If It's A War Crime, It Must Be Partisan

Ensign Calls Senate Armed Services Committee Report A ‘Democrat Partisan’ Document »

Today, Sen. John Ensign (R-AZ) went on MSNBC to attack the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Bush administration's treatment of detainees. When host Chris Matthews asked Ensign whether he was shocked that our interrogation practices were based on those used by Chinese Communists to elicit false information from U.S. troops, the senator criticized him for being "inflammatory."

When Matthews insisted that he wasn't being inflammatory because he was reading directly from the report, Ensign tried to discredit the entire document by saying it was a "Democrat partisan" report:

ENSIGN: Chris, the reason I said it is because you didn't preface that with saying that was a Democrat report. That was a Democrat partisan report. And you have to understand where the people who were doing that report -- where their ideology comes from.
MATTHEWS: Well, apparently, Sen. John McCain is part of what you call a "Democrat report." It's the full committee report. ... [I]t's the Armed Services Committee report. It went through three months of review by the Defense Department, until its final release just yesterday. It seems to me this was vetted, sir. And you say this was some Democrat report.
ENSIGN: The Democrats are in control of all of the committees. This was a Democrat majority report. This was not with the participation of the minority where the minority signed it, "Yes, we agree with these views."

Ensign is right that there are often committee reports produced and released by only the minority or the majority. This report, however, was not one of them. The first page of the detainee report makes it clear that it is a document from the "Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate." ThinkProgress spoke with a committee spokesman who confirmed that the full, unanimous committee released the report. When talking with Levin today, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell noted that Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham also endorsed the report.

Additionally, documents clearly show that the Bush administration's interrogation program was based on the U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE), which is used to train U.S. troops if they are ever tortured by an enemy that doesn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions. As the report notes, SERE techniques "were based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to elicit false confessions."

Transcript: More »

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

GOP Imploding...but

Don't make the mistake of thinking they are dead.

Also, one must understand that the Democratic Party is made up of several groups, not all of whom would have even been considered Democrats 20 years ago. Can we spell BLUE DOGS?

We need to create more viable parties who are more honest about who they are and what their real agendas are!

For the past couple of decades, the consensus in the mainstream media was that the Democratic Party was in dire trouble: politically close to irrelevance and on the wrong foot demographically. Even Bill Clinton's eight years in power were considered a fluke: brought on by a third-party candidate, Ross Perot, and reliant on a centrist triangulating strategy that threw Congressional Democrats under the bus. Red states were growing the fastest, gaining congressional seats and electoral votes which would ensure a permanent GOP majority.

Obviously, it has not quite worked out like that. From Arizona to North Carolina, and Nevada to New Hampshire, the scope of the defeat for the Republican Party in 2008 is stunning. The very states that the GOP was counting on to build on its electoral successes of the past 20-some years turned against them the hardest. Much of it has to do with the ineptitude of the party's leadership, from the economy to the war in Iraq, but it is also about simple math: did Republicans really think that newcomers to Colorado, Virginia and a dozen other fast-growing states were of the same mind set as the backwards-looking social conservatives that had dominated local politics? Or were they more likely to be transplants from blue states with little appetite for fights about abortion, gay rights, and English-only initiatives?

The answer is in the numbers, and they are ugly for the Republican Party. On the presidential level, the fastest-growing state last year, Nevada, flipped to the Democrats, as did two others among the top 10: Colorado and North Carolina. Georgia swung 14 points, coming close to giving Barack Obama an unexpected victory, and Arizona actually voted more Democratic than four years ago, even with John McCain on the ticket. Rather than strengthening the Republican Party, internal migration and immigration have diluted its strength in some critical strongholds.

It is in the Congressional results that the scope of the disaster for Republicans is best illustrated. Democrats now outnumber Republicans in the delegations of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado. Indeed, New Mexico's entire delegation, as well as its governorship, is Democratic. Among other Western states, California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and Montana all send more (often far more) Democrats than Republicans to DC. The GOP's Western front now consists of Utah, Alaska, Idaho and Wyoming, some of the smallest states in the country; and even those are showing cracks, with Alaska and Idaho electing Democrats to Congress for the first time in years.

The GOP's ambitions in the Northeast have long been limited, but they nonetheless managed to fall short of even the lowest expectations. New England's six-state, 22-person House caucus is now entirely Democratic thanks to the defeat of last GOP Rep standing Chris Shays in Connecticut. In New York, the Republican delegation now stands at three, less than 10% of the 31 members of Congress from the state.

The Midwest may remain a battleground, although one that was lost resoundingly by Republicans this year: only three of the twelve states in the region now send more Republicans to Congress than Democrats: Nebraska, Kansas, and Missouri, the latter now having officially forfeited its bellwether status.

Even in the South, cracks are beginning to show. Virginia and North Carolina, in addition to swinging to Obama, both contributed to the growth in the Democrats' Senate majority and feature Congressional delegations dominated by Democrats. Victories in previously scarlet-red districts in Mississippi and Alabama may also prove problematic for the Republican Party. Overall the GOP has an edge in the region (80 to 62 in the House; 19 to 7 in the Senate) but that is far less of an advantage than the Democratic Party's in the Northeast and the West Coast, for instance.

Those members of Congress from the South represent nearly half the entire GOP representation, and it is not an exaggeration to call the current Republican party a regional one. This in itself is a severe problem for the GOP, especially as the West is actually a faster-growing region, but other demographic data from exit polling should be even scarier for party leaders.

Losing the youth vote is something most Republicans expect, but losing 18-29 year-olds by 66% to 32%, as McCain did this year, is a preposterously high obstacle to future growth. By the same token, the only age group the Republican candidate won, those 65 and older, is not one the party can rely on to stick around forever.

Ethnically and racially, too, the Republican party is in a bind, winning among the only group that is shrinking nationally: non-Hispanic whites. McCain lost by the GOP's usual massive margin among African-Americans, but also by 2 to 1 among Latinos and Asians, the fastest growing groups. The Republican Party lost among urban voters, of course, but also among suburbanites; it scored only among rural voters, a shrinking demographic group.

The loss of the suburbs remains one of the biggest challenges for the GOP, one that has been years in the making, and will not be solved overnight. Here too, a look at Congressional results over the years shows how, one by one, quintessentially suburban districts started falling to Democrats in the 1990s, culminating in this year's victory by Obama in the suburbs. It was not so long ago that places such as Walnut Creek outside of San Francisco, or Long Island, NY, were staunchly Republican bastions. Contra Costa County, where Walnut Creek is located, voted for Obama 68% to 31%, and both Long Island counties favored him too. Both regions are have solely favored Democrats for Congress in recent years. Entire swaths of suburbs around New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, Detroit and large California cities are represented by Democrats in Congress, who often win by massive margins. On the suburban level, GOP strength is concentrated around a handful of Southern cities such as Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta.

Beyond its regional concentration, the Republican Party's face is from another time. The party's only Hispanic Senator has just announced he is not running for reelection, leaving an entirely non-white, non-Hispanic GOP Senate. In fact, the party's Congressional caucus overall includes only three Latinos, no African-Americans, and just one Asian-American elected this week in a Louisiana district that is so Democratic he is sure to lose in two years. Republican women are a dwindling group in Congress: down to four in the Senate (including the two Senators from Maine), with one, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, likely to retire soon too. In the House, they are down to 18. There are three openly gay Democrats, but no Republicans. Overall, straight white men represent about half of the Democratic Party in Congress, but close to 90% of Republicans. Indeed, nearly half of the Republican caucus is composed of Southern white men.

The conservative remains of Republicanism are likely to yield an ever more right-wing direction, as evidenced by the current race for the party leadership. One strong candidate calls for change that emphasizes "commitment to be the party of [...] respect for the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, the importance of family." It is far from clear that disgust with the Republican position on social issues is the sole culprit for the alienation a growing majority of voters feel towards the party: after all, majorities of voters in California, Arizona and Florida, defeated same-sex marriage recently. But it is certainly clear that right-wing campaigns that focus on the "sanctity" of marriage, life and guns are doomed for failure, at least nationally.

This surely means that in the long run, self-preservation will take precedence, and some form of reason will prevail, as it did, for instance, within the UK's Conservative Party. Drained of life post Margaret Thatcher, the party became increasingly insular, focused on older, native-born, white, male, rural voters, as the country became younger, more diverse and suburban. The current leader of the Conservatives, David Cameron, has brought his party close to victory after 14 years in the wilderness, and his potential success bears some lessons for Republicans, even accounting for transatlantic differences.

The cultural warfare that exists in the United States does not define British political life in the same way, except perhaps on immigration. Nonetheless Cameron has aptly put behind him topics such as gay rights and abortion that are sure losers in the long-term because of cultural and demographic shifts. Indeed, he has co-opted some of the governing Labour Party's stances on these issues, and even taken what in the US would be considered a more liberal attitude than the Democratic Party's. He has also emphasized policies on the environment, for instance, that are of growing concern to suburban and younger voters. Even if the environment is not the top vote-getting issue in most countries, in the UK, at least, it gives Cameron a modern sheen that his party has desperately lacked. The recruitment of candidates who are not straight old white men has also been given a priority, and time will tell how successful that effort will be, but, again, at the very least (and quite cynically) it gives the party a contemporary look that has been sorely lacking. At the very least, Britain's Conservatives have developed a viable marketing strategy.

No one expects a Southern-dominated GOP to abandon its single-minded focus on social issues but, at some point, Republicans will want to win again. After all, many up-and-coming party members have staked entire careers and livelihoods on winning, and winning as Republicans. There are only so many elective offices in rural Alabama and suburban Houston, and they cannot satisfy even a dwindling group of ambitious Republicans. They will start to show more pragmatism, perhaps get lucky, perhaps the Democrats will overplay their hand on taxes and bailouts, but they will be back: the US electoral system is built that way and big business has too much invested in the party to let it fail (just call it the Citigroup of political parties).

For some perspective, two years ago, one mainstream conservative commentator described the Democratic Party as "imploding," "meaningless" and run by "crazies." Just one national election later, Peggy Noonan looks like the fool that she is. And even though we know that it is the Republican Party that is imploding, meaningless and run by crazies, we also know better than to assume it is dead.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Standing Amid The Ruin Of Regressive Politics

Of all the statistics among all the political polls released this week, this rather obscure one, from Pew Research, spoke loudly and, to me, most unambiguously about why the presidential race stands where it stands:

"Voter interest in the campaign remains extraordinary: fully 81% continue to say that they have given a lot of thought to the presidential election, the highest ever measured at this stage in a campaign."

There you have it. Like Samuel Johnson's observation about hanging, it seems that nothing concentrates the electorate's mind like an acute recession and the threat of a chronic depression.

We tell ourselves that foreign wars are indeed a matter of grave concern, what with all their bloody loss of human life and public treasure, but let's face it: one's own pocketbook trumps other people's far more horrendous problems any old election year.

And it's then that the electorate runs home to mommy, the Democrat.

If only we had seen rude upticks in the price of gas and crashing home values and creeping layoffs and etc., etc., etc. in 2004 rather than 2008, perhaps we could have spared ourselves this needless surfeit of economic pain.

But we didn't see it then, even though virtual platoons of high financial analysts were frantically clanging the bells of alarm. Hey, as long as we had what's ours, everyone else -- including our country's sons and daughters marooned in desert or mountainous wastelands of tribal conflict -- and everything else could just by-God wait on the sidelines.

Meanwhile, half-attentively we'd stick with old tough-love dad, the Republican.

I generalize and simplify -- but not, I think, oversimplify -- to highlight a distressing but demonstrable point: Americans are "exceptional" all right, just like Sarah Palin insists we are. But our exceptionalism isn't always in the form we'd care to confess: we are, that is, exceptionally self-interested, self-centered and self-absorbed.

It takes something like this -- a gargantuan global crisis of concentric design in which we, individually, are the bull's eye -- to slap us into that greater reality. Two insanely conducted foreign wars -- three, if you count the amorphous one against a tactic -- weren't enough to quite do the trick.

By and large we were willing to just stumble along with that apodictically clueless stumblebum in the White House, he of historic inattentiveness and downright epic in curiosity. Problems? What problems? Everything was humming right along. We could take his word for it. And we did.

Which, in 2004, forever painted the American electorate itself historically and epically irresponsible.

The question now isn't whether we'll change course (unfortunately, within the inexorable constraints handed to the next president). That, it would seem, is an arithmetical given. Mommy has daddy backed into an electoral-count corner whose already narrow territory continues to shrink by the hour. Talk about your concentric circles and the ultimate bull's eye.

No, that's no longer the question, or should I say, the trick. Because the trick is going to be whether or not we concentrate our minds to learn something from all this pain -- that of the past, present, and even predictable future if we don't.

In short, we have got to grow up. We have got to accept that we are not the biggest kid on the block or the smartest kid in the class any more. We forfeited all claims to those exceptional honorifics -- if real they were -- some time ago.

In fact we threw them away. We were too engaged in self-celebratory, infantile chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" to notice that the good old U.S.A. was going down the tubes. And it was headed south because we weren't paying attention to what our leaders were doing, or, rather, what they weren't doing -- looking down the track.

Because we -- most of us -- had ours. Everything was just peachy, as long as both we and our leaders kept our eyes tightly shut and our minds hermetically closed to that blinding light of that oncoming train. Just permit us our iPhones and cable tv and toss in the occasional "U.S.A.!" and all would remain well.

Or so we thought. But as the conservative intelligentsia (such as it is) began insisting decades ago, "ideas have consequences." And now we're paying the consequential price of years of mostly its ideas, which we fecklessly signed off on, because, simply, we weren't really paying attention to anyone but ourselves.

There were many a voice in the wilderness standing athwart our unfolding history, just as Bill Buckley encouraged us to do, "yelling Stop!" Excuse me, pardon me, coming through -- can't anyone else see that big ugly train speeding our direction down the track? We heard that aplenty, but shut it out.

Maybe, this time, we'll learn. There's always hope, however much hope itself stands athwart the history of human folly.

Maybe we will grow the hell up and not need Mommy or Daddy anymore. What are the chances?

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

McCain/Palin Spell The End For The U.S.A.

New York Times to America: Wake the hell up!

After Michael Cooper and Jim Rutenberg tiptoed around the word "lies" yesterday, the New York Times is loaded for bear (or moose, if you will) today, with two must-read opinion pieces and a front-page article, the latter of which demonstrates definitively that putting Sarah Palin one melanoma away from the presidency isn't putting lipstick on a pig (which Barack Obama NEVER implied in regard to Ms. Palin, but I am not just implying it, but announcing it), but putting lipstick on Dick Cheney.


The article gathers in one place information that has been written about in blogs all week about the petty, ruthless, crony-riddled, ignorant governance of Sarah Palin. Excerpts/examples (emphases mine):

when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.


Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.


When Ms. Palin had to cut her first state budget, she avoided the legion of frustrated legislators and mayors. Instead, she huddled with her budget director and her husband, Todd, an oil field worker who is not a state employee, and vetoed millions of dollars of legislative projects.


And four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.


“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

[snip]



Throughout her political career, she has pursued vendettas, fired officials who crossed her and sometimes blurred the line between government and personal grievance, according to a review of public records and interviews with 60 Republican and Democratic legislators and local officials.

[snip]


Interviews show that Ms. Palin runs an administration that puts a premium on loyalty and secrecy. The governor and her top officials sometimes use personal e-mail accounts for state business; dozens of e-mail messages obtained by The New York Times show that her staff members studied whether that could allow them to circumvent subpoenas seeking public records.

[snip]


...in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book “Daddy’s Roommate” on the shelves and that it did not belong there, according to Ms. Chase and Mr. Stein. Ms. Chase read the book, which helps children understand homosexuality, and said it was inoffensive; she suggested that Ms. Palin read it.


“Sarah said she didn’t need to read that stuff,” Ms. Chase said. “It was disturbing that someone would be willing to remove a book from the library and she didn’t even read it.”


“I’m still proud of Sarah,” she added, “but she scares the bejeebers out of me.”

[snip]


Ms. Palin entered the 2006 primary for governor as a formidable candidate.


In the middle of the primary, a conservative columnist in the state, Paul Jenkins, unearthed e-mail messages showing that Ms. Palin had conducted campaign business from the mayor’s office. Ms. Palin handled the crisis with a street fighter’s guile.


“I told her it looks like she did the same thing that Randy Ruedrich did,” Mr. Jenkins recalled. “And she said, ‘Yeah, what I did was wrong.’ ”


Mr. Jenkins hung up and decided to forgo writing about it. His phone rang soon after.



Mr. Jenkins said a reporter from Fairbanks, reading from a Palin news release, demanded to know why he was “smearing” her. “Now I look at her and think: ‘Man, you’re slick,’ ” he said.


Ms. Palin won the primary, and in the general election she faced Tony Knowles, the former two-term Democratic governor, and Andrew Halcro, an independent.


Not deeply versed in policy, Ms. Palin skipped some candidate forums; at others, she flipped through hand-written, color-coded index cards strategically placed behind her nameplate.

[snip]


Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account “when there was significant state business.”

[snip]


Many lawmakers contend that Ms. Palin is overly reliant on a small inner circle that leaves her isolated. Democrats and Republicans alike describe her as often missing in action. Since taking office in 2007, Ms. Palin has spent 312 nights at her Wasilla home, some 600 miles to the north of the governor’s mansion in Juneau, records show.


[snip]


The administration’s e-mail correspondence reveals a siege-like atmosphere. Top aides keep score, demean enemies and gloat over successes. Even some who helped engineer her rise have felt her wrath.


Dan Fagan, a prominent conservative radio host and longtime friend of Ms. Palin, urged his listeners to vote for her in 2006. But when he took her to task for raising taxes on oil companies, he said, he found himself branded a “hater.”


It is part of a pattern, Mr. Fagan said, in which Ms. Palin characterizes critics as “bad people who are anti-Alaska.”

Does this all sound familiar? It should. The secrecy, the notion that government is not accountable to the people who elected it, the reliance on a small circle of long-time acquaintances and cronies, the vindictiveness against those who are deemed to have "batrayed the Family" -- this is all Bush Administration Redux.


But does it matter? After all, Palin is "just" the Vice Presidential nominee, not the #1 on the ticket.


And that's where Frank Rich comes in:

...if we’ve learned anything from the G.O.P. convention and its aftermath, it’s that the 2008 edition of John McCain is too weak to serve as America’s chief executive. This unmentionable truth, more than race, is now the real elephant in the room of this election.


No longer able to remember his principles any better than he can distinguish between Sunnis and Shia, McCain stands revealed as a guy who can be easily rolled by anyone who sells him a plan for “victory,” whether in Iraq or in Michigan. A McCain victory on Election Day will usher in a Palin presidency, with McCain serving as a transitional front man, an even weaker Bush to her Cheney.


The ambitious Palin and the ruthless forces she represents know it, too. You can almost see them smacking their lips in anticipation, whether they’re wearing lipstick or not.

[snip]


The specifics have changed in our new century, but the vitriolic animus of right-wing populism preached by Pegler and McCarthy and revived by the 1990s culture wars remains the same. The game is always to pit the good, patriotic real Americans against those subversive, probably gay “cosmopolitan” urbanites (as the sometime cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani has it) who threaten to take away everything that small-town folk hold dear.


The racial component to this brand of politics was undisguised in St. Paul. Americans saw a virtually all-white audience yuk it up when Giuliani ridiculed Barack Obama’s “only in America” success as an affirmative-action fairy tale — and when he and Palin mocked Obama’s history as a community organizer in Chicago. Neither party has had so few black delegates (1.5 percent) in the 40 years since the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies started keeping a record.


But race is just one manifestation of the emotion that defined the Palin rollout. That dominant emotion is fear — an abject fear of change. Fear of a demographical revolution that will put whites in the American minority by 2042. Fear of the technological revolution and globalization that have gutted those small towns and factories Palin apotheosized.


[snip]


Obama’s one break last week was the McCain camp’s indication that it’s likely to minimize its candidate’s solo appearances by joining him at the hip with Palin. There’s a political price to be paid for this blatant admission that he needs her to draw crowds. McCain’s conspicuous subservience to his younger running mate’s hard-right ideology and his dependence on her electioneering energy raise the question of who has the power in this relationship and who is in charge. A strong and independent woman or the older ward who would be bobbing in a golf cart without her? The more voters see that McCain will be the figurehead for a Palin presidency, the more they are likely to demand stepped-up vetting of the rigidly scripted heir apparent.


[snip]


This election is still about the fierce urgency of change before it’s too late. But in framing this debate, it isn’t enough for Obama to keep presenting McCain as simply a third Bush term. Any invocation of the despised president — like Iraq — invites voters to stop listening. Meanwhile, before our eyes, McCain is turning over the keys to his administration to ideologues and a running mate to Bush’s right.

As this campaign progresses and the McCain campaign shows that it NEEDS Palin to be a human shield for John McCain in order to present a ticket that's attractive to those fear-riddled theocratic voters who think they can somehow stop change right in its tracks by creating an American theocracy run by the Assemblies of God. Without Palin, John McCain is just an increasingly doddering old man, still determined to fight and win a war from 40 years ago from which he has never quiet recovered. With Palin, he's an aging king with a smart young knight who can Spread the Word among the heathen, pillaging and looting and seizing land and converting the pagans for the glory of the King -- who has no heir and can be easily convinced to make the young knight his anointed successor. That the young knight is female just adds to the allure.


But people who use the neocortex of the brain instead of just the reptilian one recognize that change is inevitable. Caucasians WILL be the minority in this country by mid-century, and banning abortion won't change that one bit. Climate change IS happening, and whether we are the sole cause, we are ONE of the primary causes, and pretending we are not is not going to prevent larger and stronger hurricanes, the destruction of the reefs that are hotbeds of aquatic life, and the inundation of low-lying and oceanfront parts of this country. The question is whether we are going to recognize this and try to shape this new reality of the world we live in to our benefit, or if we are going to continue to party like it's 1999.


I hate to find myself agreeing with Thomas Friedman on anything. After all, this is a guy who has applauded sending jobs in my field overseas when his job is perfectly safe -- and not really come up with a whole lot of ways to address the displacement of American workers. Globalization may be inevitable, but for all that he prides himself on his forward-thinking, updating your work skills is futile when the motivation for exporting jobs is because overseas workers will work for peanuts.


A necessary component for dealing with change is the vision to create solutions that have not been considered before. When he wrote The World is Flat, Friedman demonstrated a profound lack of vision, falling upon the bromides of politicians of BOTH parties who have bought into the notion of the mythical IT labor shortage and assuming that teaching oneself C# out of a book will magically open the door to new job opportunities for 50-year-old mainframe programmers when someone overseas is willing to do the work for three bucks an hour.


But when it comes to the pressing need for energy independence to come from renewable energy rather than from fossil fuels, Friedman is right on the money:

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”


Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that — with “drill, baby, drill” — why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra “invent, baby, invent?” That is what a party committed to “change” would really be doing. As they say in Texas: “If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.”


Who cares how much steel John McCain has in his gut when the steel that today holds up our bridges, railroads, nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is rusting? McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from? From lowering taxes? From banning abortions? From borrowing more from China? From having Sarah Palin “reform” Washington — as if she has any more clue how to do that than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook?
[snip]


Sorry, but there is no sustainable political/military power without economic power, and talking about one without the other is nonsense. Unless we make America the country most able to innovate, compete and win in the age of globalization, our leverage in the world will continue to slowly erode. Those are the issues this election needs to be about, because that is what the next four years need to be about.


There is no strong leader without a strong country. And posing as one, to use the current vernacular, is nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.

.

And that is why the election of John McCain and Sarah Palin are a death knell for this country. It's because their party is hopelessly mired in a past that cannot be recaptured because it's a past memorialized in history books and Merchant-Ivory movies; a past in which a few unfathomably rich people employ the rabble as servants in their homes and drones in their factories, working them to death for a few pennies per hour. It's a world of white wealth and privilege, where the rabble are told to be happy for their lot in life and to go to church where they can hear about how much better things will be for them in the herafter.


The question is not whether we are going to return to some state of existence that is mythical, or if we are going to use our intellect to find new solutions to the problems we face. The McCain/Palin model is one that uses fear and loathing in an attempt to turn back the clock that will inevitably fail.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

None Dare Call It Evil... The.GOP

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=8879

---

August 28, 2008

By Alfred McGuire

Americans need to be told the truth.

::::::::

The Republican party came into being in the early 1850s. Its purpose was to foster the abolition of slavery, the provision by the government of free land in the west, equal protection of the law for Americans and voting rights for blacks and women. Abraham Lincoln was the party’s first elected president.

The Republican party I just described ceased to exist a long time ago. Early on it was taken over by wealthy corporate interests which were- and are- directly and overtly opposed to the founding principles of the party- and the country for that matter. Republican politicians- who are in fact not Republicans at all in the original sense of the word- are devoted solely to fostering the interests of the wealthiest minority. They view the general population as a force to be kept in line, considering any expansion of the wealth, privileges, liberties and rights of the American people as a threat to their supremacy and as money out of their pockets. Lincoln, were he alive today, would renounce and condemn this modern "Republican" party as in no way associated with the party called Republican in his day. There is absolutely no doubt about that. These “Republicans” are violently opposed to equality in any sense of the word. They are fully dedicated to insuring that the United States be a mercantile aristocracy of wealth and that the general population be subjects of that ruling oligarchy. Not citizens in the true sense of the word. Subjects.

That’s why the “Republicans” have strenuously fought every effort to bring a better life to the American people. They don’t want that. It’s a threat to their power. That’s why they violently- and often murderously- fought the establishment of labor unions. That’s why they fought- and continue to fight- minimum- wage standards. That’s why they fought tooth and nail to defeat social security and medical assistance for the elderly. That’s why they’ve destroyed pensions, forcing the elderly to continue to work until they drop dead on the job. And they’ve fought civil rights and women’s rights and environmental protections and constitutional rights- and on and on and on- for the same damn reason. They want the people to be kept down and they want their own pockets to be filled to the breaking point by the sweat and blood of an enslaved population. Damn it, that’s the truth and you people who naively call yourselves Republicans better hear it. You’re not Republicans at all. You have been conned. What in the name of God Almighty do you have in common with these criminal sons-of-bitches? What?

Dwight Eisenhower, when he left office, warned strongly against the burgeoning power of what he called “the military-industrial complex.” What was he talking about? He was talking about what I’ve been talking about in this post. I’ll put it this way: When all branches of government join as one with big business and the military and embark upon a scheme to derive maximum profit for their elites by securing absolute domination of economic, social and political life, both nationally aNnd internationally, you have what used to be called in Europe “fascismo”- fascism, which of course also implies the lessening and systematic elimination of the rights, liberties and securities of the vast majority of the people. Why? Because absolute domination doesn’t want any competitors. The more power you and I have, the more threatened the elite feels itself to be. It’s a vicious combination of suppression of the people at home and imperialist warfare abroad- warfare for profit that is. And whether you want to hear it or not, that is the malignant cancer that has taken over this nation. It’s killing us as a people. It is destroying our beloved nation. And it is the essence of what the (so-called) Republican party is all about. And don’t think I’m absolving the Democrats, too many of whom are fellow-travelers with the Republicans, no matter how they may try to mask the fact.

This is deadly serious business and the epidemic of denial has to stop. If we don’t face what is happening we are lost. I hear someone even as politically savvy as Bill Clinton talking about all this in terms of being a difference in “political ideology” that will be cleared up if the elections go right. It doesn’t have a damn thing to do with political ideology. The Republicans and their Democratic fellow travelers don’t give a damn about political ideology. They’d use freaking Scientology or any other ology if it suited their purpose. This is all about suppressing and manipulating the population for maximum profit. It’s all about war for profit. How many billions have gone into the pockets of Bush and Cheney’s corporate fraternity brothers as the direct result of the Iraq war? I’m amazed to hear the pundits talk about “the cost of the war.” Who’s getting the money? The soldiers? The money for the supplies, weaponry, the mercenary operations, and so forth and so forth, is all going into the pockets of the merchant elite- in other words the elite of the Republican party. Are you surprised that they want to continue the war for “a hundred years?” The bullshit and the cant has to stop. That’s what’s going on- all at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Mass murder-for-profit. That’s what’s going on. A war invented to fill the pockets of Bush and Cheney’s fellow-criminal “Republican” cohorts. And too damn many Democrats. My God, this is what the Calvinist money ethic has come to? And we can sit back and let it happen?

This is the most critical moment in our history. If we don’t measure up to it we’re gone. What we have to fight with everything in us is an enormously powerful evil. I know it’s not fashionable to use the word these days; but that’s what it is- a tremendous, treacherous evil. You can call it Fascism or the Military-Industrial Complex or degenerated Republicanism or whatever the hell you want to call it. It is ruthless. It has no conscience. It can kill for profit without batting an eyelash. It is vindictive and merciless. It has no respect whatever for human rights and liberties. It will do anything whatsoever to attain its continuing objective: more and more power for more and more profit. It hides behind the corporate veil and “executive privilege” and considers itself entitled to call whatever it does “right,” It is the direct opposite of what this nation is about. And most unfortunately, it is now in the driver’s seat. It must be defeated. Now .We’re Americans and we can do it.

Authors Website: http://theopendimension.blogspot.com

Authors Bio: I am a semi-retired psychotherapist/psychiatric social worker. Originally a practicing attorney, I changed careers during the 1980's. My interests include history, constitutional law, Indian classical music, yoga, meditation and spirituality.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

UuHa!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Read More: Democratic National Convention, George W. Bush, John McCain, Populism, Progressives, Republican National Convention, Right-Wing Republicans, Sarah Palin, Social Darwinism, Politics News

With varying degrees of confidence or even complacency, many people have assumed that the jig is almost up for the horrendous political era that began when George W. Bush became president. Always dubious, the assumption is now on very shaky ground.

The Bush-Cheney regime may be on its last legs, but a new incarnation of right-wing populism is shadowing the near horizon.

Much as modern capitalism is always driven to promote new products in the marketplace, the corporate-fundamentalist partnership must reinvent and remarket itself. We're now seeing the rollout of a hybrid product under the McCain-Palin brand.

Last night, after watching Sarah Palin's acceptance speech and the laudatory responses from many TV journalists, I remembered wandering around the floor of the Democratic National Convention a week ago. At the base, the two major parties are even more different than the speeches are apt to indicate.

Under the roof of the Democratic Party, notwithstanding its shades of corporatism and militarism and numerous other grave faults, there's a lot of longstanding and ongoing involvement from key progressive constituencies -- including labor unions, African Americans, gay rights activists, human rights defenders, environmentalists, fair-trade advocates, healthcare-for-all organizers, feminists, and on and on.

In contrast, the Republican Party is a political institution that views all such constituencies and activists (including last night's new target of derision, "community organizers") as enemies to be smothered and crushed. The party's latest "populist" packaging is another wrinkle in a timeworn pattern; the most avid political servants of corporate elites are eager to keep generating the anti-elites rhetoric and imagery of down-home regular folks.

At the Democratic convention last week, some of the speeches ran counter to basic progressive tenets of peace and social justice. But none came close to the zeal for social Darwinism, jingoism and militarism routinely spewing from the Republican convention's podium.

In ways too numerous to count and in realms too profound to truly evoke, this decade has grimly underscored that -- notwithstanding theoretical claims to the contrary -- it matters greatly who is president. From the Supreme Court to thousands of subcabinet positions to executive orders to a vast array of foreign-policy decisions including the potential use of nuclear weapons, the president is able to wield state power with consequences huge enough to be unfathomable.

A popular strand of analysis on the left has downplayed the importance of the president. The story goes that corporate forces rule, and the person in the Oval Office is little more than a figurehead for those rulers. There's some validity to that assessment, but in the face of experience it has tended to calcify into a form of denial.

Right-wing Republicans running the White House for 20 of the last 28 years, maybe the downplaying of the importance of the presidency has become a kind of coping mechanism for some progressives. Accustomed to a status quo that grows increasingly dire, we've settled into an uncomfortable "comfort zone" as familiar as it is macabre. At the same time, the cascading effects of right-wing control over most of the federal government have been cumulative and devastating.

Of course progressives should always keep organizing, educating, protesting and agitating. But the potential for achieving progressive changes in government policies is severely limited while the right wing is entrenched in the White House. The changes we need can only be propelled from the grassroots, but the possibilities are badly circumscribed when the far right maintains a grip on state power.

The election will happen in 60 days. After that, it'll be President McCain or President Obama.

We'll never pass this way again.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Palin: A Moose Caught In The Headlights

Submitted by Chad on Thu, 09/04/2008 - 10:27am. Be-Elected

When Alaska Governor Sarah Palin was about to give her speech Wednesday night in St. Paul, Turner Classic Movies was about 15 minutes into "The Candidate" starring Robert Redford.

Now, TCM has no idea who John McCain would have picked for a running mate, but the channel did schedule the movie for when the Republican VP candidate would speak. Perhaps the channel's marketing people had ESP.

When Gov. Palin was finished with her speech, she looked all alone on a drab set, the huge video flag flying behind her. Nobody rushed on to meet her right away. No family, no supporters, nothing. The moment looked awkward. Waving, smiling, not knowing what was happening next. I almost wondered if she was asking herself: "What do we do now?" - the now famous line from the movie.

There are two names of Republicans that became more prominent in 2008: Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin. They could be the future of the Republican Party -- someday. But not in 2008.

Jindal was smart enough to see this, and though flattered, made it clear he wasn't interested. Palin should have realized that like a fine wine, drinking it too early is a huge mistake.

It's not easy for politicians to see this. Many in the Democratic primary, and not just Hillary Clinton supporters, wondered early on whether this was Barack Obama's time. But Obama has proven himself, not just in defeating the finest slate of candidates either party has pushed through in years, but in the way he has handled himself under pressure.

When Gov. Palin was asked by John McCain to be his running mate, she would have been better off saying, "Thanks, Sen. McCain, but no thanks."

When Palin compares her experience to Sen. Obama, think about this statistic: Palin has been governor of Alaska slightly longer than Obama has run for president.

Governorships are also like fine wine. You can't really tell too early whether they will be successful. Our own Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, is a prime example. After 20 months, he looked pretty good. Blagojevich is halfway into his second term, and every major leader in his own party, including the lieutenant governor, want to get rid of him.

Gov. Palin was a name that I had talked about for a few months. I thought she had an interesting story, and wondered if at some point, she would be part of the next generation of Republicans. I would argue that she should have spoken at the 2008 Republican National Convention - as a keynote speaker.

The keynote speaker has been a strong place to introduce a rising star. The Democrats use this tool well, with Mark Warner, Barack Obama, and Evan Bayh giving the previous three speeches. Gov. Palin could have given a great speech about herself, and her star would have had potential.

However, all the events since Friday has been under the cover of the McCain campaign, including Palin' speech last night. She was kept from speaking the entire time from Dayton in Friday to St. Paul last night. From Fred Hiatt of The Washington Post:

There was a flutter of attention when McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told a group of Post reporters and editors yesterday that his team was having to rework the vice presidential acceptance speech because the original draft, prepared before Gov. Sarah Palin was chosen, was too "masculine." While we all wondered to ourselves what might make a speech masculine or feminine, no one batted an eye at the underlying revelation: that the campaign was writing the nominee's speech before knowing who the nominee would be.

...Expect to learn something about the McCain campaign's assessment of its political standing with women, or working families, or social conservatives. Whether you're learning what Sarah Palin really thinks or feels is anybody's guess.

But because she accepted the nomination, and read a speech that she had little input into, Palin has been thrown into a whirlwind where she has lost control. Two good examples of this from the speech:

Palin had this line where she makes fun of the columns in Obama's speech, yet she had Mt. Rushmore behind her. Either she loves irony or didn't know what was behind her.

She had another line about how the presidency is "not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery." Does she know where she is right now?

Palin's self-propelled image is toughness. Going back to work 3 days after giving birth to a Down syndrome child. Giving a speech after her water broke, flying countless hours from Texas to Seattle and finally Anchorage, then going off to a clinic and having the baby.

So I thought we would get a tough speech. Instead we had a game of "Playing the Victim." "It's the media fault that they're attacking me." "I'm just a hockey mom who has run the PTA." If you think Gov. Palin is the future of the Republican Party, you were very disappointed by the speech last night.

Palin is similar to Bill McKay in so many ways. She couldn't be herself. In this spirit of toughness, do you think she wanted to sit on the sidelines for the last 5 days? Do you think she wanted her second public statement to be her acceptance speech?

This is how Wikipedia describes the fictional Bill McKay in the movie:

"Lucas saw McKay as an unpolished gem - a candidate who began with things you couldn't buy: good looks, confidence"

Does Sarah Palin fit that description?

Politics is timing. Many candidates don't become president or vice president for one reason or another due to timing.

If Sarah Palin had decided not to run in 2008, she could be forgiven. In 8-10 years, Bristol's alleged pregnancy wouldn't have been an issue, though Piper will be 17 in 2018. The birth of Trig wouldn't have been an issue. Track would have served his country well in Iraq.

But her ethics issues might have thwarted her chances at higher office. Perhaps Troopergate would have finished her. Perhaps her string of lies would receive more exposure.

So Gov. Palin decided to go for it. After watching her speech last night, clearly she wasn't ready. The only question remaining for Gov. Palin is whether she will reappear down the road or be as forgotten as Dan Quayle.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Democrats: Snap Out Of It! That goes for the rest of us, too

I post this article today, even though it was written as the Dems began their convention, mainly because I like Gene Robinson and because much of what he says here is still pertinent, if not in the same way or for the same reasons.



I doubt that the Democrats' convention could have come off any better if it had been produced and directed by Spielberg.



Obama's choice for V.P could not have been better for him or for the nation. No one in their right mind could doubt that Biden's experience in foreign affairs, not to mention the military and Justice, is just what the ticket needed.



Hill and Bill did what they had to do, not just for their party but for the nation. As Hillary said, No McCain, no way, or something to that effect. There is no way the country we all love can survive more of the GOP in the White House, not to mention as the majority party on the Hill; certainly not this GOP.


This is not Eisenhower's GOP. As a matter of fact, it is the GOP that Eisenhower warned us about, the political party whose lust for one party rule is, by now, obvious to the whole world and whose relationship with the military/industrial/(and now security)/complex, as well as other big corporate interests, is stunning and the greatest danger to face this nation since the civil war.


I was also struck by another thing Hillary said; rather a question she asked her supporters, "Are you in this just for me?" Hillary's supporters need to seriously contemplate that question, if they haven't already. Perhaps there was a time when Americans could afford to play our usual silly political games, but not this election year. No time for cult-of-personality politics this year! We, as a nation, have been staring into the abyss for too long. The abyss is staring back.


This is not politics as usual in the U.S.A.


Truth be told, the end of politics as usual began, obviously to all, with the impeachment of Bill Clinton for lying about adultery in sworn testimony, making his words fall under the legal term of perjury. Clinton's perjury is a form of perjury committed daily (except for weekends and holidays) in courthouses across this land, from sea to shining sea. Rarely is anyone ever charged with any kind of perjury in family/divorce courts, let alone criminal perjury.



"It is almost expected that people will lie their arses off when it comes to sex," as I was informed by an attorney friend some years before Clinton was impeached for it. Oddly and naively, I had thought that perjury was perjury, period, when a person lied in a court of law. I was wrong. Slapping someone with a perjury charge arising out of lies about adultery is very rare, the case of Bill Clinton, then a sitting president, being one of the exceptions, aparently, though certainly not a very bright one for the country.


Let me be clear. I am not a big Bill Clinton fan. I give him his due. He is probably the smartest politician I have seen in my lifetime and his administration was about peace, for the most part, social and economic justice, fiscal responsibility and, for a majority of the people, prosperity. The U.S. had a surplus when he left office, so the GOP can scream from the roof-tops about the "recession" the economy was sliding into as Bush/Cheney took office, as they in fact did and still do, but that "recession" was a tiny blip on the radar compared to what we face now.


Nevertheless, many of his campaign promises went unkept, some with barely and effort at all. The other thing that makes me think less of Clinton is that he hardly ever lays into Republicans for what they did to him and what they put this country through. He blames the news media. Admittedly they did their share of x-rated reporting, breathlessly, hourly, on and on, ad nauseum, but there would have been nothing to report had the GOP and their money men had not investigated Bill and Hill, as if they were the reincarnations of Bonnie and Clyde, almost from the day he took the oath of office. Of course, none of it would have been possible were it not for Clinton's own stupid/sick behavior. His enemies had been after him for his womanizing ways since before the election. Clinton, as smart as he seems to be, honestly thought they had let go of that one?



Do they put something that is toxic to the brain in the White House water supply?


So, we can all forget about politics as usual. The GOP House managers, who prosecuted perjury charges against Clinton, while frothing at their pompous mouths, against the clearly expressed wishes of the majority of the American people, put an end to politics as usual and everything that has happened since has only made it more apparent, from the stolen election of 2000, to 9/11 and Osama bin Forgotten, to the stunning deception that led this nation into a war of aggression (the mother of all war crimes) against a nation of people who had nothing to do with the attacks of 9/11 or the second major terrorist attack on American soil during the Bush administration, the anthrax attacks. Terror is terror and terrorism is terrorism, just as murder is murder and war crimes are war crimes


No, this is not politics as usual, but this election is by far the most important election I have seen in my lifetime, not only for our country and the future of our kids and grand kids, but for the well-being of the planet and all its citizens.


Even after Obama's speech last night in front of 80,000 people at Denver's Mile-High Stadium, other millions tuned in all across the country and on television sets all around the world, a speech that was both electrifying and informative, the Democrats and all who wish to join them in getting Obama/Biden elected have got to hit the ground running and get tough. After all, it is only our Democratic Republic that is at stake....at least, what's left of it after the last 40 years, especially the last 7 years and some months.



In case it was missed, Obama issued a call-to-arms last night.


There is no doubt about it. Obama knows that no matter how good of a speech he gave and no matter how well the convention went, we are in for the fight of our lives; it will be nasty and brutal. How could any of us believe otherwise. McCain has the Rovian smear machine on his payroll, not to mention Rover's geek-squad, specializing in election tampering and headed up by Chief Geek, Mr. Connell.


Those of us, whether we are independents, Democrats, disaffected Republicans or Americans registered as members of some of the many minor parties, who see our current situation clearly, had better be prepared to fight to our last last breath, if necessary or be prepared to suffer consequences still unimaginable to many.



Barack Obama made it crystal clear to us that he is ready to take on the real enemies of our constitution. He does not plan on leaving the fight to Joe Biden and others. He made that perfectly clear when he said he would be glad to have the debate about who is prepared to be "commander-in-chief," about who has the judgment and TEMPERAMENT for the job.


(I remember when we elected a president every four years. Now, thanks to Junior and his express wish to be a war president because, in his somewhat addled mind, endless war is how one holds onto power in this country, we get to elect a commander-in-chief....or not, depending on how many and how wide-spread the paperless voting machines and easily hacked optical-scanners are remaining around the country on November 4, 2008.)


We can fight tooth and nail, just by telling the truth. There is no need for meaness and nastiness, let alone lies about the opposition, circulated through the back-channels of Wingnutia in the form of chain emails and other whispering campaigns. The truth will be sufficient if told forcefully and often.


Right this moment, in our history as a nation and as citizens of this planet we call home, it is hard to imagine ourselves in greater peril. Electing Barack Obama and Joe Biden is a huge task. Let's not kid ourselves. The Republicans, Neocons, their swift-boating pals and the right-wing media echo-chamber are going to pull out all the stops. This is not a time for the faint of heart. It is a time for real courage and faith in our own minds and hearts.


We need to be prepared to make their tactics costly to them.


We must remember to re-visit our origins as a nation and demand transparency, the only answers to fear-mongering and deception.


We were not born as a nation of people scared witless; a nation of cowards, voting for security which cannot possibly be achieved, even if, like frightened fools, we gladly gave up every Right we ever had, under the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.


Our founders warned us about a tyranny that would one day come our way. They warned us about a government that would come to oppress the free people of the U.S.A. American citizens used to have a healthy skepticism about government power and how it was exercised. We were taught that power corrupts and than absolute power corrupts absolutely. We've certainly had our brushes with tyranny before, but nothing like what's happening now.


Those who would exchange freedom for security deserve neither. It was old Ben Franklin who said that. I would add that history has taught us that not only do such people deserve neither, they get neither. It was Franklin who informed a curious citizen who asked what kind of government we had, "A Republic, if you can keep it."


I wonder, can we?

By Eugene Robinson

DENVER—If they want to win in November, Democrats have one task to accomplish this week: Snap out of it.

Somehow, tentativeness and insecurity have infected a party that ought to be full of confident swagger. It’s not that Democrats don’t like their odds of winning the presidency and boosting their majorities in both houses of Congress. It’s that they are even bothering to calculate and recalculate those odds.

That’s what you could catch Democrats doing last weekend as they assembled for the convention. We’ll win, they would say, but we just have to do this or Barack Obama just has to do that or the Clintons have to do this, that and the other. And the stars have to align just so.

People, the stars don’t line up any more auspiciously than this. George W. Bush is to presidential unpopularity what Michael Phelps is to aquatic velocity. The Republican candidate for president is a wooden, uncharismatic denizen of Washington whose “maverick” image belies the fact that he has supported Bush on practically every big issue. The economy is sagging, the financial system is in crisis and gasoline prices remain punishingly high. In recent polls, as many as eight out of 10 Americans have said the country is on the wrong track. You don’t need a soothsayer to read omens like these.

Since I landed here Saturday night, though, I haven’t heard a lot of Democrats crowing about the terrible whuppin’ they’re about to administer. I’ve heard predictions of victory, yes, but also a lot of questions. Will Hillary Clinton’s die-hard supporters refuse to lay down their arms, even if their champion begs them to? Will an unreconciled Bill Clinton steal the show? Will Obama’s acceptance speech at Invesco Field be so stirring and poetic that the Republicans will slam him again for excessive eloquence?

In other words: Are Hillary Clinton’s followers, many of whom care deeply about women’s issues, ready to accept a Supreme Court majority that would do away with Roe v. Wade, which John McCain would surely deliver? Has Bill Clinton forgotten everything he ever learned about politics and forsaken his lifelong loyalty to the Democratic Party? Would Obama be wise to effectively renounce the use of his great oratorical gifts, which constitute one his most powerful and effective weapons?

All these questions are just excuses to fret. Unlike Republicans, Democrats like to obsess about what could go wrong. It’s kind of a partisan hobby.

I was going to say that the Republican Party’s hobby is driving Democrats crazy with worry, but the truth is that the Democrats are doing this to themselves.

People here complain that the polls are too close for comfort, forgetting that there is rarely anything comfortable about a presidential contest. When was the last time a non-incumbent Democrat cruised easily to the White House? Clinton, remember, won only a 43 percent plurality of the popular vote in 1992. You have to go all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Why would anyone think for a moment that Obama could win this without a fight?

I’m being somewhat unkind, because the truth is that the Democratic Party has tried mightily this year to fight its depressive tendencies. The party is even playing offense for a change, taking the fight to McCain in states that used to be a forgone conclusion for the Republicans. Here in Colorado, recent polls show Obama with a small but significant lead; in Virginia, which hasn’t gone Democratic since 1964, the race is a dead heat.

As for the Democratic states that McCain is trying to contest, Democrats should take the advice of Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell. Last Saturday, as Joe Biden was being announced as Obama’s running mate, Rendell was asked how to keep his state in the Democratic column. His answer, and I’m paraphrasing here, was to quit whining about it and just go out and win the state. He helped the Clintons pummel Obama in the primary, and he pronounced himself raring to help Obama and Biden do the same to McCain in the general.

Even with the fundamentals teed-up and the stars smiling, winning the White House was never going to be a walk in the park for any Democrat. The party will have had a successful convention if, at the end of the week, Democrats stop all the worrying and declare a moratorium on second-guessing. Go shake some hands and kiss some babies.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Arrest Them Now!!!!

This just in from a slightly to-the-right-of-center friend:


If I needed one more push toward the left it is the latest anthrax revelation. There is no GOP anymore. Just a boatload of fascists. I am a conservative and we must always be on the lookout for fascism, because that is what we can become at out worst, and authoritarian, harshly judgmental fear-mongers.


These guys are truly psychotic and need to be arrested now, before they can do any more harm. If, that is, anyone remembers the Constitution.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

This is not constitutional crisis!

If one regards said constitution even the slightest bit more than toilet paper, it is really quite simple. If a high crime or misdemeanor has been committed and a prima facia case can be made that certain crimes have been committed, all executive privilege goes right out the window. Just ask Nixon. Well....he's dead, so ask John Dean.


Looks like even the Goopers are beiginning to rise to the occassion, or are like rats from a sinking ship; their political party, not the ship of state. If they had the well-being of the nation at heart, they would have jumped ship long ago. The GOP has no defense against the finger pointing, now by most of the world's population.


Quite a few Democrats aren't a damn bit better, and we know who you are.

Bush Appointee Bates: Meirs Must Testify, Sets Up Constitutional Crisis

www.opednews.com/articles/Bush-Appointee-Bates--Meir-by-Ralp...

With Judge Bates ruling against immunity for Harriet Meirs, and ruling that "executive privilege" claims are invalid against orders to produce certain documents, it is clear that congress has no business going into recess in the middle of a constitutional crisis. They have just been handed a major victory, by a Bush appointee, no less. Republicans of integrity are emerging from the shadows, most dramatically with the nine who broke with the party to vote for having the hearings which took place on July 25. Judge Bates said: Even if you're my friend, George, you still have to, um, obey the law.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Don't Go After GOP Wiith Pea-shooter,

Barack Obama.

I have often quoted George Carlin's remarks which he made on the Charlie Rose show interview in late November 2004. Rose asked Carlin why he thought the Democrats lost the 2004 election. Carlin told of the advice his father gave him years earlier, paraphrasing, "When the other side has you talking their language, they've got you."

I will probably use this quote from now up until the November election because right now we are seeing Barack Obama holding only a slight lead in the major polls over John McCain. It is far from insurmountable by the likes of John McCain's powerful allies and smear mongers in the Republican Party. The 2008 election is probably just as important, maybe more so, to G. W. Bush as it is for John McCain.

It will be, as Bush pointed out in the aftermath of the 2004 election, "We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election. The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates and chose me, for which I'm grateful."

G. W. Bush will interpret a John McCain win in November as a choice that the voters had between Barack Obama and Bush’s policies. If voters choose Bush’s policies that McCain wants to continue, it will be a huge victory for Bush.

Considering the breadth and scope of the Bush legacy of depravity, abandonment of Afghanistan, unending Iraq War with over 4,110 U.S. fatalities, budget deficits in each and every year of his administration, record national debt of $9.5 trillion, a weakening dollar, record balance of trade deficits, skyrocketing price of oil and gasoline, rising unemployment, scathing attacks against individual liberties and freedoms, Barack Obama should be 20 to 30 points ahead of John McCain. However, he is not and as a matter of fact, John McCain is gaining traction while the infamous Republican smear machine is just getting wound up.

Barack Obama claimed recently that once he meets with U.S. military commanders in his upcoming visit to Iraq he will "refine" his strategy for withdrawing troops and ending the Iraq War over time. He is accused by the McCain operatives of changing tactics and coming around more to John McCain's position. The mainstream media obediently disseminated the Republican propaganda that Barack Obama has shifted his position on ending the Iraq debacle and has now become a centrist.

When General Wesley Clark made the statement that he didn't think being shot down over enemy territory and spending 5-1/2 years as a POW were qualifications to become president, McCain's propagandists exploded and screeched on Fox News that Clark dissed McCain's war record and military service.

Why do they get away with these incendiary, dishonest remarks? In two words: Stupidity and Gullibility. Republicans rely on the public's gullibility and how easily they can be deceived. Exacerbating Obama’s problems are the timorous mainstream media who regurgitate the Republican propaganda as if it were Gospel.

As long as Barack Obama is put on the defensive over inane charges by the likes of Franklin Graham and James Dobson who insist on spouting the lie that Obama is a Muslim, he will suffer John Kerry's fate -- close but no cigar.

I am not angry with the Religious Right so much as I am at Obama for naively thinking he can talk to people as myopic, hateful and depraved as Dobson and other Evangelicals who have become a political arm of the Republican Party. They are one of the biggest reasons why our country is in decline on the world stage. I am angry with Obama for making the same mistake that Democrats continue to make. They don't understand the simple and stark truth that the late George Carlin articulated so well -- when the other side has you talking their language they've got you.

Barack Obama, by drifting away from his message of hope and inspiration that got him to the Big Dance to begin with, will go home alone in November because he mistakenly thought that the extremist factions of the Republican Party and its Evangelical base cared about ending the devastation to our country caused by G. W. Bush and the toxic tone that allowed these autocrats to define all the talking points.

Barack Obama, if he wants to win in November, can't go to war with a peashooter. For every hit he takes from the Republican propagandists he needs to fire back forcefully with bigger and louder guns.

Richard A. Stitt

Austin, Texas

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Economic Ticking Bomb: The GOP's December Surprise

Is the GOP cooking the books to avoid recession till after Election Day?

My hunch would be that it is cooking the books until after the inauguration. Then All Hell is Gonna Break Loose, just a we have been prediction for over a year.

James K. Galbraith"
July 01" /> , 2008" />

Is the worst over? Are we on the road to recovery? Will the next president take office against a backdrop of economic improvement, as Bill Clinton did in 1993? Or has something deeper and more intractable gone wrong?

Early this year, the optimists, including Citigroup chairman Bob Rubin and Treasury secretary Hank Paulson, argued that the slowdown was short-term and that a "stimulus" package should be "targeted and temporary." This with rare haste the Democratic Congress enacted. As a result, most taxpayers got one-time $600 checks in May, prefigured by bubbly messages touting "Good News!" if you filed your taxes electronically.

The rebate isn't the only little Dutch boy thrown headlong at the dike this election year. Government spending, especially for defense, will be up: Military spending as a share of gdp is expected to grow by $75 billion in fiscal 2008, enough to neutralize a 0.3 percent decline in gdp. Dick Cheney was secretary of defense for Bush 41; just before the 1992 election he engineered a big run-up in outlays, as the military restocked following the first Gulf War. (It was exposed in the first Clinton "Economic Report.") Is the Pentagon up to that trick again? I'd be astonished if it were not.

Under intense pressure from panicky bankers, Ben Bernanke cut interest rates relentlessly from August 2007 through the spring of 2008. I don't accuse Bernanke of playing politics. But it's worth noting that this is what usually happens. In presidential election years when Republicans are in office, the Fed regularly and predictably pursues a more expansionary policy than when Democrats rule—after controlling for differences in the rates of inflation and unemployment. (I made these calculations myself; see the chart.) Maybe they just can't help themselves.

But much of the ordinary effect of interest cuts on new lending—like a rebound in construction and automobile sales—didn't happen this time. That's because the fall in home prices (and therefore the value of collateral) overwhelmed the benefit of cheaper money to the banks. And the banks barely cut mortgage rates, so consumers saw no benefits at all. Lower interest rates did cut the value of the dollar, however, and that promotes exports and foreign investment. (These days New York Times real estate listings come with a currency converter.) It also boosts the stock market, since multinational firms can report their (unchanged) foreign income as higher dollar earnings.

Possibly all this stimulus will ward off the two-quarter decline that has historically defined a recession. Don't be surprised: Republicans haven't had an election-year slump since 1960. On the other hand, the National Bureau of Economic Research, which has the official call, may describe the early spring as a recession anyway. Republicans will welcome that, too, so long as they can plausibly call the summer a "recovery." Even if they can't stop a recession, they may be able to make it short and shallow enough, this year, to put John McCain in the White House. But all this brings up an important question—what of next year?

You get what you pay for

How Fed's election-year rates varied from non-election years when the incumbent was:

1984-2004. Source: Galbraith et al report, page 20.

No matter how effective the stimulus, two enormous clouds remain for whoever becomes president: the housing slump and the banking crisis. Both are far from being finished yet.

The problem with a housing slump is inventory. Unlike factories and Internet startups, shuttered houses don't go away. No one declares them obsolete. They aren't boxed up and sent to China. They remain, a drag on the market, decaying and pulling down property values for years. Here in Texas, housing values slumped with the S&L crisis and the oil bust of 1985 and did not recover until around 1993. That slump clobbered the oil patch but was barely felt anywhere else. This slump is the reverse—it's driving down housing prices just about everywhere except Texas, where the scars of the last bubble helped keep the recent one under control.

Nationally, the subprime debacle is blowing away the homeownership gains of the last few years. Those abusive mortgages were deliberately targeted at vulnerable, even desperate, people who could be steered into financial death traps. Lenders didn't care, because with the help of fraudulent appraisals, the loans could be off-loaded quickly in packages bought by greedy or gullible investors, including your pension fund. Poor people got hit on the front end; 1.5 million homes entered foreclosure last year. Middle-class people got it on the return volley.

And middle-class homeowners are now getting hit a second way: in the declining value of their homes. You don't have to be holding a subprime to find yourself underwater. That means that home-equity loans will dry up. (As of April, California homeowners in default were already a median of eight months behind on those loans.) Many people will be tempted to walk on their houses and mail the keys to the bank. Incidents of the foreclosed expressing themselves to their lenders by yanking the plumbing and the wires on the way out the door are on the rise, as is arson by desperate homeowners, according to the Los Angeles Times. Will students, small businesses, and other borrowers still be able to get credit when this is over? God only knows.

The mechanisms of mortgage finance and home-equity drawdown haven't simply been damaged. That well has been poisoned. Having largely outsourced mortgage originations to companies like Countrywide who didn't care whether the borrowers had good credit, the banking system cannot easily go back to its old method of making loans to creditworthy people and contenting itself with the interest paid back over many years. And who would trust them, anyway, if that's what they claimed they wanted to do?

Then there's another problem: The banks no longer trust each other. Last August, as mortgage-backed securities unraveled, finances froze up worldwide. Why? Because banks knew how much undisclosed junk they had on their own books. Who could say what the next fellow had? Overnight lending between banks—the process that ensures that every bank has funds when it needs them—fell apart. This is a very big deal. If banks will not lend money to each other, why (except for the blessings of federal insurance) should anyone else leave their money to them? Economists like me wait entire careers to study events such as these—which should provide no comfort to anyone else.

Since August, America's big banks have been wards of the Fed, and those in Europe equally so of the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. The system survives because central banks keep the lending windows open, and the result is that—except for one instance in Britain—the public has not pulled out of the banks. Let's be clear. The private financial markets did actually fail. It's only the fact that the public trusts government that keeps the system from dissolving in panic. But even if the Fed and its counterparts can hold the line, the problem of mistrust among the big bankers won't go away soon. And that means we're at the end of the age of credit expansions, for now.

As for next year, good luck. No matter who becomes president, there probably won't be another tax cut. Instead, cries for "fiscal responsibility" will be heard. States and localities, hit in 2008 on their property taxes, will cut their spending. Consumers, hit hard on their home equity, will cut back on new borrowing (which they probably couldn't get anyway) and pinch pennies however they can. Businesses won't even think about new investments.

In this situation, more cuts to interest rates—the only applicable tool the Fed has—don't work well. And they weaken the dollar, which raises inflation. What is gained by cheaper money will be lost in higher gas and food prices. But if the Fed reverses field and defends the dollar, exports will slump and the housing crisis will get worse. There's no easy way out.

Thus far the dollar has fallen, but it hasn't collapsed. Will it? There are two big threats. The first is the financial crisis itself, which is a problem of trust not only in the ordinary borrower, and not only in the banks, but in the American dollar. Why is the rest of the world nervous? Because the fundamental trust that they have always had—that the United States was a safe place to put your money—has come into question.

The second threat, not often mentioned, is our reckless foreign policy, including the invasion of Iraq, bellicosity toward Iran, and the ongoing subtext of hostility toward China. Since the Middle East has the oil and China holds our debts, all this is spitting in the soup, big time. It may not by itself wreck the financial system. But it doesn't exactly build up the reserve of good will that we may need when the financial going gets tough.

For half a century much of the world believed that we provided security under which they too could prosper; many no longer think so. Today, our country, like our banks, has a problem of global trust. Unlike the banks, we have no higher power to keep things going if we screw up.

James K. Galbraith is a contributing writer for Mother Jones. His new book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, comes out in August.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.