans] have created a new vague target: al-Zarqawi. Almost a year has elapsed since they created this new pretext and whenever they destroy houses, mosques, restaurants, and kill children and women, they said: 'We have launched a successful operation against al-Zarqawi.' The people of Fallujah assure you that this person, if he exists, is not in Fallujah . . . and we have no links to any groups supporting such inhuman behaviour. We appeal to you to urge the UN [to prevent] the new massacre which the Americans and the puppet government are planning to start soon in Fallujah, as well as many parts of the country."
Not a word of this was reported in the mainstream media in Britain and America.
"What does it take to shock them out of their baffling silence?" asked the playwright Ronan Bennett in April after the US marines, in an act of collective vengeance for the killing of four American mercenaries, killed more than 600 people in Fallujah, a figure that was never denied. Then, as now, they used the ferocious firepower of AC-130 gunships and F-16 fighter-bombers and 500lb bombs against slums. They incinerate children; their snipers boast of killing anyone, as snipers did in Sarajevo.
Bennett was referring to the legion of silent Labour backbenchers, with honourable exceptions, and lobotomised junior ministers (remember Chris Mullin?). He might have added those journalists who strain every sinew to protect "our" side, who normalise the unthinkable by not even gesturing at the demonstrable immorality and criminality. Of course, to be shocked by what "we" do is dangerous, because this can lead to a wider understanding of why "we" are there in the first place and of the grief "we" bring not only to Iraq, but to so many parts of the world: that the terrorism of al-Qaeda is puny by comparison with ours.
There is nothing illicit about this cover-up; it happens in daylight. The most striking recent example followed the announcement, on 29 October, by the prestigious scientific journal, the Lancet, of a study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Anglo-American invasion. Eighty-four per cent of the deaths were caused by the actions of the Americans and the British, and 95 per cent of these were killed by air attacks and artillery fire, most of whom were women and children.
The editors of the excellent MediaLens observed the rush - no, stampede - to smother this shocking news with "scepticism" and silence. They reported that, by 2 November, the Lancet report had been ignored by the Observer, the Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Star, the Sun and many others. The BBC framed the report in terms of the government's "doubts" and Channel 4 News delivered a hatchet job, based on a Downing Street briefing. With one exception, none of the scientists who compiled this rigorously peer-reviewed report was asked to substantiate their work until ten days later when the pro-war Observer published an interview with the editor of the Lancet, slanted so that it appeared he was "answering his critics". David Edwards, a MediaLens editor, asked the researchers to respond to the media criticism; their meticulous demolition can be viewed on the http://www.medialens.org alert for 2 November. None of this was published in the mainstream. Thus, the unthinkable that "we" had engaged in such a slaughter was suppressed - normalised. It is reminiscent of the suppression of the death of more than a million Iraqis, including half a million infants under five, as a result of the Anglo-American-driven embargo.
In contrast, there is no media questioning of the methodology of the Iraqi Special Tribune, which has announced that mass graves contain 300,000 victims of Saddam Hussein. The Special Tribune, a product of the quisling regime in Baghdad, is run by the Americans; respected scientists want nothing to do with it. There is no questioning of what the BBC calls "Iraq's first democratic elections". There is no reporting of how the Americans have assumed control over the electoral process with two decrees passed in June that allow an "electoral commission" in effect to eliminate parties Washington does not like. Time magazine reports that the CIA is buying its preferred candidates, which is how the agency has fixed elections over the world. When or if the elections take place, we will be doused in cliches about the nobility of voting, as America's puppets are "democratically" chosen.
The model for this was the "coverage" of the American presidential election, a blizzard of platitudes normalising the unthinkable: that what happened on 2 November was not democracy in action. With one exception, no one in the flock of pundits flown from London described the circus of Bush and Kerry as the contrivance of fewer than 1 per cent of the population, the ultra-rich and powerful who control and manage a permanent war economy. That the losers were not only the Democrats, but the vast majority of Americans, regardless of whom they voted for, was unmentionable.
No one reported that John Kerry, by contrasting the "war on terror" with Bush's disastrous attack on Iraq, merely exploited public distrust of the invasion to build support for American dominance throughout the world. "I'm not talking about leaving [Iraq]," said Kerry. "I'm talking about winning!" In this way, both he and Bush shifted the agenda even further to the right, so that millions of anti-war Democrats might be persuaded that the US has "the responsibility to finish the job" lest there be "chaos". The issue in the presidential campaign was neither Bush nor Kerry, but a war economy aimed at conquest abroad and economic division at home. The silence on this was comprehensive, both in America and here.
Bush won by invoking, more skilfully than Kerry, the fear of an ill-defined threat. How was he able to normalise this paranoia? Let's look at the recent past. Following the end of the cold war, the American elite - Republican and Democrat - were having great difficulty convincing the public that the billions of dollars spent on the war economy should not be diverted to a "peace dividend". A majority of Americans refused to believe that there was still a "threat" as potent as the red menace. This did not prevent Bill Clinton sending to Congress the biggest "defence" bill in history in support of a Pentagon strategy called "full-spectrum dominance". On 11 September 2001, the threat was given a name: Islam.
Flying into Philadelphia recently, I spotted the Kean congressional report on 11 September from the 9/11 Commission on sale at the bookstalls. "How many do you sell?" I asked. "One or two," was the reply. "It'll disappear soon." Yet, this modest, blue-covered book is a revelation. Like the Butler report in the UK, which detailed all the incriminating evidence of Blair's massaging of intelligence before the invasion of Iraq, then pulled its punches and concluded nobody was responsible, so the Kean report makes excruciatingly clear what really happened, then fails to draw the conclusions that stare it in the face. It is a supreme act of normalising the unthinkable. This is not surprising, as the conclusions are volcanic.
The most important evidence to the 9/11 Commission came from General Ralph Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad). "Air force jet fighters could have intercepted hijacked airliners roaring towards the World Trade Center and Pentagon," he said, "if only air traffic controllers had asked for help 13 minutes sooner . . . We would have been able to shoot down all three . . . all four of them."
Why did this not happen?
The Kean report makes clear that "the defence of US aerospace on 9/11 was not conducted in accord with pre-existing training and protocols . . . If a hijack was confirmed, procedures called for the hijack coordinator on duty to contact the Pentagon's National Military Command Center (NMCC) . . . The NMCC would then seek approval from the office of the Secretary of Defence to provide military assistance . . . "
Uniquely, this did not happen. The commission was told by the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Authority that there was no reason the procedure was not operating that morning. "For my 30 years of experience . . ." said Monte Belger, "the NMCC was on the net and hearing everything real-time . . . I can tell you I've lived through dozens of hijackings . . . and they were always listening in with everybody else."
But on this occasion, they were not. The Kean report says the NMCC was never informed. Why? Again, uniquely, all lines of communication failed, the commission was told, to America's top military brass. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defence, could not be found; and when he finally spoke to Bush an hour and a half later, it was, says the Kean report, "a brief call in which the subject of shoot-down authority was not discussed". As a result, Norad's commanders were "left in the dark about what their mission was".
The report reveals that the only part of a previously fail-safe command system that worked was in the White House where Vice-President Cheney was in effective control that day, and in close touch with the NMCC. Why did he do nothing about the first two hijacked planes? Why was the NMCC, the vital link, silent for the first time in its existence? Kean ostentatiously refuses to address this. Of course, it could be due to the most extraordinary combination of coincidences. Or it could not.
In July 2001, a top secret briefing paper prepared for Bush read: "We [the CIA and FBI] believe that OBL [Osama Bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."
On the afternoon of 11 September, Donald Rumsfeld, having failed to act against those who had just attacked the United States, told his aides to set in motion an attack on Iraq - when the evidence was non-existent. Eighteen months later, the invasion of Iraq, unprovoked and based on lies now documented, took place. This epic crime is the greatest political scandal of our time, the latest chapter in the long 20th-century history of the west's conquests of other lands and their resources. If we allow it to be normalised, if we refuse to question and probe the hidden agendas and unaccountable secret power structures at the heart of "democratic" governments and if we allow the people of Fallujah to be crushed in our name, we surrender both democracy and humanity.
[b]Source:[/b]
John Pilger is currently a visiting professor at Cornell University, New York. His latest book, [i]Tell Me No Lies: investigative journalism and its triumphs[/i], is published by Jonathan Cape, http://www.newstatesman.com/s...
“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the civil authorities.” - T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), The Sunday Times, August 1920
[b]A history lesson about the town we are currently destroying[/b].
There is a small City on one of the bends of the Euphrates that sticks out into the great Syrian Desert. It’s on an ancient trade route linking the oasis towns of the Nejd province of what is today Saudi Arabia with the great cities of Aleppo and Mosul to the north. It also is on the desert highway between Baghdad and Amman. This city is a crossroads.
For millennia people have been going up and down that north-south desert highway. The city is like a seaport on that great desert, a place that binds together people in what are today Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. People in the city are linked by tribe, family or marriage to people in all these places.
The ideas that came out of the eastern part of Saudi Arabia in the late 18th Century, which today we call Wahhabi ideas—those of a man named Muhammad Ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab—took root in this city more than 200 years ago. In other words, it is a place where what we would call fundamentalist salafi, or Wahhabi ideas, have been well implanted for 10 generations.
This town also is the place where in the spring of 1920, before T. E. Lawrence wrote the above passage, the British discerned civil unrest.
The British sent a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer who had quelled unrest in the corners of their empire, Lt. Col. Gerald Leachman, to master this unruly corner of Iraq. Leachman was killed in an altercation with a local leader named Shaykh Dhari. His death sparked a war that ended up costing the lives of 10,000 Iraqis and more than 1,000 British and Indian troops. To restore Iraq to their control, the British used massive air power, bombing indiscriminately. That city is now called Fallujah.
Shaykh Dhari’s grandson, today a prominent Iraqi cleric, helped to broker the end of the U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah in April of this year. Fallujah thus embodies the interrelated tribal, religious and national aspects of Iraq’s history.
The Bush administration is not creating the world anew in the Middle East. It is waging a war in a place where history really matters.
[b]A change for the worse[/b]
The United States has been a major Middle Eastern power since 1933, when a group of U.S. oil companies signed an exploration deal with Saudi Arabia. The United States has been dominant in the Middle East since 1942, when American troops first landed in North Africa and Iran. American troops have not left the region since. In other words, they have been in different parts of the Middle East for 62 years.
The United States was once celebrated as a non-colonial, sometimes anti-colonial, power in the Middle East, renowned for more than a century for its educational, medical and charity efforts. Since the Cold War, however, the United States has intervened increasingly in the region’s internal affairs and conflicts. Things have changed fundamentally for the worse with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, particularly with the revelation that the core pretexts offered by the administration for the invasion were false. And particularly with growing Iraqi dissatisfaction with the occupation and with the images of the hellish chaos broadcast regularly everywhere in the world except in the United States—thanks to the excellent job done by the media in keeping the real human costs of Iraq off our television screens.
The United States is perceived as stepping into the boots of Western colonial occupiers, still bitterly remembered from Morocco to Iran. The Bush administration marched into Iraq proclaiming the very best of intentions while stubbornly refusing to understand that in the eyes of most Iraqis and most others in the Middle East it is actions, not proclaimed intentions, that count. It does not matter what you say you are doing in Fallujah, where U.S. troops just launched an attack after weeks of bombing. What matters is what you are doing in Fallujah—and what people see that you are doing.
[b]Fact-free and faith-based[/b]
Most Middle East experts in the United States, both inside and outside the government, have drawn on their knowledge of the cultures, languages, history, politics of the Middle East—and on their experience—to conclude that most Bush administration Middle East policies, whether in Iraq or Palestine, are harmful to the interests of the United States and the peoples of this region. A few of these experts have had the temerity to say so, to the outrage of the Bush administration and its supporters, who are committed to what I would call a fact-free, faith-based approach to Middle East policymaking.
These experts predicted that it would be difficult to occupy a vast, complex country like Iraq, that serious resistance from a major part of the population was likely, and that the invasion and occupation would complicate U.S. relations with other countries in the region. It is clear today that all of these fears were well founded.
After 20 months of occupation, the United States continues to make the important decisions in Iraq. Instead of control being exercised through the Coalition Provisional Authority, it takes place through the largest U.S. embassy in the world and its staff of more than 3,000. You can be sure that should the Iraqis try to end the basing of U.S. troops, or try to tear up the contracts with Halliburton and other U.S. companies, or take any other steps that displease the Bush administration, they would be brought up short by the U.S. viceroy, a.k.a. Ambassador John Negroponte.
We, and even more so the Iraqi government and its people, are trapped in a nightmare with no apparent end, in part because those experts who challenged neoconservative fantasies about U.S. troops being received with rice and flowers simply were not heeded. They warned that it is impossible to impose democracy through force in Iraq. Mao Tse Tung said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun; he did not say democracy does. And it doesn’t.
The stench of hypocrisy rises when the United States, a nation supposedly com-mit-ted to democratization and reform, does not hesitate to embrace dictatorial, autocratic and undemocratic regimes like those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and now even Libya, simply because they act in line with U.S. security concerns or give lucrative contracts to U.S. businesses. The United States claims to be acting in favor of democracy, yet embraces Qaddhafi! People in the Middle East notice this gap between word and deed—even if Americans don’t notice the things being done in our name.
The United States, in fact, has a far from sterling record in promoting democracy in the Middle East. Initially it started off on a better footing. It opposed colonial rule and -promoted self-determination, as in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points after World War I. But when the United States returned to the Middle East after World War II, it soon supported anti-democratic regimes simply because they provided access to oil and military bases.
If you look carefully, what the Bush administration seems to mean by democracy in the Middle East is governments that do what the United States wants.
[b]Conquer and plunder[/b]
Middle Eastern economics is another area about which we hear very little in our media. Americans may not be aware of it, but the wholesale theft of the property of the Iraqi people through privatization was prominently reported all over the Middle East. A recent case involved the handover of Iraqi Airways to an investor group headed by a family with close ties to the Saddam Hussein regime. The airline is worth $3 billion, because in addition to valuable landing slots all over Europe and a few tattered airplanes, Iraqi Airways owns the land on which most of the airports are built.
Such cases, and there are many, cause deep anger against the United States, and evoke bitter resistance to pressures for economic liberalization that people in the region interpret as the looting of their country’s assets.
These privatization measures arouse deep suspicion in the Middle East, because of fears that the region’s primary asset, oil, may be next.
Here, too, history is all-important. Since commercial quantities of oil were discovered in the Middle East at the turn of the 20th century, decisions over pricing, control and ownership of these valuable resources were largely in the hands of giant Western oil companies. They decided prices. They decided how much in taxes they would pay. They decided who controlled the local governments. They decided how much oil would be produced. And they decided everything else about oil, including conditions of exploration, production and labor.
In those seven decades the people of the countries where this wealth was located obtained few benefits from it. Only with the rise of OPEC and the nationalization of the Middle East oil industries and the oil price rises in the ’70s did the situation change. Sadly, it was the oligarchs, the kleptocrats and Western companies that benefited most from the increased prices.
Fears that they will lose their resources shape much of the nationalism of the peoples of the Middle East. And events in Iraq only enhance these fears.
By invading, occupying and imposing a new regime on Iraq, the United States may be following, intentionally or not, in the footsteps of the old Western colonial powers—and doing so in a region that within living memory ended a lengthy struggle to expel colonial occupations. They fought from 1830 to 1962 to kick out the French from Algeria. From 1882 to 1956 they fought to get the British out of Egypt. That’s within the lifetime of every person over 45 in the Middle East. Foreign troops on their soil against their will is deeply familiar.
"I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived." --Willa Cather
[b]Yasser Arafat was a revolutionary who waged a life-long struggle for the nation of Palestine for his people ... Bush has stated that he is "committed" to "spending the United States of America's capital" in order to create an independent state of Palestine ... We'll see ... Make sure to read "Peace Finds Arafat" on http://www.tblog.com/template... ...[/b]
Yasser Arafat is crafty ‘til the end. His death could not have come at a worse time for the Bush administration.
It creates a problem for the neocons that they cannot deal with head-on. Tony Blair's Washington visit is critical, because Blair is meeting President Bush face to face, unfiltered by aides, to tell the president that he needs to take the Road Map out of the glove compartment. It’s an issue on which Blair, already facing an increasingly anti-Iraq war public opinion at home, agrees with the Old Europeans. They all believe that it’s time that Ariel Sharon get his comeuppance.
According to the [i]Post[/i], http://www.washingtonpost.com... Bush is considering the naming of a Middle East envoy to restart the peace process, an action that would trigger a huge behind-the-scenes struggle to determine who it is and what powers the envoy might have.
It also provides an opportunity for the Republican coalition’s two anti-neocon factions to join hands. The realists, led by Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, et al., and the nativists, led by Pat Buchanan and Co., can be expected to mobilize in support of a major new initiative to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Scowcroft outline the general shape of what an agreement might start with in a [i]Post[/i] op-ed http://www.washingtonpost.com... today:
... "The president should add substance to his commitment to an independent Palestinian state. It must include steps to provide security to Israel and to give the Palestinians the ability and means to construct a viable political entity free from the crushing presence of Israeli troops. The United States should insist that Israel stop construction of its wall on the West Bank and mirror its withdrawal from Gaza with the evacuation of the West Bank. In return, the wall and Israeli troops would be replaced by an international force, principally European or perhaps NATO troops." ...
And the Arabs can be expected to unite in demanding a return to Oslo-style negotiations and the Road Map. Already King Abdullah of Jordan and Jimmy Carter have side-by-side op-eds in the [i]Times[/i] trying to push Bush in that direction.
How can the neocons deal with this? I’m sure their strategy will be to delay, counting on the militants of Hamas to bail them out by blowing up buses. Keep your eye on Elliott Abrams, the Middle East chief at the National Security Council.
[b]George W. Bush is a War Criminal http://www.motherearth.org/bu... ... That Karl Rove staged a brilliant coup d'etat is irrelevant ... Bush should be charged with treason and war crimes; impeached; and, formally put on trial for Crimes Against Humanity ...[/b]
Do Americans of good conscience really believe that we are making the United States more secure by bombing and killing the people of Fallujah?
That's the justification President Bush and his hawkish circle have given for their brutal offensive against the Sunni stronghold as they push ahead for the total military occupation of Iraq.
Why are we killing Iraqis in their own country? And why are our forces being killed?
Of course it was convenient and the better part of valor for the president to wait until after the election to start dropping the 500-pound bombs on Fallujah as well as raking the streets with artillery and aircraft firepower.
Bush, who has never been in war, flaunted his commander in chief status during the campaign. But clearly he did not want to put it to the test at Fallujah before Election Day.
Had he done so, the president would have had to explain why he took the United States into Iraq and why he was targeting innocent Iraqis.
From day one, the U.S. government has been hard-pressed to find legal justification for being in Iraq by force. U.S. military moves were contrary to the U.N. Charter and the laws that came from the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II.
Under the U.N. Charter, armed force by a state against the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of another state is a violation of international law.
Does anyone believe that hand-picked interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, on the CIA payroll for years, is a free soul? Did we really make war against Iraq out of the goodness of our hearts to ensure free elections for Iraqis?
The silence of the Democrats is playing into the president's hands. As was the case with the original October 2002 congressional resolution authorizing war, Democrats are unsure of themselves and therefore unwilling to challenge the president.
Once the offensive was under way, many Americans were appalled to learn that among our first major targets were the hospitals in Fallujah.
By now everyone in this country must know that every reason Bush gave to attack Iraq has turned out to be a false. No weapons of mass destruction were found after two task forces took months and spent millions to hunt for them.
There was no imminent threat by Iraq against the United States. And virtually nothing has been found to connect al-Qaida with deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Presidential credibility used to have some meaning in this country. The president visited the soldiers wounded in Iraq at Walter Reed Hospital Army Medical Center on Tuesday for the first time since March. He told reporters that the U.S. soldiers in Fallujah were doing "the hard work necessary" for a free Iraq to emerge.
And he said the coalition forces were moving into Fallujah "to bring to justice those who are willing to kill the innocent, those who are trying to terrorize the Iraqi people and our coalition (and) those who want to stop democracy."
The Bush administration has no count on civilians who have lost their lives in the current massive assault on Fallujah, but some 900 civilians reportedly died in the fighting last April when the U.S. retreated temporarily from Fallujah.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters http://www.commondreams.org/s... he knew of "no specific estimate of civilians" who may have been killed in the recent fighting.
But he added: "I know the military goes out of its way to minimize the loss of civilian life, and what we are working to achieve in Iraq is an important cause that will make America more secure."
Thousands in Fallujah fled their homes and are living in tents, knowing that the U.S. attack was about to begin.
Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers are going from house to house in urban street fighting -- something Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush, wanted to avoid as a way of reducing the human cost of the first Gulf War. For that reason he resisted going on to Baghdad after the liberation of Kuwait.
To understand the Iraqi resistance, I suggest reading the Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott. He wrote: "Breathes there a man with soul so dead who never to himself has said this is mine own my native land."
A little more than a week after Election Day, the reports are rolling in of some [i]unsettling trends concerning electronic voting machines[/i]. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, the machines registered [b]several hundred more votes for Bush than the number of total voters who cast ballots[/b]. And in North Carolina, a voting machine[b] lost more than 4,000 votes [/b]because of problems determining the machines' memory capacity. There's been more than 30,000 complaints about electronic voting machines—and the Internet rumors are flying.
That's why Working Assets' ActForChange http://www.workingforchange.c... is working with several members of Congress to call for an[i] independent authority [/i]to investigate and dig deeper into the electronic voting problems. Tell the Government Accountability Office to immediately start an investigation—so we can get to the bottom of the e-voting mess. [b]ACT NOW: http://www.workingforchange.c... !!! [/b]...
[b]George Monbiot is the author of the best selling books [i]The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order [/i]and[i] Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain[/i]; as well as the investigative travel books [i]Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed [/i]and [i]No Man’s Land[/i]. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper. Monbiot also has a web-site: http://www.monbiot.com and his thought-provoking articles are worth pondering whether or not one agrees entirely with his conclusions ...[/b]
[b]Religion of the Rich
There is a precedent for the Bush Project, but it’s not fascism
by George Monbiot [/b]
"If Bush wins," the US writer Barbara Probst Solomon claimed just before the election, "fascism is possible in the United States."(1) Blind faith in a leader, she said, a conservative working class and the use of fear as a political weapon provide the necessary preconditions.
She's wrong. So is Richard Sennett, who described Bush's security state as "soft fascism" in the Guardian last month.(2) So is the endless traffic on the internet. In [i][u]The Anatomy of Fascism[/u][/i], http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob... Robert Paxton persuasively describes it as "... a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity".(3) It is hard to read Republican politics in these terms. Fascism recruited the elite, but it did not come from the elite. It relied on hysterical popular excitement: something which no one could accuse George Bush of provoking.
But this is not to say that the Bush project is unprecedented. It is, in fact, a repetition of quite another ideology. If we don't understand it, we have no hope of confronting it.
Puritanism is perhaps the least-understood of any political movement in European history. In popular mythology it is reduced to a joyless cult of self-denial, obsessed by stripping churches and banning entertainment: a perception which removes it as far as possible from the conspicuous consumption of Republican America. But Puritanism was the product of an economic transformation.
In England in the first half of the 17th Century, the remnants of the feudal state performed a role analagous to that of social democracy in the second half of the 20th. It was run, of course, in the interests of the monarchy and clergy. But it also regulated the economic exploitation of the lower orders. As RH Tawney observed in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), Charles 1st sought to nationalise industries, control foreign exchange and prosecute lords who evicted peasants from the land, employers who refused to pay the full wage, and magistrates who failed to give relief to the poor.(4)
But this model was no longer viable. Over the preceding 150 years, "the rise of commercial companies, no longer local, but international" led in Europe to "a concentration of financial power on a scale unknown before" and "the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization of the Middle Ages to a new money-power". The economy was “swept forward by an immense expansion of commerce and finance, rather than of industry". The kings and princes of Europe had become "puppets dancing on wires" held by the financiers.(5)
In England, the dissolution of the monasteries had catalysed a massive seizure of wealth by a new commercial class. They began by grabbing ("enclosing") the land and shaking out its inhabitants. This generated a mania for land speculation, which in turn led to the creation of sophisticated financial markets, experimenting in futures, arbitrage and almost all the vices we now associate with the Age of Enron.
All this was furiously denounced by the early theologists of the English Reformation. The first Puritans preached that men should be charitable, encourage justice and punish exploitation. This character persisted through the 17th Century among the settlers of New England. But in the old country it didn't stand a chance.
Puritanism was primarily the religion of the new commercial classes. It attracted traders, money lenders, bankers and industrialists. Calvin had given them what the old order could not: a theological justification of commerce. Capitalism, in his teachings, was not unchristian, but could be used for the glorification of God. From his doctrine of individual purification, the late Puritans forged a new theology.
At its heart was an "idealization of personal responsibility" before God. This rapidly turned into “a theory of individual rights” in which "the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed". By the mid-17th Century, most English Puritans saw in poverty "not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion" but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will.”(6)
It wasn't hard for them to make this leap. If the Christian life, as idealised by both Calvin and Luther, was to concentrate on the direct contact of the individual soul with God, then society, of the kind perceived and protected by the medieval Church, becomes redundant. “Individualism in religion led "to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric".(7)
To this the late Puritans added another concept. They conflated their religious calling with their commercial one. "Next to the saving of his soul," the preacher Richard Steele wrote in 1684, the tradesman's "care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go."(8) Success in business became a sign of spiritual grace: providing proof to the entrepreneur, in Steele’s words, that “God has blessed his trade”. The next step follows automatically. The Puritan minister Joseph Lee anticipated Adam Smith’s invisible hand by more than a century, when he claimed that “the advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public”.(9) By private persons, of course, he meant the men of property, who were busily destroying the advancement of everyone else.
Tawney describes the Puritans as early converts to “administrative nihilism”: the doctrine we now call the minimal state. "Business affairs," they believed, "should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality".(10) They owed nothing to anyone. Indeed, they formulated a radical new theory of social obligation, which maintained that helping the poor created idleness and spiritual dissolution, divorcing them from God.
Of course, the Puritans differed from Bush’s people in that they worshipped production but not consumption. But this is just a different symptom of the same disease. Tawney characterises the late Puritans as people who believed that “the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian.”
There were some, such as the Levellers and the Diggers, who remained true to the original spirit of the Reformation, but they were violently suppressed. The pursuit of adulterers and sodomites provided an ideal distraction for the increasingly impoverished lower classes.
Ronan Bennett's excellent new novel, [u][i]Havoc in Its Third Year[/i][/u], http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob... about a Puritan revolution in the 1630s, has the force of a parable.(11) An obsession with terrorists (in this case Irish and Jesuit), homosexuality and sexual licence, the vicious chastisement of moral deviance, the disparagement of public support for the poor: swap the black suits for grey ones, and the characters could have walked out of Bush’s America.
So why has this ideology resurfaced in 2004? Because it has to. The enrichment of the elite and impoverishment of the lower classes requires a justifying ideology if it is to be sustained. In the United States this ideology has to be a religious one. Bush’s government is forced back to the doctrines of Puritanism as an historical necessity. If we are to understand what it’s up to, we must look not to the 1930s, but to the 1630s.
[b]References:[/b]
1. Quoted by Quico Alsedo, 27th October 2004. “El Fascismo Es Posible Si Gana Bush” Dice Probst Salomon(sic). El Mundo.
2. Richard Sennett, 23rd October 2004. The Age of Anxiety. The Guardian.
3. Robert O. Paxton, 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
4. RH Tawney, 1998 edition. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Transaction publishers, New Brunswick.
5. ibid.
6. ibid.
7. ibid.
8. Richard Steele, 1684. The Tradesman’s Calling. Cited in Tawney (ibid).
9. Joseph Lee, cited in Tawney, ibid.
10. Tawney, ibid.
11. Ronan Bennett, 2004. Havoc in its Third Year. Bloomsbury, London.
The world might not hear from American media that Bush had 53 million votes or more against him, with nearly half the country voting against him. They might just hear that Bush "won." [i]Sorry Everybody[/i], http://72.3.131.10/ an enormous online photogallery project puts a face on the silent almost-majority. Thousands of people have submitted photographs of themselves with messages to the world to say that they did their best.
One Oregonian's message to the world is http://72.3.131.10/upload_fil... : [i]Sorry World[/i]. Oregon did it's best. Even vets know when it's gone too far.... U.S.M.C. Of course, the knuckleheads will say that this amounts to apologizing to terrorists... but that's what the FAQ http://72.3.131.10/faq/ is for.
"We had an attorney general who treated criticism and dissent as treason, ethnic identity as grounds for suspicion and Congressional and judicial oversight as inconvenient obstacles. He was a disaster from a civil liberties perspective but also from a national security perspective."
-- David Cole, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/1... author of [i]Enemy Aliens [/i]and professor of law at Georgetown University, on John Ashcroft's resignation.
[b]Now we face[i] another [/i]neo-con fascist, Bush's long-time toady and creep, Alberto 'Gitmo' Gonzales ... Please read "Alberto Gonzales: A Record of Injustice" on http://www.tblog.com/template... , and then write to your Representatives and Senators in Congress http://www.congress.org and demand that they reject this incompetent Bush Family thug ...[/b]
[b]In his first press conference after he won re-election, George W. Bush said he would try to bridge the gap that sharply divides his supporters from his detractors. David Corn says http://www.tompaine.com/artic... he shouldn't bother. Divisiveness has a long history in American politics stemming from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and Corn says its provides an opportunity for Democrats to become stronger. Just as long as there are no duels involved.
David Corn writes The Loyal Opposition twice a month for[i] TomPaine.com[/i]. Corn is also the Washington editor of [i]The Nation [/i]and is the author of [i]The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception [/i](Crown Publishers).[/b]
Maybe George W. Bush deserves a break. Maybe we should put a hold on the partisan and ideological sniping and give him a chance to unite a country that faces so many challengers here and abroad. Maybe the political warfare has gone too far and all the advocates—myself included—have let our own agendas drive us more than concern for the common good. Maybe we should try to heal the political wounds, bridge the divide and move forward as one nation. Maybe Bush’s critics should acknowledge he has offered to reach out and try to do the same…Naaah.
As soon as the election results were apparent, I urged the Bush opposition to maintain and celebrate the great divide in American politics. After all, it was a positive thing that almost half of the electorate (49 percent) did not accept Bush’s leadership, policies and agenda. Forty-nine percent of the voters, according to the exit polls, said they were angry or dissatisfied with the Bush administration—which was more than the 48 percent who reported they were satisfied and enthusiastic. Over half (54 percent) said they believed Bush cares more about large corporations than ordinary Americans. Fifty-five percent did not buy Bush’s spin that the war in Iraq was going well. And almost as many people rejected Bush’s assertion that the war there has made the United States safer. Bush and his views were not embraced. He won because a slim majority judged him a stronger leader than John Kerry. So I argued that the deeply rooted Blue-Red split was good news and urged people not to bemoan it. But after the shock (caused by the realization that 59 million Americans did not accept my analysis that Bush was a champion dissembler who had misled the country into war) wore off, I wondered if such talk was petty or, worse, self-defeating. Perhaps, I thought, we need not to suspend the opposition but to turn down the vituperation.
Then I watched Bush at his first post-election press conference. He said that he would “reach out to others and explain why I make the decisions I make” and that he would “reach out to everyone who shares our goals.” Extending himself to those who agree with him to explain his decisions? That’s not much in the way of reaching out. What about reaching out to people who believe Iraq is a mess and then actually listening to their ideas? That is something Bush has not done and is unlikely to do so. Consider this: A few weeks ago, retired Colonel Pat Lang, a former Middle East specialist for the Defense Intelligence Agency told me he had spoken at a gathering of 100 or so senior Middle East experts in Washington. Lang asked for a show of hands: How many of the people in the room had been consulted by the Bush administration before or since the Iraq invasion? Not a hand went up. This White House does not know how to reach out.
Also in that press conference, Bush joked that he was “willing to reach out to everybody by including the White House press corps.” (How funny—especially since Bush has held fewer press conferences than any president since Woodrow Wilson.) But then he refused to let reporters ask follow-up questions. This may seem a minor matter. But follow-ups are essential. The normal routine is that a reporter poses a question and the president does not answer it directly. The follow-up is the only chance the reporter has to try to squeeze a meaningful response out of Bush. If Bush were truly interested in establishing a more productive relationship with the press, he would grant the journalists follow-ups. Instead, he rigidly enforced his “no follow-ups rule.” And not a single journalist asked him why he stuck to this rule and whether he is afraid to have a genuine give-and-take with the press.
Bush—duh!—is not really interested in reaching out. So why should the 50-minus-1 percent opposition do the same? Especially after Bush trashed John Kerry during the campaign. Moreover, Bush’s hardball conservative comrades show no signs of mellowing. After Sen. Arlen Specter, the Republican in line to chair the Judiciary Committee, observed that it might be tough for Bush to win confirmation of judicial appointees who oppose abortion rights, the right wing tried to crucify Specter, demanding that he be blocked from assuming the chairmanship of the committee. (“We got rid of Tom Daschle,” Jerry Falwell huffed. “We don’t need a Republican Tom Daschle.”) And Mr. Reach Out in the White House let the Specter-bashing proceed. As the Boston Globe’s Thomas Oliphant noted, “The Bush White House—which could stop the whole thing quickly and decisively if it wished—has decided to let Specter twist a bit longer.”
If the conservatives are not going to stand down—indeed, they are insisting that Bush reward the religious right for achieving his re-election—there is less reason for the Bush opposition to tone down the rhetoric. After all, if Bush was a no-good fake and hypocrite promoting harmful policies before the election, he is still one now.
And what further convinced me there was no cause for the anti-Bush partisans to soften their language was history. This week I have been attending a conference hosted by the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism for its ten 9/11 Security and Liberty Fellows (of which I am one). One of our first speakers was Joyce Appleby, a noted historian. She focused on the rise and fall of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. And it was as if she was describing the present. Not that the Bush is going to throw his critics into jail. But she reminded us that the 1790s was a time of extreme partisanship. As Appleby described it, the Federalists generally wanted the people (that is, white male landowners) to vote for the rulers and then leave the governing to an enlightened ruling class that ought to be revered and trusted. But the French Revolution fired up Americans—including Thomas Jefferson—and persuaded them that common folks could play a greater role, and that included criticizing elected leaders. Jefferson and others formed the Republican Party to oppose the Federalists. And the politics of the day were passionate and harsh, with sharp and scurrilous accusations routinely hurled. Republican newspapers lambasted Federalists, and—gasp—even denigrated a “toothless” George Washington. Men who had fought with one another in the Continental Army but who now were on different sides crossed the street rather than have to tip their hat to the other.
President John Adams and his Federalist allies in Congress—aghast that the riffraff was questioning the motives and actions of officeholders—passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which gave Adams the power to imprison or deport aliens he deemed a threat and which made it a crime to criticize government officials. Republican newspaper editors were indicted and their papers were shut down. Not a single one was publishing by the spring of 1800. A New York congressman was arrested for petitioning against the sedition law. Thomas Cooper, a prominent journalist, went to jail for writing that Adams was “hardly in the infancy of political mistakes.” A typical punishment under the sedition law was two years imprisonment and a $2,000 fine (which would be an $80,000 fine today). When Moreau de Mery, an owner of a bookstore, was threatened with deportation, he attempted to learn how he had offended the Adams administration. Adams offered this explanation: “He’s just too French.” (Sound familiar?)
Talk about a bitter partisan divide. And Adams’ extreme tactics didn’t work. Thomas Jefferson and his Republican Party won power in 1800, and the Alien and Sedition Acts were repealed or allowed to expire. The dissenters in jail were released. Republican newspapers were revived and flourished. The politics, though, remained bare-knuckled—and worse. Duels were popular. Three-quarters of them, Appleby said, were political. A congressional dueling grounds existed in Maryland. (A field trip for Zell Miller?) The intense partisanship—sparked by Jefferson—did not fade. And today he is on the nickel.
The disputes at the turn of America’s first century were significant and focused on fundamental issues of governance. The arguments of today are just as consequential. Should a president be allowed to get away with launching an elective war on the basis of untrue assertions? How best can the nation protect itself from real threats? Should the wealthy receive tax cuts while poverty increases? Should the administration be permitted to do nothing about global warming? If this is not the stuff of passionate discourse, then what is? Applying her reading of history to the present, Appleby remarks, “It is up to the opposition to be as strong and clear as the Jeffersonian opposition. A lot of responsibility belongs to the party that lost.” Democrats and other Bush foes need to preserve the profound split in American politics, celebrate it and figure out how to win over a majority to their side of the gulf. There’s nothing wrong with divisiveness in politics. It is a grand tradition that ought to inspire today’s Democrats. But in the spirit of reaching out, I am willing to make one concession: Let’s all agree—no sedition laws and no duels.
...---... BREAK THE CODE: The Republican Dictionary ...---...
[b]At least until the draft comes, progressive Americans will not be fleeing [i]en masse [/i]to Canada, despite the charming offer of so many compassionate Canadians to sacrifice their singlehood http://www.marryanamerican.ca... to save us from the "cowboy" Bush. (As the [i]New Yorker [/i]'s Hendrik Hertzberg says http://www.pbs.org/newshour/c... , the Canadians make us proud to be North Americans.) [/b]
After all, who is to say Canada is safe from a preemptive strike? Canada's leaders are a bunch of socialists hostile to our president just like the Baathists were, Canada might have hidden stockpiles of WMD, it possesses a natural resource-- cheap prescription drugs http://www.consumerwatchdog.o... --critical to our people's security, and historically-speaking it would be a really bad idea (see Quebec, Battle of; 1812, War of).
No, alas, we will stay and fight to retake our country from the forces of extremism, corruption, and incompetence that have set up shop in the White House, Capitol Hill, and K Street. Taking our cue from the venerable military strategist Sun-tzu, http://qing_long_institut e.tr... the first stage of this battle is to understand our opponents, who are as bold as they are devious.
Nowhere is their deception more in need of debunking than in the realm of political discourse, where they have over the last several decades created a veritable Orwellian Code of encrypted language. The key to their linguistic strategy is to use words, which sound moderate to us but mean something completely different to their base. Their tactics range from the childish use of antonyms, i.e., "clean" = "dirty" http://www.sierraclub.org/cle... to the pseudo-academic use of prefixes--"neo" is a favorite--to the pernicious (and very expensive) http://news.orb6.com/stories/... rebranding of traditional political labels-- "liberal"--as an insult.
We need to break the code by building a Republican dictionary. Here's a small list I've put together to get us started. Please feel free to add your own contributions by clicking here http://www.thenation.com/cont... . I'll be publishing more examples in the coming weeks.
BI-PARTISANSHIP, n. When conservative Republicans work together with moderate Republicans to pass legislation Democrats hate.
CLARIFY, v. Repeating the same lie over and over again.
CLEAN, adj. The word used to modify any aspect of the environment Republican legislation allows corporations to pollute, poison, or destroy.
FAIRER, adj. Regressive.
FAITH, n. The stubborn belief that God approves of Republican moral values despite the preponderance of textual evidence to the contrary.
FAITH COMMUNITY, n. Evangelicals, because they are saved, and hawkish conservative Jews, because they are useful. Israel is the bait-on-the-hook just waiting for God to take that Rapturous bite.
FISCAL CONSERVATIVE, n. A Republican who is in the minority.
FREEDOM, n. What Arabs want but can't achieve on their own without Western military intervention. It bears a striking resemblance to chaos.
GROWTH, n. The justification for tax cuts for the rich. What happens to the deficits when Republicans cut taxes on the rich.
HONESTY, n. Lies told in simple declarative sentences: "Freedom is on the march."
HUMBLE FOREIGN POLICY, n. The invasion of any sovereign nation whose leadership Republicans don't like.
HUMBLED adj. What a Republican says right after a close election and right before he governs in an arrogant manner.
MORAL VALUES, n. Hatred of homosexuals dressed up in Biblical language.
MANDATE, n. What a Republican claims to possess when only 49 percent of the voting public loathes him instead of 51 percent.
THE MEDIA, n. Immoral elitist liberally-biased traitors who should leave Republicans alone so they can complete God's work on Earth in peace and quiet, behind closed doors.
PHILOSOPHY, n. Religion.
SIMPLIFY, tr. v. To cut the taxes of Republican donors.
SLAVE, n. A person without legal rights, e,g. a fetus.
[b]BONUS DEFINITION:[/b] [i]NEOCONSERVATIVES, n. Nerds with Napoleonic complexes[/i].
[b]Even if Bush did really win, Nov. 2 was a voting disaster. It's not too late for there to be an accurate count, but how to get the tallies from the black boxes?[/b]
Everyone remembers Florida's 2000 election debacle, and all of the new terms it introduced to our political lexicon: Hanging chads, dimpled chads, pregnant chads, overvotes, undervotes, Sore Losermans, Jews for Buchanan and so forth. It took several weeks, battalions of lawyers and a questionable decision from the U.S. Supreme Court to show the nation and the world how messy democracy can be. By any standard, what happened in Florida during the 2000 Presidential election was a disaster.
What happened during the Presidential election of 2004, in Florida, in Ohio, and in a number of other states as well, was worse.
Some of the problems with this past Tuesday's election will sound all too familiar. Despite having four years to look into and deal with the problems that cropped up in Florida in 2000, the "spoiled vote" chad issue reared its ugly head again. Investigative journalist Greg Palast, the man almost singularly responsible for exposing the more egregious examples of illegitimate deletions of voters from the rolls, described the continued problems in an article published just before the election, and again in an article published just after the election.
Four years later, and none of the Florida problems were fixed. In fact, by all appearances, they spread from Florida to Ohio, New Mexico, Michigan and elsewhere. Worse, these problems only scratch the surface of what appears to have happened in Tuesday's election. The fix that was put in place to solve these problems – the Help America Vote Act passed in 2002 after the Florida debacle – appears to have gone a long way towards making things worse by orders of magnitude, for it was the Help America Vote Act which introduced paperless electronic touch-screen voting machines to millions of voters across the country.
At first blush, it seems like a good idea. Forget the chads, the punch cards, the archaic booths like pianos standing on end with the handles and the curtains. This is the 21st century, so let's do it with computers. A simple screen presents straightforward choices, and you touch the spot on the screen to vote for your candidate. Your vote is recorded by the machine, and then sent via modem to a central computer which tallies the votes. Simple, right?
Not quite.
Is there any evidence that these machines went haywire on Tuesday? Nationally, there were more than 1,100 reports of electronic voting machine malfunctions. A few examples:
... In Broward County, http://www.palmbeachpost.com/... Florida, election workers were shocked to discover that their shiny new machines were counting backwards. "Tallies should go up as more votes are counted," according to this report. "That's simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone down. Officials found the software used in Broward can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward."
... In Franklin County, http://www.ohio.com/mld/beaco... Ohio, electronic voting machines gave Bush 3,893 extra votes in one precinct alone. "Franklin County's unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry's 260 votes in Precinct 1B," according to this report. "Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Matthew Damschroder, director of the Franklin County Board of Elections, said Bush received 365 votes there. The other 13 voters who cast ballots either voted for other candidates or did not vote for president."
... In Craven County, http://www.newbernsj.com/Site... North Carolina, a software error on the electronic voting machines awarded Bush 11,283 extra votes. "The Elections Systems and Software equipment," according to this report, "had downloaded voting information from nine of the county's 26 precincts and as the absentee ballots were added, the precinct totals were added a second time. An override, like those occurring when one attempts to save a computer file that already exists, is supposed to prevent double counting, but did not function correctly."
... In Carteret County, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usl...,1282,-4596394,00.html North Carolina, "More than 4,500 votes may be lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Local officials said UniLect Corp., the maker of the county's electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes. Officials said 3,005 early votes were stored, but 4,530 were lost."
... In LaPorte County, http://www.michigancityin.com... Indiana, a Democratic stronghold, the electronic voting machines decided that each precinct only had 300 voters. "At about 7 p.m. Tuesday," according to this report, "it was noticed that the first two or three printouts from individual precinct reports all listed an identical number of voters. Each precinct was listed as having 300 registered voters. That means the total number of voters for the county would be 22,200, although there are actually more than 79,000 registered voters."
... In Sarpy County, http://www.wowt.com/news/head... Nebraska, the electronic touch screen machines got generous. "As many as 10,000 extra votes," according to this report, "have been tallied and candidates are still waiting for corrected totals. Johnny Boykin lost his bid to be on the Papillion City Council. The difference between victory and defeat in the race was 127 votes. Boykin says, 'When I went in to work the next day and saw that 3,342 people had shown up to vote in our ward, I thought something's not right.' He's right. There are not even 3,000 people registered to vote in his ward. For some reason, some votes were counted twice."
Stories like this have been popping up in many of the states that put these touch-screen voting machines to use. Beyond these reports are the folks who attempted to vote for one candidate and saw the machine give their vote http://www.infozine.com/news/... to the other candidate. Sometimes, the flawed machines were taken off-line, and sometimes they were not. As for the reports above, the mistakes described were caught and corrected. How many mistakes made by these machines were not caught, were not corrected, and have now become part of the record?
The flaws within these machines are well documented. Professors and researchers from Johns Hopkins performed a detailed analysis of these electronic voting machines in May of 2004. In their results, http://avirubin.com/vote/anal... the Johns Hopkins researchers stated, "This voting system is far below even the most minimal security standards applicable in other contexts. We identify several problems including unauthorized privilege escalation, incorrect use of cryptography, vulnerabilities to network threats, and poor software development processes. We show that voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting terminal software."
"Furthermore," they continued, "we show that even the most serious of our outsider attacks could have been discovered and executed without access to the source code. In the face of such attacks, the usual worries about insider threats are not the only concerns; outsiders can do the damage. That said, we demonstrate that the insider threat is also quite considerable, showing that not only can an insider, such as a poll worker, modify the votes, but that insiders can also violate voter privacy and match votes with the voters who cast them. We conclude that this voting system is unsuitable for use in a general election."
Many of these machines do not provide the voter with a paper ballot that verifies their vote. So if an error – or purposefully inserted malicious code – in the untested machine causes their vote to go for the other guy, they have no way to verify that it happened. The lack of a paper ballot also means the end of recounts as we have known them; now, on these new machines, a recount amounts to pushing a button on the machine and getting a number in return, but without those paper ballots to do a comparison, there is no way to verify the validity of that count.
Worst of all is the fact that all the votes collected by these machines are sent via modem to a central tabulating computer which counts the votes on Windows software. This means, essentially, that any gomer with access to the central tabulation machine who knows how to work an Excel spreadsheet can go into this central computer and make wholesale changes to election totals without anyone being the wiser.
Bev Harris, who has been working tirelessly since the passage of the Help America Vote Act http://www.blackboxvoting.org... to inform people of the dangers present in this new process, got a chance to demonstrate how easy it is to steal an election on that central tabulation computer while a guest on the CNBC program 'Topic A With Tina Brown.' Ms. Brown was off that night, and the guest host was none other than Governor Howard Dean. Thanks to Governor Dean and Ms. Harris, anyone watching CNBC that night got to see just how easy it is to steal an election because of these new machines and the flawed processes they use.
"In a voting system," Harris said on the show, "you have all the different voting machines at all the different polling places, sometimes, as in a county like mine, there's a thousand polling places in a single county. All those machines feed into the one machine so it can add up all the votes. So, of course, if you were going to do something you shouldn't to a voting machine, would it be more convenient to do it to each of the 4000 machines, or just come in here and deal with all of them at once? What surprises people is that the central tabulator is just a PC, like what you and I use. It's just a regular computer."
Harris then proceeded to open a laptop computer that had on it the software used to tabulate the votes by one of the aforementioned central processors. Journalist Thom Hartman describes what happened next http://www.commondreams.org/h... : "So Harris had Dean close the Diebold GEMS tabulation software, go back to the normal Windows PC desktop, click on the 'My Computer' icon, choose 'Local Disk C:,' open the folder titled GEMS, and open the sub-folder 'LocalDB' which, Harris noted, 'stands for local database, that's where they keep the votes.' Harris then had Dean double-click on a file in that folder titled Central Tabulator Votes,' which caused the PC to open the vote count in a database program like Excel. 'Let's just flip those,' Harris said, as Dean cut and pasted the numbers from one cell into the other. Harris sat up a bit straighter, smiled, and said, 'We just edited an election, and it took us 90 seconds.'"
Any system that makes it this easy to steal or corrupt an election has no business being anywhere near the voters on election day.
The counter-argument to this states that people with nefarious intent, people with a partisan stake in the outcome of an election, would have to have access to the central tabulation computers in order to do harm to the process. Keep the partisans away from the process, and everything will work out fine. Surely no partisan political types were near these machines on Tuesday night when the votes were counted, right?
One of the main manufacturers of these electronic touch-screen voting machines is Diebold, Inc. More than 35 counties in Ohio alone used the Diebold machines on Tuesday, and millions of voters across the country did the same. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Diebold gave $100,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2000, along with additional contributions between 2001 and 2002 which totaled $95,000. Of the four companies competing for the contracts to manufacture these voting machines, only Diebold contributed large sums to any political party. The CEO of Diebold is a man named Walden O'Dell. O'Dell was very much on board with the Bush campaign, having said publicly in 2003 that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
So much for keeping the partisans at arm's length.
Is there any evidence that vote totals were deliberately tampered with by people who had a stake in the outcome? Nothing specific has been documented to date. Jeff Fisher, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Florida's 16th District, claims to have evidence that the Florida election was hacked, and says further that he knows who hacked it and how it was done. Such evidence is not yet forthcoming.
There are, however, some disturbing and compelling trends that indicate things are not as they should be. This chart http://ustogether.org/Florida... displays a breakdown of counties in Florida. It lists the voters in each county by party affiliation, and compares expected vote totals to the reported results. It also separates the results into two sections, one for "touch-screen" counties and the other for optical scan counties.
Over and over in these counties, the results, based upon party registration, did not come close to matching expectations. It can be argued, and has been argued, that such results indicate nothing more or less than a President getting cross-over voters, as well as late-breaking undecided voters, to come over to his side. These are Southern Democrats, and the numbers from previous elections show that many have often voted Republican. Yet the news wires have been inundated for well over a year with stories about how stridently united Democratic voters were behind the idea of removing Bush from office. It is worth wondering why that unity did not permeate these Democratic voting districts. If that unity was there, it is worth asking why the election results in these counties do not reflect this.
Most disturbing of all is the reality that these questionable Diebold voting machines are not isolated to Florida. This list documents, http://www.why-war.com/featur... as of March 2003, all of the counties in all of the 37 states where Diebold machines were used to count votes. The document is 28 pages long. That is a lot of counties, and a lot of votes, left in the hands of machines that have a questionable track record, that send their vote totals to central computers which make it far too easy to change election results, that were manufactured by a company with a personal, financial, and publicly stated stake in George W. Bush holding on to the White House.
A poster named "TruthIsAll" on the DemocraticUnderground.com forums laid out the questionable results of Tuesday's election in succinct fashion: "To believe that Bush won the election, you must also believe: That the exit polls were wrong; that Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning Ohio and Florida were wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that Harris' last-minute polling for Kerry was wrong (he was exactly right in his 2000 final poll); that incumbent rule #1 – undecideds break for the challenger - was wrong; That the 50% rule – an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling - was wrong; That the approval rating rule – an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election – was wrong; that it was just a coincidence that the exit polls were correct where there was a paper trail and incorrect (+5% for Bush) where there was no paper trail; that the surge in new young voters had no positive effect for Kerry; that Kerry did worse than Gore against an opponent who lost the support of scores of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000; that voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were not tampered with in this election."
In short, we have old-style vote spoilage in minority communities. We have electronic voting machines losing votes and adding votes all across the country. We have electronic voting machines whose efficiency and safety have not been tested. We have electronic voting machines that offer no paper trail to ensure a fair outcome. We have central tabulators for these machines running on Windows software, compiling results that can be demonstrably tampered with. We have the makers of these machines publicly professing their preference for George W. Bush. We have voter trends that stray from the expected results. We have these machines counting millions of votes all across the country.
Perhaps this can all be dismissed. Perhaps rants like the one posted by "TruthIsAll" are nothing more than sour grapes from the side that lost. Perhaps all of the glitches, wrecked votes, unprecedented voting trends and partisan voting-machine connections can be explained away. If so, this reporter would very much like to see those explanations. At a bare minimum, the fact that these questions exist at all represents a grievous undermining of the basic confidence in the process required to make this democracy work. Democracy should not ever require leaps of faith, and we have put the fate of our nation into the hands of machines that require such a leap. It is unacceptable across the board, and calls into serious question not only the election we just had, but any future election involving these machines.
Representatives John Conyers, Jerrold Nadler and Robert Wexler, all members of the House Judiciary Committee, posted a letter on November 5th to David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States. In the letter, they asked for an investigation into the efficacy of these electronic voting machines. The letter reads as follows:
November 5, 2004
The Honorable David M. Walker
Comptroller General of the United States
U.S. General Accountability Office
441 G Street, NW
Washington, DC 20548
Dear Mr. Walker:
We write with an urgent request that the Government Accountability Office immediately undertake an investigation of the efficacy of voting machines and new technologies used in the 2004 election, how election officials responded to difficulties they encountered and what we can do in the future to improve our election systems and administration.
In particular, we are extremely troubled by the following reports, which we would also request that you review and evaluate for us:
In Columbus, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave President Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes. ("Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes," Associated Press, November 5)
An electronic tally of a South Florida gambling ballot initiative failed to record thousands of votes. "South Florida OKs Slot Machines Proposal," (Id.)
In one North Carolina county, more than 4,500 votes were lost because officials mistakenly believed a computer that stored ballots could hold more data that it did. "Machine Error Gives Bush Extra Ohio Votes," (Id.)
In San Francisco, a glitch occurred with voting machines software that resulted in some votes being left uncounted. (Id.)
In Florida, there was a substantial drop off in Democratic votes in proportion to voter registration in counties utilizing optical scan machines that was apparently not present in counties using other mechanisms.
The House Judiciary Committee Democratic staff has received numerous reports from Youngstown, Ohio that voters who attempted to cast a vote for John Kerry on electronic voting machines saw that their votes were instead recorded as votes for George W. Bush. In South Florida, Congressman Wexler's staff received numerous reports from voters in Palm Beach, Broward and Dade Counties that they attempted to select John Kerry but George Bush appeared on the screen. CNN has reported that a dozen voters in six states, particularly Democrats in Florida, reported similar problems. This was among over one thousand such problems reported. ("Touchscreen Voting Problems Reported," Associated Press, November 5)
Excessively long lines were a frequent problem throughout the nation in Democratic precincts, particularly in Florida and Ohio. In one Ohio voting precinct serving students from Kenyon College, some voters were required to wait more than eight hours to vote. ("All Eyes on Ohio," Dan Lothian, CNN, November 3)
We are literally receiving additional reports every minute and will transmit additional information as it comes available. The essence of democracy is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and the fairness of voting procedures. In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this inquiry.
Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr., Jerrold Nadler, Robert Wexler
Ranking Member, Ranking Member, Member of Congress House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on the Constitution
cc: Hon. F. James Sensenbrenner, Chairman
"The essence of democracy," wrote the Congressmen, "is the confidence of the electorate in the accuracy of voting methods and the fairness of voting procedures. In 2000, that confidence suffered terribly, and we fear that such a blow to our democracy may have occurred in 2004." Those fears appear to be valid.
John Kerry and John Edwards promised on Tuesday night that every vote would count, and that every vote would be counted. By Wednesday morning, Kerry had conceded the race to Bush, eliciting outraged howls from activists who were watching the reports of voting irregularities come piling in. Kerry had said that 10,000 lawyers were ready to fight any wrongdoing in this election. One hopes that he still has those lawyers on retainer.
According to black-letter election law, Bush does not officially get a second term until the electors from the Electoral College go to Washington D.C on December 12th. Perhaps Kerry's 10,000 lawyers, along with a real investigation per the request of Conyers, Nadler and Wexler, could give those electors something to think about in the interim.
In the meantime, soon-to-be-unemployed DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe sent out an email on Saturday night titled 'Help determine the Democratic Party's next steps.' In the email, McAuliffe states, "If you were involved in these grassroots activities, we want to hear from you about your experience. What did you do? Did you feel the action you took was effective? Was it a good experience for you? How would you make it better? Tell us your thoughts." He provided a feedback form http://www.democrats.org/feed... where such thoughts can be sent.
Use the form. Give Terry your thoughts on the matter. Ask him if those 10,000 lawyers are still available. It seems the validity of Tuesday's election remains a wide-open question.
[b]Source:[/b]
William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books – "War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know'"and '"The Greatest Sedition is Silence.", http://www.alternet.org/elect...
...---... Ballot Initiatives: More Than Gay Marriage ...---...
Following President Bush's victory over Sen. John Kerry on Tuesday, conservative media followed Vice President Cheney's lead in declaring the election "a decisive mandate for Bush's agenda, and mainstream media outlets have followed their lead." In fact, the president's popular vote margin was the smallest since 1976 (with the exception of 2000) and, according to the Wall Street Journal's Albert Hunt, the president's victory represented "the narrowest win for a sitting president since Woodrow Wilson in 1916." Percentage-wise, Bush's victory was the narrowest for any wartime president in American history. And while President Bush did win more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history, "Kerry's vote total – 55.7 million – was still greater than any U.S. presidential candidate in history prior to 2004. That means more Americans cast their vote against Bush than against any other presidential candidate in U.S. history."
[b]Bush didn't get a "mandate" from the American people ... We must fight the neo-con fascists every step of the way in order to pass ballot initiatives that are in our nation's best interests ... Organize and put pressure upon your representatives locally and in Congress ...[/b]
While the popular results from last week's election reflected a modest conservative tilt, voters in several states passed ballot initiatives and referenda on important progressive issues. As Kristina Wilfore of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center says, "asking pundits to look beyond the passage of same-sex marriage bans may feel a little like asking Mrs. Lincoln how the show was," but a broader look at the fate of ballot measures in states across the country shows acceptance of progressive policies not necessarily manifested in the general election.
[b]MINIMUM WAGE:[/b] In both Florida and Nevada, voters passed amendments raising the minimum wage to $6.15 per hour – a dollar higher than the federal minimum wage – and adjusting it for inflation. Seventy-one percent of Floridians voted for the measure, despite intense opposition from pro-business groups. President Bush has refused to consider raising the minimum wage nationwide.
[b]STEM CELL RESEARCH:[/b] In California, voters approved a proposition "that will make $3 billion in state funds available over the next decade for stem cell research." The funding for research in California will "dwarf" federal funding levels under the Bush administration, turning the state into the "likely world center" for stem cell research.
[b]PATIENTS' RIGHTS:[/b] Floridians passed Amendment 7 and Amendment 8, expanding family rights to medical data in cases of suspected malpractice and barring doctors who have committed more than three instances of medical malpractice from practicing in the state. Floridians also helped re-elect a president who has made limiting patients' rights (he calls it "tort reform") a cornerstone of his health care plan.
[b]ENVIRONMENT:[/b] Several states voted for the environment over industry interests on a variety of ballot measures. Colorado voted for a "five-fold increase of the state's use of renewable energy," passing an amendment requiring public utilities to generate 10 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2015. In Washington, 69 percent voted for Initiative 297, limiting nuclear waste dumping and requiring better clean-up efforts in the state. And in Montana, voters decisively defeated Amendment I-147, which would have repealed a ban on cyanide use in open pit mining.
[b]EDUCATION:[/b] In Nevada, voters affirmed a commitment to funding education by passing Question 1, which will "require lawmakers to fund kindergarten through 12th-grade education before other state programs." North Carolina decided to put civil fine money towards education and mandated a more equitable distribution among school districts. Arkansas voted to do the same with lottery revenue.
[b]TAXES:[/b] In Maine, voters overwhelmingly defeated Amendment 1, which would have "capped property taxes at 1 percent of valuation." The measure would have hamstrung cities and towns, stripping their authority to collect the revenue they need to fund crucial Maine programs.
[b]Empire: [i]A political unit having an extensive territory or comprising a number of territories or nations and ruled by a single supreme authority. Imperial or imperialistic sovereignty, domination, or control[/i]. http://www.dictionary.com [/b]
I struggled for some time with the title of this article. I might also have called it “Way Worse Than ‘I Told You So’” after having written for months, even years, that the charade we have just witnessed, called an election, would be a repeat performance of the coup d'etat of 2000. Was this election stolen? Unquestionably. The list of likely illegal acts in this election is no less than mindnumbing. But if you wish to read them, they can be found at: http://www.accuracy.org/new.h...
Some months ago, I wrote an article entitled “Why I Will Not Vote in 2004” and incurred the wrath of those folks who were hellbent on voting for the “lesser evil.” They could not grasp my position because their paradigm would not allow them to do so. Their paradigm goes something like this: We are still living in a democracy, although we are about to lose it, and we will lose it if G.W. Bush gets elected. So even though John Kerry is an imperialist, corporate lap dog-suck-up, we can “elect him and then fight him.” Never mind that Kerry IS the ruling elite and is the embodiment of the neoliberal establishment which seeks kinder, gentler world domination and social legislation domestically that dutifully buttresses the agenda of corporate capitalism while pretending to “regulate” it. These individuals are in this moment nursing their broken hearts that Kerry lost but grasping at whatever straws of hope they might find for 2008. What they also don’t get is that there isn’t going to BE a 2008—well yes, there will be a 2008, but it is highly unlikely that it will include a Presidential election, and if it does, it won’t be a clean, fair, equitable, democratic one.
What few people in America understand, despite the astute observations of millions of individuals around the world, is that we are living in an empire, and we are no longer living in a democracy. Every last semblance of democracy in our nation that, in our desperate denial, we leave our claw marks on, is evaporating with each tick of the clock.. America’s allies and enemies internationally are calling like it is: Within four years, the so-called democratic republic of the United States will be unrecognizable. Without question, we can expect the destruction of Roe v. Wade, the packing of the Supreme Court with Christian fascist maniacs, the invasion of Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Colombia, to name a few. Even more horrifying is the likelihood that one of the cavalier, oil-sucking exploits will end up in a nuclear exchange. We can count on a ghastly tanking of the U.S. economy and a government policy of privatization (piratization?) on steroids. Endless versions of and addendums to the Patriot Act will become the law of the land, and another terrorist attack, deliberately planned, orchestrated and financed by persons in the U.S. government and the energy and financial sectors will almost certainly occur. It will undoubtedly catapult the nation into Code Red and martial law. The folks who could not grasp the futility of voting for a corporate candidate or a third-party candidate who cannot possibly win have not allowed themselves to comprehend that the Machiavelli-worshipping neoconservatives of the Bush Crime Family WILL NEVER, I said, WILL NEVER, turn over this government willingly—not in 2004, not in 2008, not EVER. They proudly proclaim that they have no problem with doing WHATEVER is required to remain in power. That includes rigging elections, assassinations, book-cooking, and above all, carefully crafting their personal propaganda machine, the American corporate media.
When an old paradigm no longer serves its adherents, serving the paradigm becomes absurdly self-destructive. Already, liberal democrats are delusionally thinking about the election they naively assume will happen in 2008, determined to resuscitate the decrepit, dying paradigm which fantacizes that some Hillary or some Obama will save us. When people understand the term, “fascist empire,” and when they fully grasp that they are living in one, they will no longer waste precious physical, mental, or spiritual energy applying the bandaids of defunct democracy to the cancer of world domination and domestic devourment.
On September 11, 2001, all the rules and paradigms of our post-Cold War world were incinerated in the ashes of Ground Zero. For the past three years, 9-11 researchers (not the ones that produce substandard fiction like the 9-11 Commission Report) have gathered enough evidence to convict and imprison for life as war criminals the perpetrators many times over. Hint: The perpetrators were not Islamic terrorists, although Islamic terrorists were used as intelligence assets by the United States government to commit the atrocities. When we understand the motive, means, and opportunity (the three factors all criminal investigators examine first, but which the Kean Commission couldn’t be bothered with) of September 11, we will understand unequivocally that we no longer live in a democratic republic, but rather a burgeoning fascist empire. All of this exhaustive research can be examined at: http://www.globalresearch.ca and http://www.septembereleventh.... . If the thought of exploring this issue further immediately causes you to feel overwhelmed and longing to find the nearest sofa on which to curl up and take a nap, be aware that that is exactly what the perpetrators are counting on. However, until we get to the bottom of exactly what happened on September 11, 2001, who perpetrated the crimes, for what reason, who benefited and how, we have no chance of defeating the empire.
As citizens living in the belly of the beast, we must not only think about how to defeat the empire, but also how to merely survive living within it. In order to do so, one must understand the concept of Peak Oil—one of the principal reasons for the 9-11 attacks. Peak Oil is simply that moment in time when global oil and natural gas begin an irreversible and permanent decline which cannot be thwarted no matter how much money, effort, or alternative forms of energy are spent trying to change it. Although Peak Oil is something we will only know with certainty when we see it in the rear view mirror of history, we are clearly, dangerously in the throes of it at this moment. For the latest research on Peak Oil, see: www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net and the website of geologist, Dale Allen Pfieffer at http://home.earthlink.net/~annallen0416/energydeple tion.html .
Both corporate candidates of 2004 have been aware of the realities of Peak Oil, but had they to come clean with the American people, they would have risked putting the markets and the citizenry in chaos, not to mention decreasing the value of their own oil stocks. Peak Oil is a global energy crisis of a magnitude previously unknown to the human race and will cause food prices to skyrocket and the American way of life as we know it to disappear. It means the end of sustainability and growth on planet earth. No candidate who seriously aspires to receiving votes can even think about discussing this issue.
Some uninformed individuals erroneously insist that Peak Oil is a scam perpetrated by oil companies and vehemently attack those of us who take it seriously. In response to them, I would offer a paraphrase from Dale Allen Pfieffer: Peak Oil does not need to be defended; it will defend itself quite effectively within the next decade. For comprehensive research on the 9-11 attacks and their connection with Peak Oil, all citizens who wish to be thoroughly informed should attentively read CROSSING THE RUBICON: The Decline Of The American Empire At The End Of The Age Of Oil, by Mike Ruppert.
So what solutions do I propose?
First, we must willing to face the reality that we do, in fact, live in an empire and that that empire is plummeting headlong into unrestrained fascism. This means the death of our relentless fantasies that we still live in a democracy or that the old paradigm based “electing the right candidate” can serve us. We have had three corrupt elections in America in the past four years. Continuing to believe that we will have a clean one in 2008 is tantamount to insisting that the earth is flat.
Secondly, we can join with millions—yes millions, of Americans who will not swallow the foul, fairytale version of what happened on September 11, 2001. Rather than obsessing over who might be the “right” candidate to “save” us, we can choose to work in a grassroots movement with victims’ families and other truth-demanding citizens for a totally transparent investigation of that watershed moment in time which the empire will continue to use to justify its devourment of other nations and its own citizens. I believe that a grassroots movement of 9-11 truth-tellers has the potential for total transformation of the political landscape of the United States, and I personally will settle for nothing less than that level of social and political renovation.
In addition, it behooves us to begin to massively conserve energy on an unprecedented scale and learn how to grow our own food, as well as learn techniques of emergency and non-traditional health care. (See The Party’s Over, and Power Down, by Richard Heinberg) Finally, we must wake up and smell the fascism and the futility of its rigged elections. More than ever, after witnessing yet another coup d’ etat on November 2, 2004, I celebrate W.E.B. Dubois’ assessment that “the two parties have combined against us to nullify our power by a 'gentlemen's agreement' of non-recognition, no matter how we vote...May God write us down as asses if ever again we are found putting our trust in either Republican or the Democratic parties."
[b]The rallying cry of the emerging "honest vote" movement must become: Get Corporations Out of Our Vote![/b]
The hot story in the blogosphere is that the "erroneous" exit polls that showed Kerry carrying Florida and Ohio (among other states) weren't erroneous at all http://www.bluelemur.com/inde... – it was the numbers produced by paperless voting machines in Florida that were wrong, and Kerry actually won. As more and more analysis is done of what may (or may not) be the most massive election fraud in the history of the world, however, it's critical that we keep the largest issue at the forefront at all time: Why are We The People allowing private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their officers and boards of directors, and loyal only to agendas and politicians that will enhance their profitability, to handle our votes?
Maybe Florida went for Kerry, maybe for Bush. Over time – and through the efforts of some very motivated investigative reporters – we may well find out (Bev Harris of blackboxvoting.org http://blackboxvoting.org/ just filed what may be the largest Freedom of Information Act [FOIA} filing in history), and bloggers and investigative reporters are discovering an odd discrepancy in exit polls being largely accurate in paper-ballot states and oddly inaccurate in touch-screen electronic voting states. Even raw voter analyses http://www.dailykos.com/story... are showing extreme oddities in touch-screen-run Florida, and eagle-eyed bloggers are finding that news organizations are retroactively altering their exit polls http://www.buzzflash.com/anal... to coincide with what the machines ultimately said.
But in all the discussion about voting machines, let's never forget the concept of the commons, because this usurpation is the ultimate felony committed by conservatives this year.
At the founding of this nation, we decided that there were important places to invest our tax (then tariff) dollars, and those were the things that had to do with the overall "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" of all of us. Over time, these commons – in which we all make tax investments and for which we all hold ultimate responsibility – have come to include our police and fire services; our military and defense; our roads and skyways; our air, waters and national parks; and the safety of our food and drugs.
But the most important of all the commons in which we've invested our hard-earned tax dollars is our government itself. It's owned by us, run by us (through our elected representatives), answerable to us, and most directly responsible for stewardship of our commons.
And the commons through which we regulate the commons of our government is our vote.
About two years ago, I wrote a story for Common Dreams, "If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines," http://www.commondreams.org/v... that exposed how Sen. Chuck Hagel had, before stepping down and running for the U.S. Senate in Nebraska, been the head of the voting machine company (now ES&S) that had just computerized Nebraska's vote. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska, nearly all on unauditable machines he had just sold the state. And in all probability, Hagel will run for president in 2008.
In another, later article I wrote http://www.alternet.org/story... at the request of MoveOn.org and which they mailed to their millions of members, I noted that in Georgia – another state that went all-electronic – "USA Today reported on Nov. 3, 2002, 'In Georgia, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll shows Democratic Sen. Max Cleland with a 49% to 44% lead over Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss.' Cox News Service, based in Atlanta, reported just after the election (Nov. 7) that, 'Pollsters may have goofed' because 'Republican Rep. Saxby Chambliss defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by a margin of 53 to 46 percent. The Hotline, a political news service, recalled a series of polls Wednesday showing that Chambliss had been ahead in none of them.'" Nearly every vote in the state was on an electronic machine with no audit trail.
In the years since those first articles appeared, Bev Harris has published her book on the subject ("Black Box Voting"), including the revelation of her finding the notorious "Rob Georgia" folder on Diebold's FTP site just after Cleland's loss there; Lynn Landes has done some groundbreaking research, particularly her new investigation of the Associated Press, http://www.ecotalk.org/AP.htm... as have Rebecca Mercuri http://www.notablesoftware.co... and David Dill http://verify.stanford.edu/di... . There's a new video out on the topic, Votergate, available at votergate.tv http://www.votergate.tv/ .
Congressman Rush Holt introduced a bill into Congress requiring a voter-verified paper ballot be produced by all electronic voting machines, and it's been co-sponsored by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives. The two-year battle fought by Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay to keep it from coming to a vote, thus insuring that there will be no possible audit of the votes of about a third of the 2004 electorate, has fueled the flames of conspiracy theorists convinced Republican ideologues – now known to be willing to lie in television advertising – would extend their "ends justifies the means" morality to stealing the vote "for the better good of the country" they think single-party Republican rule will bring.
Most important, though, the rallying cry of the emerging "honest vote" movement must become: Get Corporations Out Of Our Vote!
Why have we let corporations into our polling places, locations so sacred to democracy that in many states even international election monitors and reporters are banned? Why are we allowing corporations to exclusively handle our vote, in a secret and totally invisible way? Particularly a private corporation founded, in one case, by a family that believes the Bible should replace the Constitution; in another case run by one of Ohio's top Republicans; and in another case partly owned by Saudi investors?
Of all the violations of the commons – all of the crimes against We The People and against democracy in our great and historic republic – this is the greatest. Our vote is too important to outsource to private corporations.
It's time that the U.S.A. – like most of the rest of the world – returns to paper ballots, counted by hand by civil servants (our employees) under the watchful eye of the party faithful. Even if it takes two weeks to count the vote, and we have to just go, until then, with the exit polls of the news agencies. It worked just fine for nearly 200 years in the U.S.A., and it can work again.
When I lived in Germany, they took the vote the same way most of the world does – people fill in hand-marked ballots, which are hand-counted by civil servants taking a week off from their regular jobs, watched over by volunteer representatives of the political parties. It's totally clean, and easily audited. And even though it takes a week or more to count the vote (and costs nothing more than a bit of overtime pay for civil servants), the German people know the election results the night the polls close because the news media's exit polls, for two generations, have never been more than a tenth of a percent off.
We could have saved billions that have instead been handed over to ES&S, Diebold, and other private corporations.
Or, if we must have machines, let's have them owned by local governments, maintained and programmed by civil servants answerable to We The People, using open-source code and disconnected from modems, that produce a voter-verified printed ballot, with all results published on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
As Thomas Paine wrote at this nation's founding, "The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery."
Only when We The People reclaim the commons of our vote can we again be confident in the integrity of our electoral process in the world's oldest and most powerful democratic republic.
[b]Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show. His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy."[/b], http://www.alternet.org/elect...
[b]Johnny-boy [i]'Robespierre'[/i] Ashcroft is undoubtedly the worst Attorney General http://www.americanprogress.o... that we've ever had the misfortune to be saddled with, largely responsible along with [i]'Halliburton'[/i]-Chen ey & Karl [i]'Joseph Goebbels' [/i]Rove for the traitorous Bushies' Neo-Fascist Reign of Terror ... Tragically we're stuck with the corrupt neo-con Bush/Cheney Inc.[i] junta [/i]for 4 more miserable years ... Hopefully, however, we'll be seeing the backside of '[i]Robespierre[/i]' Ashcroft very soon ... [i]Don't let the door hit you on your fat ass, on the way out, Johnny-boy [/i]...[/b]
[b][u]Ashcroft Likely to Leave Post[/u][/b]
WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft is likely to leave his post before the start of President Bush's second term, senior aides said Thursday.
Ashcroft, 62, is described as exhausted from leading the Justice Department in fighting the domestic war on terrorism since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Stress was a factor in Ashcroft's health problems earlier this year that resulted in removal of his gall bladder.
Ashcroft is expected to resign before Bush's Jan. 20 inauguration, said aides who spoke only on condition of anonymity. They said there is a small chance he would stay on, at least for a short time, if Bush asked him.
The attorney general has not officially informed his staff of his future plans, spokesman Mark Corallo said.
At a news conference, Bush said he hasn't made any decisions about his Cabinet.
Ashcroft, a former two-term governor and senator from Missouri, has long been a favorite among Bush's base of religious conservatives. He also is a lightning rod for Democrats and other critics on issues ranging from the anti-terrorism Patriot Act, which expanded rules for eavesdropping, to abortion rights and gun control.
Names that have been floated in recent weeks as a possible replacement include Ashcroft's former deputy, Larry Thompson, who would become the first black attorney general. Others include Marc Racicot, who was Bush's campaign manager, and White House general counsel Alberto Gonzalez, who would give Bush a notable Hispanic appointment. - http://www.freep.com/news/lat...
...---... Kerry Won . . . "We the People" Lost . . . ...---...
[b]Bush won Ohio by 136,483 votes. Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of votes cast are voided—known as “spoilage” in election jargon—because the ballots cast are inconclusive. Palast’s investigation suggests that if Ohio’s discarded ballots were counted, Kerry would have won the state. Today, the [i]Cleveland Plain Dealer [/i]reports http://www.cleveland.com/elec... there are a total of 247,672 votes not counted in Ohio, if you add the 92,672 discarded votes plus the 155,000 provisional ballots.[/b]
Greg Palast, contributing editor to[i] Harper's [/i]magazine, investigated the manipulation of the vote for BBC Television's [i]Newsnight[/i]. The documentary, "Bush Family Fortunes," based on his [i]New York Times [/i]bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, has been released this month on DVD http://www.gregpalast.com/bff... .
[b]Kerry won. Here's the facts[/b].
I know you don't want to hear it. You can't face one more hung chad. But I don't have a choice. As a journalist examining that messy sausage called American democracy, it's my job to tell you who got the most votes in the deciding states. Tuesday, in Ohio and New Mexico, it was John Kerry.
Most voters in Ohio thought they were voting for Kerry. CNN's exit poll showed Kerry beating Bush among Ohio women by 53 percent to 47 percent. Kerry also defeated Bush among Ohio's male voters 51 percent to 49 percent. Unless a third gender voted in Ohio, Kerry took the state.
So what's going on here? Answer: the exit polls are accurate. Pollsters ask, "Who did you vote for?" Unfortunately, they don't ask the crucial, question, "Was your vote counted?" The voters don't know.
Here's why. Although the exit polls show that most voters in Ohio punched cards for Kerry-Edwards, thousands of these votes were simply not recorded. This was predictable and it was predicted. [See TomPaine.com, "An Election Spoiled Rotten," http://www.tompaine.com/artic... November 1.]
Once again, at the heart of the Ohio uncounted vote game are, I'm sorry to report, hanging chads and pregnant chads, plus some other ballot tricks old and new.
The election in Ohio was not decided by the voters but by something called "spoilage." Typically in the United States, about 3 percent of the vote is voided, just thrown away, not recorded. When the bobble-head boobs on the tube tell you Ohio or any state was won by 51 percent to 49 percent, don't you believe it ... it has never happened in the United States, because the total never reaches a neat 100 percent. The television totals simply subtract out the spoiled vote.
And not all votes spoil equally. Most of those votes, say every official report, come from African American and minority precincts. (To learn more, click here http://www.civilrightsproject... .)
We saw this in Florida in 2000. Exit polls showed Gore with a plurality of at least 50,000, but it didn't match the official count. That's because the official, Secretary of State Katherine Harris, excluded 179,855 spoiled votes. In Florida, as in Ohio, most of these votes lost were cast on punch cards where the hole wasn't punched through completely—leaving a 'hanging chad,'—or was punched extra times. Whose cards were discarded? Expert statisticians investigating spoilage for the government calculated that 54 percent of the ballots thrown in the dumpster were cast by black folks. (To read the report from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, click here http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/vot... .)
And here's the key: Florida is terribly typical. The majority of ballots thrown out (there will be nearly 2 million tossed out from Tuesday's election) will have been cast by African American and other minority citizens.
So here we go again. Or, here we don't go again. Because unlike last time, Democrats aren't even asking Ohio to count these cards with the not-quite-punched holes (called "undervotes" in the voting biz). Nor are they demanding we look at the "overvotes" where voter intent may be discerned.
Ohio is one of the last states in America to still use the vote-spoiling punch-card machines. And the Secretary of State of Ohio, J. Kenneth Blackwell, [i]wrote before the election[/i], http://www.civilrightsproject... “the possibility of a close election with punch cards as the state’s primary voting device invites a Florida-like calamity.”
But this week, Blackwell, a rabidly partisan Republican, has warmed up to the result of sticking with machines that have a habit of eating Democratic votes. When asked if he feared being this year's Katherine Harris, Blackwell noted that Ms. Fix-it's efforts landed her a seat in Congress.
Exactly how many votes were lost to spoilage this time? Blackwell's office, notably, won't say, though the law requires it be reported. Hmm. But we know that last time, the total of Ohio votes discarded reached a democracy-damaging 1.96 percent. The machines produced their typical loss—that's 110,000 votes—overwhelmingly Democratic.
[b]The Impact Of Challenges[/b]
First and foremost, Kerry was had by chads. But the Democrat wasn't punched out by punch cards alone. There were also the 'challenges.' That's a polite word for the Republican Party of Ohio's use of an old Ku Klux Klan technique: the attempt to block thousands of voters of color at the polls. In Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida, the GOP laid plans for poll workers to ambush citizens under arcane laws—almost never used—allowing party-designated poll watchers to finger individual voters and demand they be denied a ballot. The Ohio courts were horrified and federal law prohibits targeting of voters where race is a factor in the challenge. But our Supreme Court was prepared to let Republicans stand in the voting booth door.
In the end, the challenges were not overwhelming, but they were there. Many apparently resulted in voters getting these funky "provisional" ballots—a kind of voting placebo—which may or may not be counted. Blackwell estimates there were 175,000; Democrats say 250,000. Pick your number. But as challenges were aimed at minorities, no one doubts these are, again, overwhelmingly Democratic. Count them up, add in the spoiled punch cards (easy to tally with the human eye in a recount), and the totals begin to match the exit polls; and, golly, you've got yourself a new president. Remember, Bush won by 136,483 votes in Ohio.
[b]Enchanted State's Enchanted Vote[/b]
Now, on to New Mexico, where a Kerry plurality—if all votes are counted—is more obvious still. Before the election, in TomPaine.com, I wrote, "John Kerry is down by several thousand votes in New Mexico, though not one ballot has yet been counted."
How did that happen? It's the spoilage, stupid; and the provisional ballots.
CNN said George Bush took New Mexico by 11,620 votes. Again, the network total added up to that miraculous, and non-existent, '100 percent' of ballots cast.
New Mexico reported in the last race a spoilage rate of 2.68 percent, votes lost almost entirely in Hispanic, Native American and poor precincts—Democratic turf. From Tuesday's vote, assuming the same ballot-loss rate, we can expect to see 18,000 ballots in the spoilage bin.
Spoilage has a very Democratic look in New Mexico. Hispanic voters in the Enchanted State, who voted more than two to one for Kerry, are five times as likely to have their vote spoil as a white voter. Counting these uncounted votes would easily overtake the Bush 'plurality.'
Already, the election-bending effects of spoilage are popping up in the election stats, exactly where we'd expect them: in heavily Hispanic areas controlled by Republican elections officials. Chaves County, in the "Little Texas" area of New Mexico, has a 44 percent Hispanic population, plus African Americans and Native Americans, yet George Bush "won" there 68 percent to 31 percent.
I spoke with Chaves' Republican county clerk before the election, and he told me that this huge spoilage rate among Hispanics simply indicated that such people simply can't make up their minds on the choice of candidate for president. Oddly, these brown people drive across the desert to register their indecision in a voting booth.
Now, let's add in the effect on the New Mexico tally of provisional ballots.
"They were handing them out like candy," Albuquerque journalist Renee Blake reported of provisional ballots. About 20,000 were given out. Who got them?
Santiago Juarez who ran the "Faithful Citizenship" program for the Catholic Archdiocese in New Mexico, told me that "his" voters, poor Hispanics, whom he identified as solid Kerry supporters, were handed the iffy provisional ballots. Hispanics were given provisional ballots, rather than the countable kind "almost religiously," he said, at polling stations when there was the least question about a voter's identification. Some voters, Santiago said, were simply turned away.
[b]Your Kerry Victory Party[/b]
So we can call Ohio and New Mexico for John Kerry—if we count all the votes.
But that won't happen. Despite the Democratic Party's pledge, the leadership this time gave in to racial disenfranchisement once again. Why? No doubt, the Democrats know darn well that counting all the spoiled and provisional ballots will require the cooperation of Ohio's Secretary of State, Blackwell. He will ultimately decide which spoiled and provisional ballots get tallied. Blackwell, hankering to step into Kate Harris' political pumps, is unlikely to permit anything close to a full count. Also, Democratic leadership knows darn well the media would punish the party for demanding a full count.
What now? Kerry won, so hold your victory party. But make sure the shades are down: it may be become illegal to demand a full vote count under PATRIOT Act III.
I used to write a column for the[i] Guardian [/i]papers in London. Several friends have asked me if I will again leave the country. In light of the failure—a second time—to count all the votes, that won't be necessary. My country has left [i]me[/i].
[b]The days after the election the talk is about everything except the obvious: It hurts! [/b]
It’s [Thursday[i] now[/i]] Wednesday morning and after staying up late to watch election returns, I’ve had a restless night. I fight to stay asleep, to postpone the inevitable moment when I'll get up – and know. As I lay in bed, a friend’s comment from last night echoes in my head: “It’s not our country anymore.” If it ever was, I wonder. But she’s right. A lot of progressives had hoped to reclaim it this election.
As I struggle to get through the day, dragging around the weight beginning to settle on my heart, her words stay with me. They echo in the back of my head when I hear Kerry's concession speech; watch the CNN blowhards natter on about "unity"; read the inevitable lefty post-mortems that crowd my e-mail inbox.
They talk about everything except the obvious: It hurts! All this ink spilt on the sell-out Democratic Party, the incompetent media, and the future of a divided nation and not a word about the emotional reality of loss. Do you think it's because they're mostly men? Natch.
All the blame-mongering in the world can't erase the pain or, more importantly, the fear. My mind can handle the body blow of defeat, but it's the slow, seeping chill of dread that is harder to fend off.
This wasn't just another conservative victory. Lord knows, progressives have had plenty of practice losing elections in recent decades. And it isn't about partisanship. I'm not shedding any tears over Tom Daschle.
No, it's not about losing an election, but the fear of losing faith. Liberals have always believed that if we did everything right – got the truth out; got the people out – we would prevail. In the past, I could tell myself it was the wrong candidate, wrong strategy, wrong party – some reason why people didn't show up at the polls or vote for the "right" guy. Not any more.
On Tuesday, the largest turnout in recent history couldn't save us from defeat. Democracy won and so did George Bush. And all the Monday morning quarterbacking doesn't change the sad fact that the truth did not set us free. Nearly 52 percent of all Americans preferred to simply ignore reality to keep their faith in God and the man who is only too happy to play messiah.
This is now their White House, their Senate, their House of Representatives, and very likely their Supreme Court. It's their country.
Or at least that's the message I get from all the talk of "unity" and "healing" in the media. Now that the Democrats lost the political equivalent of the Super Bowl, I just need to shut up and put up. Anything less would just be typical liberal whining and bitterness. That I am afraid of what will happen to my country in the next four years is dismissed as just sore loser behavior. That I care about what will happen to my right to choose as a woman; the healthcare I can afford; the air I breathe; the soldiers I've spoken to – all this is just partisan obstinacy?
James Carville says that if liberals like me want to win, we need to learn how to talk to white guys in pickup trucks who think my gay friends are a sin against nature. But what could I possibly say to someone for whom a ban on abortion is the single most important issue in their life? There's no point in trying to "speak my values," if the folks I'm talking to think those values are simply wrong.
John Edwards was right in a way. There are two Americas: one that values tolerance, justice, and equality; the other that believes in Divine Will. But now that the Democrats lost the election – and control over every branch of government – I get to live in their America. And Carville wants me to talk to these guys? Or is he really saying that I need to be more like them? After all, it's not like I have any values that might be worth holding on to. Why not just put my silly liberal preoccupations with choice or sexual freedom aside so we can all come together as one nation – one nation under God, Guns, and (hating) Gays.
In the aftermath of the election, it feels like I've not just ceded my country, but also my self. I've become just one among the sea of anonymous losers whose concerns and issues are simply not relevant any more. In the space of a single night, I've become invisible.
It's hard – right now, at least – to fight that sense of irrelevance, the loss of purpose. I was exhausted and in tears the night we dropped the first bombs over Iraq. But I was back at work the next morning, determined to do my best. The fight was still ahead of me.
What stories should I assign for tomorrow, I ask myself now, trying to prod my slow-moving brain. Does it matter? Did any of my work over the past three years – through 9/11, the war, the election – matter? I'd planned to get pregnant next year. Maybe I'll just stay home with the baby – lose myself in motherhood as some women do when defeated in other parts of their lives.
The weariness will pass. It must. And the faith will return. I hope. But for now, I mourn.
Earlier on Tuesday night, I ran out to buy a pack of cigarettes from the local grocery store. "Who's winning?" asked the young African American woman at the checkout counter. When I told her it was Bush, she said, "I can't cry on the job. Guess I'll have to wait till later." It's later, now.
"It's tough on the psyche to be beaten. Throughout our country's history, abolitionists, suffragists, union organizers, anti-racists, antiwarriors, civil libertarians, feminists and gay rights activists have challenged the majority of Americans to take off their blinders. Each succeeded one way or another, but not overnight, and certainly not without serious setbacks." Don't Mourn, Organize, http://www.smirkingchimp.com/...
[b]We shall not give up ...[/b]
There’s no good way to spin this disaster. The zombies marched to the polls. The thing is, what’s most annoying is that the elite GOP string-pullers don’t care at all about abortions, guns, prayer in schools, same-sex marriage etc. Their daughters get abortions, they don’t pray much, they sure don’t own guns (except the ones their bodyguards have) and they could care less about homosexuals. But to their followers, and there are many, these are make-or-break issues.
The recriminations will already be underway among Democrats. I’d expect that the trend will be: we can’t run these northeast liberals, we need to appeal to the rural voter, we need the south. Expect a sharp right turn from the Dems lasting a couple decades. It will be ironically stupid, because if they stay progressive and await the demographic tide, they can rise, sooner than they think.
Meanwhile: in Iraq, the long-postponed Fallujah attack seems ready to unfold. Prime Minister Allawi, the puppet in chief, wants it. But Iraq’s president, a tribal chieftain who is a lot more connected to the actual Iraqis than Allawi (a former exile), is vigorously opposed to attacking Fallujah. Guess who will win?
Expect the Fallujah offensive to be the first of many under Bush II. Richard Perle was already on television last night, resurfacing after months of quiescence. I expect the neocons to return with a vengeance in Bush II, not only demanding victory-at-any-cost in Iraq but pressing for a restoration of their original regional plan: Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and more, all in preparation for what they expect to be a twenty-first century conflict with China.
[b]Look here for updates on voter intimidation, turnout, exit polls from these crucial battleground states. REPORTED NOW: Election Protection News in PA, OH, FL ...[/b]
[b]Note:[/b] These are listed at PST times.
[b]OHIO – 1:11 pm [/b]
[b]Judge Rules Media Allowed to Conduct Exit Polling in Ohio[/b]
The AP reports that "a federal judge ruled that exit polling can be conducted within 100 feet of a polling place on Election Day in Ohio. Judge Michael H. Watson's ruling on Monday night overturned an October directive by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell to prohibit exit polling within the 100-foot boundary. Five networks — ABC, CNN, CBS, Fox News and NBC — and The Associated Press had sued on Monday to block Blackwell's order. The organizations said the rule would have hindered their ability to gather information about the political process and would violate constitutional guarantees of free speech."
*****
[b]OHIO – 12:45 pm[/b]
Franklin, Delaware, Cuyahoga, and Lucas counties in Ohio all have numerous complaints of equipment malfunction.
At 1393 E. Broad Street, Franklin County, Ohio reports are of a 3-hour line to vote. Only 3 of 5 machines working. Reports of hour-long or greater lines throughout county are pouring in.
Philadelphia voters continue to report widespread problems with their voting machines, including suspicious and confusing behavior from DRE voting machines. Some polling locations are reportedly completely shut down.
"State inspectors" in Ohio are reportedly taking names of people at the door. Then they go inside and have to be checked off another 2 times. Really slowing down the lines.
Many security guards and poll workers in Cuyahoga county are reportedly demanding signatures from everyone before handing out ballots.
The hotline has recently received a glut of calls from Ohio complaining about, among other things, long lines and inadequately staffed polling stations. Many callers have telephoned complaints about EPVC # 10 in Cuyahoga County, where voters have been unable to park and lines are reported to be over two hours long. One caller noted that the three precincts that are voting at this station have been divided into three lines. The lines for the two less-populated precincts (1a and 3b) are moving more rapidly than the line for the third precinct (2a); this caller felt that there may be partisan motives behind the delay. One caller reported a rumor that the precinct judge had quit earlier in the morning.
Similar problems have been reported by callers in other polling stations in Cuyahoga County, and in polling stations in Summit, Franklin, Hamilton, and Mahoning Counties. Callers from many of these counties report that lines are long, crowd control is poor, disabled voters are being denied access, and voters are routinely leaving the sites without voting. One caller from Franklin County reports that poll workers are pressuring voters to hurry, and are denying requests for assistance with electronic voting machines. Another caller from Summit County reported that elderly voters with disabilities, carrying oxygen tanks, are standing in the long lines. One caller in Lucas County complained about the lack of privacy for people filling out their ballots; the caller claimed that it is very easy to see who other people are voting for – when she filled out her ballot, one person looked over at her and gave her a thumbs up.
[b]FLORIDA – 12:45 pm[/b]
As reported by Election Protection:
This is a summation from some of the calls to the Election Protection Hotline, 1-866-OUR VOTE, and some of the reports from the field.
In Pinellas County, FL callers report that individuals purporting to be from the Kerry campaign are going door-to-door handing out absentee ballots, and asking voters to fill them out, and then taking the ballots from them, saying "Vote here for Kerry. Don't bother going to the polls."
A field attorney in Miami-Dade, Florida, reports that the wait at one precinct is over 3 hours. That attorney also reports that twelve cars with disabled voters have been waiting for over two hours to be able to vote, and that only two poll workers have been assisting the disabled voters, which has led to this delay.
*****
[b]PENNSYLVANIA – 12:45 PM [/b]
As reported by Election Protection:
This is a summation from some of the calls to the Election Protection Hotline, 1-800-OUR VOTE, and some of the reports from the field.
So far, 7,500 problems were reported in Philadelphia, mostly regarding polling places opening late and broken machines.
However, there have been 41 voter intimidation reports, including reports of suspected off-duty police and GOP operatives going around in a van in small teams. When they arrive at a polling place, they reportedly pull random people out of line and ask them questions like "Where do you live?" "When did you become a citizen?" and "When did you register?" As soon as EP people confront them about this activity, they flee.
A caller in Pennsylvania has alleged that Republican Party operatives are engaging in partisan activity inside a polling location – handing out literature, trying to persuade people into voting for Bush.
The hotline recently received a call from a woman in Philadelphia who has a van full of disabled voters. She states that the polling station is inaccessible, and that the judge in the polling station is refusing to provide paper ballots.
******
[b]OHIO – 11:30 am [/b]
Deanna Zandt, who is in the Election Protection offices in Columbus Ohio reports that some precincts are reporting a 80% turnout rate in Columbus. Some of the precincts, she reports, have a 3+ hour-long wait.
Deanna says that there have been reports from election protection officials that there is some voter intimidation going on. She has heard that groups of Republican-backed intimidators have been walking up and down voter lines, misleading voters about their eligibiity to vote and telling them that they need to vote in another precinct.
[b]As they prepare to cast their vote today, traditional Republicans must ask themselves whether this administration is truly the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.[/b]
Republicans look at this election as a test of loyalty to the standards of their party. What many do not understand is that the party, and its leader who demands their fealty, no longer exists. The principles that have defined Republicanism for the last 100 years are being rapidly eroded by an administration that seeks to promote an extremist right wing agenda and profoundly redefine the character of this country.
In the last six decades of observing and participating in presidential elections, I cannot remember one that has offered Americans such a stark choice over the future direction of their democracy, such a clear opportunity to reject extremism and embrace reason.
Traditional Republican John Eisenhower, son of President Dwight D. Eisenhower said recently that, "Today's Republican Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word Republican has always been synonymous with the word 'responsibility,' which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms. Today's whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion.
Responsibility used to be observed in foreign affairs. That has meant respect for others. America, though recognized as the leader of the community of nations, has always acted as a part of it, not as a maverick separate from that community and at times insulting towards it. Leadership involves setting a direction and building consensus, not viewing other countries as practically devoid of significance. Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance."
Talking about the Bush administration's economic recovery policies, Pete Peterson, former secretary of commerce under President Richard Nixon and founder of the Concord Coalition, has said, "Over the next decade these tax cuts will add about $5 trillion of deficits. We sit around and talk about all these cuts and we say it's our money, your money and mine, [and] I do not think they are being honest with the American people. In the first place, it's our debt and it's our children's debt. But more importantly, a tax cut isn't really a tax cut long-term unless you reduce spending. Because then it becomes a tax increase on your children. So we're inflicting this awful bill not simply on ourselves but most importantly on our kids."
As they prepare to cast their vote on Tuesday, traditional Republicans must ask themselves whether this administration is truly the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower. Are principles that have defined their party for generations still being respected? Is the Republican Party still the defender of economic responsibility, and an advocate for the environment? Can women continue to trust the party that fought to win them the right to vote? Are historic commitments to a well-reasoned multilateral foreign policy, and rational policies of national defense still being honored?
I do not believe that they are. I am concerned that a campaign of fear and intimidation is being used as a defense to justify governmental encroachment on the hard fought constitutional rights of American citizens. I am convinced that millions of Republicans are looking at this administration and quietly asking themselves whether this is the president they want to represent their party and defend their country.
Many believe they are alone – but they are not.
Respected pollster John Zogby, president and CEO of the polling firm Zogby International, has said, "when I talk anecdotally to moderate Republicans, it's very hard to find one who is going to vote for Bush. On the other hand, it's not showing up in our polling." In fact, Zogby's latest polls show 87% of Republicans backing Bush. "I'm just watching and waiting and saying to myself maybe there's something going on here, because I'm hearing it."
Using Zogby's figures, 13% of this country's approximately 56 million registered Republicans could crossover to support John Kerry. This is a potential of seven million voters, and, if Zogby's professional intuition is accurate that number could be much higher.
These voters could easily represent the margin of victory in next week's presidential election.
It worries me that many of these Republicans will choose, out of frustration, to stay at home on Tuesday, and in doing so re-elect an administration they know does not represent their beliefs.
Many of these Republicans are making their decision based on an inaccurate understanding of many of the Bush administration's policies. A recent survey showed that three out of four self-described supporters of President George W. Bush still believe that pre-war Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) or active programs to produce them. This survey shows that a similar number also believes that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein provided "substantial support" to al Qaeda.
Millions of Republican voters also believe Bush administration claims that the 1.7 million jobs they have created are comparable to the millions of jobs that have been outsourced overseas. Instead we are seeing what the New York Times recently referred to as the "Wal-Martization" of the American economy, a situation where $30.00 an hour jobs are being replaced with jobs that pay no more than $9.00 an hour.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush mesmerized many of his party's centrist members with talk of "compassionate conservatism," and a desire for bipartisan cooperation.
"President Bush's rhetoric during the 2000 campaign held the promise for a significant change of direction," said Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI). "There was a strong bipartisan desire for mutual respect and cooperation – for the good of the country. We were exhausted by the bitter partisan infighting, but this administration's behavior has only made the problem worse."
Of greater concern is the Republican's apparent willingness to wage a divisive campaign of fear, personal attacks and persistent inaccuracies. Such tactics denigrate the credibility of respected party principles.
In 1950, freshman Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith delivered what has come to be known as her "Declaration of Conscience" speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Sen. Smith made the decision to publicly confront Sen. Joseph McCarthy's charges that those who disagreed with his version of patriotism were, "giving ammunition to America's enemies." Similar implications have been leveled at Sen. John Kerry and many Democratic candidates for congressional office around the country.
In a quiet voice Sen. Smith made the following observations, "I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.
Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who by their own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: the right to criticize, the right to hold unpopular beliefs, the right to protest, the right to independent thought."
As Republicans make their decision over the next few days as to who to vote for for president they should remember that by voting for President Bush, they are giving him the power to change the face of the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal judiciary for a generation. They will empower Bush to amass an enormous federal deficit that will fall on the backs of their children. And, they will run the risk of undermining the Social Security system and Medicare, programs they have paid for and are relying on as integral components of their retirement.
These are not the principles on which their party was founded. These are not policies they have to support. This election could well be a defining moment in the history of the Republican Party if traditional Republicans turn their backs on neo-conservative ideologues, regain their voice and become major players in setting the party's political agenda for future generations.
[b]Sources:[/b]
Michael Cudahy is a political writer and analyst from Massachusetts. He was a former national campaign staff member for President George H.W. Bush, executive director for Elliot Richardson's Committee for Responsible Government, and national communications director for the Republican Coalition for Choice. http://www.alternet.org/elect...
[b]Please VOTE for John Kerry for President of the United States of America!!! ...
Every vote matters on Nov. 2. Here are a few tips to ensure that your vote is counted. [/b]
With the memory of 2000's contested election fresh in our minds, and brand new warnings that this election may also be challenged, every vote matters. With all the recent media coverage of contested votes and challenges to ballots, every voter needs to know a few tips in order to ensure your vote is counted:
[b]10. Know your polling place.[/b] Many polling places have changed since the last election, so check your polling place ahead of time. If you've not sure where you should go to vote, find out at mypollingsite.com http://www.mypollingsite.com/... .
[b]9. Vote in the morning, when the lines are likely to be shorter.[/b] Take a chair, or a good book just in case. Better yet, bring some treats to share with your fellow voters.
[b]8. Bring a photo ID.[/b] Many states have new identification requirements this year, so play it safe by bringing your drivers license or other official ID if at all possible.
[b]7. Not on the list?[/b] Ask for a provisional ballot and vote. Every voter has the right to a provisional ballot, even if your name is not on the rolls.
[b]6. Review the sample ballot before voting.[/b] Ballots can be confusing (think "butterfly ballot") and many states have changed their ballots since the last election. If you have any questions about the ballot, ask a poll worker.
[b]5. Make a mistake on your ballot?[/b] Ask for a new one.
[b]4. Check your ballot before finalizing your vote.[/b] Are your chads hanging? Did the computer properly record your votes? Triple-check everything.
[b]3. Get there late?[/b] As long as you are in line before the polls close, you still have the right to vote.
[b]2. Call 1-866-OUR-VOTE [/b]if you experience or witness a voting emergency such as intimidation or a challenge to your voting rights. Lawyers will be standing by to provide free, immediate, on-the-spot assistance.
[b]1. SHOW UP![/b] Democracy is not a spectator sport. You have to vote if you want your vote to be counted. See you at the polls!
[b]Source:[/b]
Mark Ritchie is the National Coordinator of [i]National Voice[/i], http://www.nationalvoice.org/... a coalition of non-profit and community groups working to maximize public participation in our nation's democratic process.
...---... IRAQ: Troops Lacking the Basics ...---...
[i]Newsweek[/i] reports, "A year ago the insurgents were relegated to sabotaging power and gas lines hundreds of miles outside Baghdad. Today they are moving into once safe neighborhoods in the heart of the capital, choking off what remains of "normal" Iraqi society like a creeping jungle." According to[i] Newsweek[/i], Colin Powell has acknowledged privately to friends "that the insurgents...are winning" http://msnbc.msn.com/id/63705... in Iraq.
[b]Iraq is a mess ... The nightmarish fiasco in Iraq has been a failure, a bloody guerrilla quagmire[i] for months now [/i]... Isn't it time to impeach and put on trial for War Crimes the corrupt Bush/Cheney Inc. [i]junta[/i]??? ...[/b]
The administration, failing to anticipate the rise of an insurgency in Iraq, sent troops to war without crucial equipment. Twenty months after the start of the war, U.S. troops on the front lines still lack the basics, like armor and bullets. Last night, [i]60 Minutes[/i] http://www.cbsnews.com/storie... talked to soldiers about their lack of "armored vehicles, field radios, night vision goggles and even ammunition – especially for the National Guard and reserve units that now make up more than 40 percent of U.S. troops."
[b]CARDBOARD COFFINS:[/b] According to [i]60 Minutes[/i], nearly half of U.S. casualties in Iraq are the result of roadside bombs. Gen. James E. Chambers, the commander of the 13th Corps Support Command in Iraq, charges that for soldiers, "the most dangerous job in Iraq is driving a truck. It's not if, but when, they will be attacked." The U.S. military, however, "still lacks thousands of fully armored vehicles that could save American lives." One interim solution has been to bolt on "add-on" armor kits. "But most of these add-ons don't protect the bottom of the vehicle, leaving them vulnerable to an explosive device." Other soldiers have been forced to jerry rig their vehicles with plywood and sandbags for protection; these vehicles have become known as "cardboard coffins."
[b]TROOPS LACK EQUIPMENT:[/b] Vital equipment is also missing for soldiers in Iraq. One guardsman told[i] 60 Minutes[/i] his unit lacked ammunition, night goggles and radios. He said guardsmen were using walkie-talkies their families bought at sporting goods stores to communicate. "And anybody can pick up those signals, you know," he said. "And we don't have the radios that we need." The Army admitted to[i] 60 Minutes [/i]"that there is a shortage of radios in Iraq and a shortage of bullets for training."
[b]MCCAIN SPEAKS OUT:[/b] Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) points out one reason there is a shortage of funds for training, maintenance and repairs: "I don't think that this war has truly come home to the Congress of the United States. This is the first time in history that we've cut taxes during a war." Certainly Rep. Tom DeLay wasn't thinking of the troops when he said in the days just before the war, "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes."
"Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty." - Samuel Adams ...
[b]Osama Bin Laden's reappearance and the missing munitions in Iraq are part of the same story – of a President who lacks the essential quality of a good leader: [i]judgment[/i].[/b]
When Osama bin Laden reappeared on our television screens a mere four days before Election Day, he did indeed deliver the much- anticipated "October Surprise." But contrary to the predictions of paranoid liberals and optimistic conservatives, his reappearance did not mark the veritable coup de grace for the Bush reelection campaign.
The sight of a well-rested, healthy bin Laden — with no dialysis machine in sight and sporting a tan that he clearly could not have acquired in an underground cave — was a poke in the eye of a White House that has done its best to frame him as a desperate fugitive of justice. The videotape was instead a sour reminder of the administration's unqualified failure in fighting terrorism: Bin laden, still standing strong and tall after three years of the much-touted "war on terror."
It's no accident that Bin Laden's turn in the spotlight came at the end of a week marked by a furious political debate over the missing 360 tons of explosives from the Al Qaqqa facility in Iraq. The White House variously tried to pin the blame on Saddam Hussein (They were moved before Baghdad fell!); revive its tattered justifications for the Iraq War (Aha! We thought liberals said there were no WMD!); minimize the situation (What is 360 tons in the grand scheme of things?); or simply pass the buck (Liberal New York Times targets Bush). In other words, the Bush administration did everything except admit its mistake — in this case, errors in its post-war planning, or rather, the lack thereof.
Bin Laden’s reappearance and the missing munitions are part of the same story. It's the story of a President who has consistently mistaken blind conviction for strength. It's the story of a man who, irrespective of partisanship, lacks the most important quality of a good leader: judgment. Each time George W. Bush has been faced with a set of choices on Iraq — before, during, and after the war — he has unerringly picked the worst option available.
As Bill Maher observed on HBO a couple of weeks ago: [b]"It's the incompetence, stupid!"[/b]
[b]Unilateralism, the New American Way[/b]
Four years ago, Candidate Bush pledged to create a "humble" U.S. foreign policy based on international cooperation, and scoffed at the idea of "nation building." Those turned out to be the proverbial famous last words as the rhetoric of the campaign was replaced by the radical foreign policy of the Bush presidency.
The transformation required the right trigger, the right justification. And Al Qaeda provided it on Sept 11, 2001.
The radical reorientation of U.S. foreign policy manifested itself almost immediately after the attacks, made plain in the President's now infamous assertion: "(E)ither you are with the United States or you are with the terrorists." It marked the birth of what would come to be known as the Bush Doctrine. Nine months later, he clarified the tenets of this uber-aggressive philosophy to West Point graduates: preemptive strikes, military unilateralism, preservation of the United States' status as the sole superpower, and a crusade to spread "democracy" around the world, by any means necessary.
It was a doctrine in search of a war. And that the war came to be with Iraq was hardly surprising. It was no secret that senior ranking officials in the administration were itching to finish the job that they perceived as left undone by the President’s father in the first Gulf War. As former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Bush’s own Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill would later attest, Vice-President Dick Cheney was eager to use the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse to move against Iraq within hours of the tragedy.
George Bush was faced with a clear choice: Option A, crack down on Al Qaeda at a time when its members were on the run; Option B, pursue a war that would at best deliver an ideological victory of dubious value. He chose war with Iraq.
Once the President made that one bad decision, he committed himself to the series of lies and misrepresentations that would be required to justify it. His advisors proceeded to "cherry pick" unreliable intelligence to make the case for war, which included claims about Saddam's arsenal of WMD, links to Al Qaeda, and the imminent threat he posed to the United States. According to a study by U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Bush and his top four advisors made 237 misleading statements about Iraq to the American public, elected officials, and international diplomats in the run up to war. Secretary of State Colin Powell sat before the UN Security Council and presented mountains of "evidence" on Iraq’s weapons stockpiles to the world that has since been discredited.
The Bush administration chose to risk the United States' reputation and credibility in the world to pursue a war of its choosing simply because it could. To make matters worse, committed to his unilateralist stance, Bush did not take the required measures to ensure international support for the United States in the impending conflict. He cavalierly cut short the UN weapons inspection process that was underway in Iraq and declared war on the strength of a shaky coalition, which included only one other significant military ally, the United Kingdom, and was made up of nations whose own people opposed the war.
The irony is that if the Bush administration had chosen instead to allow the UN inspections to continue, we would have learned exactly what Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, told us last month: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
On Mar. 6, 2003, just 14 days before the invasion of Iraq, Bush chose to deride the UN: "If we need to act, we will act, and we really don’t need United Nations approval to do so." The Bush administration stuck to its go-it-alone approach in the aftermath of the invasion by choosing to exclude companies from countries that did not participate in the war from receiving reconstruction contracts.
Bush also turned down the opportunity to change course when he rejected the UN’s offer to play a central role in post-war security and reconstruction. Rather than share power and control with "outsiders," Bush relegated the UN to the job of providing food, medicine and other humanitarian needs. It's a job that the UN soon found itself unable to do as Iraq's security continued to deteriorate and the United States found itself faced with a defiant insurgency.
Today, it's the Iraqi people and the U.S. soldiers who are paying the price for this outright rejection of the UN charter and the willingness, as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently said, to violate international law.
As reconstruction has ground to nearly a halt and security has deteriorated in Iraq, the motley number of the "coalition of the willing" is steadily declining. In recent months, nine countries have either pulled their troops from Iraq or withdrawn from the coalition. At the war’s start, the coalition countries represented 19.1 percent of the world’s population; that number now stands at a paltry 14 percent.
More importantly, the U.S. is now courting the very countries it excluded from the reconstruction, and asking them for financial aid to help rebuild Iraq and maintain security on the ground.
Among the most tragic results of the Bush administration's decision to ignore and even violate international law is the torture in the Abu Ghraib prison. According to Human Rights Watch, "The pattern of abuse resulted from decisions made by the Bush administration to bend, ignore, or cast rules aside." While Bush tried to cast the perpetrators’ behavior as an aberration, over 300 allegations of abuse have been filed against soldiers involved in post 9/11 military operations.
The Abu Ghraib revelations dealt a mortal blow to the already failing efforts to win the trust of the Iraqi people, who, along with most other people in the Middle East, viewed the torture as yet more confirmation of American bad faith toward Arabs in particular, and Muslims in general. They also outraged many former generals who warned of future consequences for American prisoners of war.
Yet the President shows no signs of reversing his policies toward the use of torture. Recent news reports reveal that the Justice Department may also have violated the Geneva Convention when it gave a green light to the CIA to secretly transport prisoners captured in Iraq out of the country for interrogations. In the process, the CIA concealed detainees from the International Red Cross and other authorities. On Oct. 27, Amnesty International released a new report which concluded that the Bush administration failed to substantially change the policies and practices that led to torture and ill-treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities.
Even today, the United States could still take a different approach — a conciliatory, and yes, even humble, approach to reach out to its allies and the Iraqi people. But the President instead chooses to keep charging down the road to international isolation.
[b]Plan? What Plan?[/b]
In the summer of 2002, Secretary Powell — now resigned to the Bush administration's determination to go to war despite his repeated warnings — led a State Department initiative, titled The Future of Iraq Project, to bring together Iraqi exiles from around the world to put together a comprehensive plan of reconstruction. Its recommendations, based on almost a year's worth of planning, were dismissed outright by the Department of Defense.
Told over and again by a wide array of experts — including conservative think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations, overseen by former Republican defense secretary James Schlesinger — that the war would require more troops for peacekeeping, the Bush administration chose instead to stick to the fanciful idea that intensive bombing (shock and awe) would be sufficient to cow Iraqis into submission — the few who wouldn't be celebrating in the streets.
Despite overwhelming intelligence from the CIA, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research that chaos could erupt after Saddam’s overthrow, the United States invaded Iraq with 140,000 soldiers, who were poorly informed or trained to deal with the chaos that would follow.
Commenting on the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Army Secretary General Thomas White said, "We immediately found ourselves shorthanded in the aftermath. We sat there and watched people dismantle and run off with the country." Former U.S. Administrator in charge of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, echoed this mistake more recently saying, "We never had enough troops on the ground."
The error would have far-reaching repercussions, sowing the seeds of the intractable insurgency that would soon ensue.
The failure to create a comprehensive and effective post-war plan is perhaps the best example of the President's lack of judgment. Rather than heed the caution of his veteran advisers, George Bush chose instead to rely on the rosy prognostications of the hawks in his administration. Their plan: Simply walk into Baghdad, bask in the adulation of cheering Iraqis, handoff the country to the U.S.-anointed heir, the now discredited Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, and leave. It was less a plan than ideological fantasy.
The result: widespread looting that alienated the Iraqi people; unguarded arsenals of weapons that would enable the insurgents to inflict a bloody toll on both soldiers and civilians. Yet at the time, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would dismiss the looting with a throwaway comment: "Freedom is messy."
Already hamstrung by insufficient troops, the Bush administration soon compounded its error when it bypassed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and approved CPA chief Paul Bremer’s decision to disband the Iraqi army and dismiss tens of thousands of Iraqi civil servants. In one fell swoop, the United States dismantled the Iraqi state but without the resources or the will to replace it. Not only did the decision exacerbate the near state of anarchy in Iraq, it also created thousands of unemployed, disaffected, and often armed Iraqis, immediately boosting the insurgent ranks. The Iraqi resistance has since quadrupled in strength from 5,000 to 20,000.
[b]A Failed Reconstruction[/b]
Having made a misguided decision to go to war and botched the post-war planning, the Bush administration could still have saved the situation in Iraq by winning the proverbial "battle for the hearts and minds." The support of the Iraqi people would have gone a long way in helping the U.S. military secure and stabilize Iraq.
The President, however, proved more willing to promote the interests of his corporate supporters than the welfare of the Iraqis. The Bush administration chose to award lucrative reconstruction contracts to U.S. and "coalition of the willing" companies instead of investing in qualified Iraqi firms. and building Iraq’s local resources. As companies such as Halliburton received no-bid contracts, it confirmed many Iraqis' suspicions that their nation was merely a cash cow to be milked for U.S. corporate interests.
Those suspicions were only confirmed by the CPA's spending patterns. When Bremer left Baghdad on June 28, the U.S. had spent less than 2 percent of its funds to repair Iraq’s shattered infrastructure. The U.S. reconstruction schemes bred further distrust when the CPA allocated $19 billion of the $20 billion in Iraqi oil revenue to pay U.S. private contractors. Unlike most U.S. reconstruction funds, the Iraqi oil fund did not require competitive bidding or transparency measures and the U.S. kept almost full control of the funds. Twenty-six criminal investigations into the CPA’s fraud, waste, and abuse are now underway.
The sluggish pace of reconstruction also became one more factor fueling the insurgency. Having promised 250,000 jobs to the Iraqis, the U.S. managed to employ only 30,000 as part of its various projects. Disaffected unemployed Iraqis, eager for any type of income to feed their families, became vulnerable to insurgents who offered them up to $500 to participate in attacks on U.S. forces, their perceived Iraqi sympathizers, and U.S.-led reconstruction projects.
The rising strength of the resistance in turn stalled most reconstruction efforts. Most foreign run reconstruction projects ground to a halt when the risk of kidnappings spiked in April 2004. To address the security crisis, the Bush administration further shifted $3.5 billion of the $18.4 billion that Congress approved for Iraq reconstruction away from restoring essential services such as water, sewage, and electricity and toward security and oil-related areas.
As sabotaged water, sewer, oil, and electricity projects remain in disrepair, frustration on the streets grows as does support for the insurgency to drive out the United States. The result is an entrenched cycle of failure: the insurgency diverts resources toward security, which in turn creates greater popular anger, which then strengthens the insurgency.
To earn the trust of the Iraqi people, President Bush could have directed reconstruction funds through a UN supervised public works program that prioritized building the institutional capacity of Iraqi businesses and employment of Iraqi citizens. He chose instead to favor his closest corporate allies and squander the remaining opportunity to win the peace.
Today, only 2 percent of Iraqis consider the U.S. as "liberators." Faced with this rising tide of popular anger, Bush has chosen to try and bomb it out of existence. He waited a mere four days for negotiations to work in Fallujah before he returned to bombing its residents on Oct. 13 — just two days before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. And this even though the negotiations between U.S. and interim government representatives and prominent Sunnis revealed a rift between the local Iraqi insurgents and foreign "jihadists" operating in Falluja. Instead of seizing an opportunity to isolate foreign fighters, the President instead chose to pursue a course of action that will surely be viewed on the streets of Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East as confirmation of America's war on Islam.
[b]The Bush Definition of Democracy[/b]
"Freedom" is one of the President's favorite words. It's also the word he employs these days to justify the war, now that his other rationales have proven hollow. Yet his administration's track record in establishing democracy in Iraq is poor, to say the least.
In the past 18 months, the Bush administration has shown little inclination to let Iraqis rule themselves. Following the fall of Baghdad, the CPA appointed Iraqi expatriates with no established local political support as members of the Iraqi Governing Council, even as it sidelined popular local leaders. The Bush policy has been crystal clear: Block Iraq’s radical religious leadership from attaining power and ensure a government sympathetic to American political and economic goals.
The policy has backfired. The very constituencies Bush sought to exclude are now more popular than ever. For example, when the Bush team shut down the newspaper of cleric Moqtada al Sadr in April 2004, support for al Sadr grew rapidly as did violent street attacks on the U.S. military. The result: American soldiers suffered the highest death toll in that month since the invasion.
The "transfer of sovereignty" on June 28, 2004 to the interim government has been almost entirely symbolic. The U.S. maintains control of almost every aspect of Iraqi life through its 138,000 troops, 20,000 U.S.-funded private foreign national contractors, and 100 official orders issued by the CPA that are designed to benefit U.S. interests — orders that cannot be undone even by a democratically-elected Iraqi government.
While the U.S. orders may lock in policy, they cannot control public opinion. According to a new U.S.-financed poll by the International Republican Institute, the very same religious parties that the U.S. has tried to marginalize in Iraq would win a national election if it were held today. At the same time, U.S.-backed interim government candidates are losing support and credibility with each passing month.
Despite daily abductions, assassinations, ambushes, and bombings, Bush insists that the elections will proceed as scheduled in January 2005. Rumsfeld, on the other hand, has told reporters that violence may lead authorities to exclude certain "hot spots," like Fallujah, from voting.
A plan for democracy that relies on disenfranchisement for success is a recipe for disaster. Yet the President is determined to "stay the course."
[b]The Price of Incompetence[/b]
If the President continues to make the wrong choice over and over again, it's perhaps because he does not have to pay the price for his decisions.
A report published by the Lancet Medical Journal on its web site last Friday reveals that 100,000 people, nearly all of them Iraqi civilians, have been killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. The numbers of wounded are likely to be far, far higher.
As for the U.S soldiers, the numbers only tell half the story. The Pentagon only counts the 1,500 dead and 7,500 plus injured in direct combat. There are tens of thousands more who have been disabled for life by injuries that are non-combat related. Since the ceremonial transfer of power on June 28, U.S. military casualties (dead and wounded) have risen to 747 per month — up from 415 during the 14-month period under the CPA.
The burden has grown heavier as the tours of over 20,000 troops have been extended in Iraq beyond their active duty contracts, amounting to a de facto back door draft. The harsh realities on the ground are taking their toll: 52 percent report low morale and one in six show signs of a mental health disorder.
The President's poor planning has been borne by the 51,000 U.S. soldiers and contractors who found themselves in a war zone without proper body armor. This month, soldiers from the 343rd Quartermaster Company are facing potential court martial for refusing orders to transport a fuel convoy because their vehicles were unsafe and they were not provided the standard armed escort for the mission. The army referred to the defiance as "a temporary breakdown in discipline," yet a growing number of soldiers, who have come home disillusioned and angry, are now breaking ranks to speak out against the President's Iraq policy.
The war that was supposed to pay for itself now rivals the average monthly cost of the Vietnam War at $5.1 billion per month. The astronomical price tags for Bush’s war and Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy have plunged the U.S. into record deficits that will top $422 billion this year. Looking ahead to the projected three-year occupation, the bill for each American taxpaying household will add up to approximately $3,500.
In December 2002, White House Economic Advisor Lawrence Lindsey was fired for predicting that an Iraq war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion. It turns out that his estimate actually erred on the conservative side. The President, if reelected, plans to ask Congress for another $70 billion, putting the cost of this war thus far at more than $200 billion.
George Bush's errors have been many and their consequences deadly. Yet if reelected, there is little hope that he will choose differently or better. Why, he hasn't even learned to listen to his own advisors. In September, the President dismissed his own National Intelligence Council’s warning that the current path in Iraq is likely to lead to civil war as "just guessing."
George W. Bush is the man who won’t ask for directions. Sitting in the driver’s seat, his gaze is fixed on the horizon, ignoring danger signs along the road and refusing to yield. Every time his passengers suggest they are lost and need to change course he shoots them that famous Bush glare, shifts his puckered lips to the right and bears down on the gas.
[b]Source:[/b]
Amy Quinn works with the Institute for Policy Studies. She is a co- author of “A Failed Transition: The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War.", http://www.alternet.org/waron...
