Love and War, Poetry & Politics

Kansan Governor Sebellius accuses Palin of Deceiving Voters

2008-09-04T14:56:00.001-04:00

n a Thursday morning conference call for reporters organized by the Democratic National Committee, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius pushed back against the idea that Republicans have cornered the market on small-town American values.

"I live in the American heartland, and have been a governor [here] for six years," she said. "I don't know any mayor in any small town in Kansas -- and we have a lot of mayors of small towns -- who hires a lobbyist and goes after earmarks the way Sarah Palin did." On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that, as mayor of Wasilla, Palin secured more than $27 million in federal earmarks for a town with only 6,700 residents.

In her speech, Palin made a not-so-subtle pitch to snatch the sympathies of small-town voters -- touting her own experience as a mayor, and contrasting her self-professed values with those of Barack Obama. "I might add that in small towns, we don't quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they are listening, and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren't listening," Palin said, referring to remarks Obama made at a San Francisco fundraiser earlier this year.

Sebelius would have none of it. "What I hear from these folks in the heartland, is that people want to know how they're going to afford health care ... whether they're going to keep their jobs [and manage] the cost of gas and groceries," Sebelius said. "Again last night, what we heard were partisan attacks and no real solutions. ... I work with a Republican legislature every day. And I know what people expect us to do ... is to roll up your sleeves and get the job done."

"There's a disconnect between the way she positions herself as a small-town mayor ... and an inside Washington strategy," Sebelius added. "The kind of persona she is putting forward is very enticing, but I don't think it matches with either her positions."

Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz hammered a similar theme to Sebelius, saying that Palin "had a real problem with the truth last night" and adding that "even her hometown newspaper said she stretched the truth." (a reference to Thursday's Anchorage Daily News headline: "Some Of Palin's Remarks Stretch The Truth.")

Schultz also suggested that Palin had simply done a good job of robotically delivering an address she had little hand in crafting herself. "Whenever I have had to give significant speeches, I've spent a lot of time with the people assisting me in drafting remarks, adding my own voice," Schultz said. "Last night, I only heard Sarah Palin's voice [through] negative partisan attacks, with no substance or vision of where she thinks the country should go."

On Palin's effort to position herself and McCain as reformers, Schultz asked, "Where is the beef? Where is the evidence? Sarah Palin is not a reformer, she is under investigation in her home state for the abuse of power in trying to get a state trooper fired... If her best example of being a reformer was trying to sell a plane on E-Bay, that is not my definition of reform."

Shultz also questioned Palin's readiness to lead. "To say that her experience as a mayor of a town of 7,000 people ... makes her qualified to have her hands on the pillar of American foreign policy, if God forbid anything happens to John McCain, to suggest that is frightening," she said. "What kind of experience does Sarah Palin have to sit across the table from negotiators of the dangerous countries of this world?"

Obama adviser Robert Gibbs stepped in to rebut a few points of fact from Palin's speech. Specifically, he cited her reference to family members who own a small service station, saying they were precisely the kind of Americans who would receive "three times the tax relief" under Obama's tax plan. Gibbs also noted that Palin "picked up the worn-out playbook of Joe Lieberman," by claiming that Obama cannot point to any substantive legislative accomplishments. Even some of John McCain's surrogates know, Gibbs said, that the ethics and lobbying reforms in 2007, "the toughest since the scandal of Watergate," were passed due to Obama's work across party lines.

God Ditches the GOP

2008-09-03T16:16:00.001-04:00

God ditches the GOP

This just in: Even the Lord has abandoned the desperate, shameful Right

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

This just in: Hurricane of delicious irony slams Republican National Convention, flooding the streets of Minneapolis/St. Paul with rivers of savage hypocrisy as levees of evangelical denial and sexual confusion overflow into the streets, leaving stunned party members scrambling in vain for shaky moral high ground.

Meanwhile, clever looters smash windows of opportunity and steal valuable quips about underage sex and teen pregnancy, as everyone gets a very unsettling if not downright weird taste of warped pro-gun anti-choice elk-kabob conservative Alaskan family values. YouTube at 11.

Yes, the rumors are true. The cosmic votes have all been tallied, and I do believe we can now say, with some measure of happy certainty, that God appears to be just as sick-to-death of the Republican Party as the rest of us.

But let's back up for a moment, just to be sure. Let's imagine the hot 'n' febrile reaction if, say, an enormous storm had come thundering through Denver during DNC '08, if some gale force winds or bowel-shaking rainfall had shut the city down, prophetically timing itself just right to thwart the Democratic Party's biggest party and stop Barack Obama from making all sorts of stunning history as he delivered his record-breaking speech to a wary and Bush-ravaged nation.

Let us, in other words, imagine that "rains of Biblical proportions" had slammed the DNC to a halt, just as those nutball pastors from Focus on the Family prayed it would.

Can you imagine the joyful outcry? The righteous outpourings of "Praise Jesus!" from the scandal-plagued evangelicals from Orange County to Colorado Springs, with the corpse of Jerry Falwell itself rising from the depths of Hell's own restroom to yelp "Ha! God smites the gay-loving heathens once again! Now, who wants to come down here 'n' wash my back?"

Funny, then, the ironies of nature and time and God, no? For there was Gustav, roaring through the Gulf Coast and shutting down a large, sweaty chunk of the Republican National Convention as he conjured all manner of painful Katrina-esque nightmares, reminding anyone with the slightest sense of integrity of just how inept and dangerous the Republican Party has been lo these past eight insufferable years. Ah, cosmic irony. Sweet like candy.

Perhaps God has shifted political allegiances? Perhaps She has finally revealed her true liberal colors? Or perhaps She's simply indulging in a bit of the same cosmic Schadenfreude as the rest of us, enjoying the various miseries, scandals, humiliations, missteps, gay-outings, meth addictions and unmarried teen pregnancies of the crumbling GOP as they writhe and squirm and attempt to make this McCain/Palin ticket seem even the slightest bit palatable, as opposed to downright frightening. You think?

How else to explain the latest smack of GOP shame, the lovely news that Sarah Palin's unwed 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant? Even in Alaska, that's still considered "a little young" to be knocked up, despite how the Palins say the father, 18-year-old Levi Johnston, a self-proclaimed "f--in' redneck" who "lives for hockey" and doesn't want kids, will "do the right thing" by Bristol, which certainly seems like sad shorthand for "sham marriage to lock down desperately needed evangelical support for John McCain." Oh, you poor kids.

To be sure, it's moments like these that make it difficult not to take some delight, not to sit back and feel the ironic righteousness melt over us like hot Cheez-Whiz over an Alaskan mooseburger. After all, Sarah Palin is anti-choice, pro-abstinence, anti sex-ed, religiously fundamentalist, a creationist, about as friendly to feminism and women's reproductive rights as John McCain is to his beloved "gooks."

But here's the saddest part of all: Governor Palin knew. She absolutely had to realize that her daughter's unfortunate condition would come to light when McCain offered her this bizarre gig. To which we can only say: Way to shove your own daughter under the wheels of the GOP Machine, Governor Palin. Ultimate sacrifice indeed.

Ah, but perhaps it's all a bit too much. Perhaps you think this perspective is just too negative, ugly, far too similar to how the right itself operates, full of low-vibration energy and fear and abhorrence of the Other, all topped by a cheerless belief in a cruel, micromanaging God who is so petty and small as to actually care about who you love, or how you vote, or what kind of sex you enjoy. Let me say this: I agree completely.

So let's flip it around. After all, if there's one thing we've learned in the past eight years, it's that the cavalcade of wanton scandal and hypocrisy among the GOP is never-ending, unstoppable, far more the rule than the exception. We could be here all day.

So, on to the good news: A staggering 40 million Americans watched Obama deliver his spectacular, rain-free speech in Denver. That's more than the opening ceremony of Olympics. More than "American Idol." Half again as much as Kerry or Bush earned for similar speeches from years before and an all-time record for any televised political speech anywhere. What a thing.

And let's recall, for a moment, Obama in Berlin back in July, where nearly a quarter million locals turned up to see a man who wasn't yet even a world leader, but merely a candidate. Recall those stunning images of cheering throngs at the Victory Column, hundreds of thousands of eager, curious foreigners, all there to catch a glimpse not of Mick Jagger or the Pope, not of the Dalai Lama or Brad Pitt, but a brilliant young American senator.

That's not middling celebrity. That's not merely good PR on behalf of Obama's team. That's something else entirely, a world electrified by new possibility. Hell, McCain would be lucky to draw 100 onlookers to the airport Sheraton, and most of those would be EMTs.

Even Bill Clinton, with his effortless charisma and fantastic oratory skill, could never draw like Obama. This man fills stadiums. Electrifies not just Democrats, but entire nations. He has that rarest of political power, the ability to make people want to get out there and feel it, be part of the shift. Bush gave the world hives. McCain gives the world the creeps. Obama gives the world goosebumps. Simple as that.

You gotta admit, amidst all the GOP scandal and meltdown and Obama's revitalizing, meteoric rise to international beacon of change -- a guy who, in Joe Biden's words, has "grabbed the lightning" like no one he's ever seen before -- it's tempting to say even God has abandoned the religious right.

Then again, it's probably far more accurate to say She was never really over there in the first place.

When Foix News IS the STORY

2008-07-06T22:29:00.000-04:00

The Media Equation

When Fox News Is the Story

By DAVID CARR

Like most working journalists, whenever I type seven letters — Fox News — a series of alarms begins to whoop in my head: Danger. Warning. Much mayhem ahead.

Once the public relations apparatus at Fox News is engaged, there will be the calls to my editors, keening (and sometimes threatening) e-mail messages, and my requests for interviews will quickly turn into depositions about my intent or who else I am talking to.

And if all that stuff doesn’t slow me down and I actually end up writing something, there might be a large hangover: Phone calls full of rebuke for a dependent clause in the third to the last paragraph, a ritual spanking in the blogs with anonymous quotes that sound very familiar, and — if I really hit the jackpot — the specter of my ungainly headshot appearing on one of Fox News’s shows along with some stern copy about what an idiot I am.

Part of me — the Irish, tribal part — admires Fox News’s ferocious defense of its guys. I work at a place where editors can make easy sport of teasing apart your flawed copy until it collapses in a steaming pile, but Lord help those outsiders who make an unwarranted or unfounded attack on me or my work. Our tactics may be different, but we, too, are strong for our posse.

Media reporting about other media’s approach to producing media is pretty confusing business to begin with. Feelings, which are always raw for people who make their mistakes in public, will be bruised. But that does not fully explain the scorched earth between Fox News and those who cover it.

Fox News found a huge runway and enormous success by setting aside the conventions of bloodless objectivity, but along the way, it altered the rules of engagement between reporters and the media organizations they cover. Under its chief executive, Roger Ailes, Fox News and its public relations apparatus have waged a permanent campaign on behalf of the channel that borrows its methodology from his days as a senior political adviser to Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

At Fox News, media relations is a kind of rolling opposition research operation intended to keep reporters in line by feeding and sometimes maiming them. Shooting the occasional messenger is baked right into the process.

As crude as that sounds, it works. By blacklisting reporters it does not like, planting stories with friendlies at every turn, Fox News has been living a life beyond consequence for years. Honesty compels me to admit that I have choked a few times at the keyboard when Fox News has come up in a story and it was not absolutely critical to the matter at hand.

But it cuts both ways: Fox News’s amazing coup d’état in the cable news war has very likely been undercovered because the organization is such a handful to deal with. Fox is so busy playing defense — mentioning it in the same story as CNN can be a high crime — that its business and journalism accomplishments don’t get traction and the cable station never seems to attain the legitimacy it so clearly craves.

There have been few stories about Bill O’Reilly’s softer side (I’m sure he has one), and while Shepard Smith’s amazing reporting in New Orleans got some play, he was not cast as one of the journalistic heroes of the disaster. The fact that Roger Ailes has won both Obie awards and Emmys does not come up a lot, nor does the fact that he donated a significant chunk of money to upgrade the student newsroom at Ohio University, his alma mater.

Instead, Mr. Ailes and Brian Lewis, his longtime head of public relations, act as if every organization that covers them is a potential threat and, in the process, have probably made it far more likely. And as the cable news race has tightened, because CNN has gained ground during a big election year, Fox News has become more prone to lashing out. Fun is fun, but it is getting uglier by the day out there.

•

A little more than a week ago, Jacques Steinberg, a reporter at The New York Times who covers television, wrote a straight-up-the-middle ratings story about cable news. His article acknowledged that while CNN was using a dynamic election to push Fox News from behind, Fox was still No. 1. Despite repeated calls, the public relations people at Fox News did not return his requests for comment. (In a neat trick, while they were ignoring his calls, they e-mailed his boss asking why they had not heard from him.)

After the article ran, Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy of “Fox and Friends,” the reliable water carriers on the morning show on the cable network, did a segment suggesting that Mr. Steinberg’s editor was a disgruntled former employee — Steven V. Reddicliffe once edited TV Guide, which, like Fox News, is owned by the News Corporation — and that Mr. Steinberg was his trained attack dog. (The audience was undoubtedly wondering what the heck they were talking about.)

The accompanying photographs were heavily altered, although the audience was probably none the wiser. Mr. Reddicliffe looked like the wicked witch after a hard night of drinking, but it was the photo of Mr. Steinberg that stopped traffic when it appeared on the Web at Media Matters side by side with his actual photo. In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, his ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with. (Mr. Steinberg told me that as a working reporter who covers Fox News, he was not in a position to comment. A spokeswoman said the executive in charge of “Fox and Friends” is on vacation and not available for comment but added that altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.

It’s a particularly vivid example of how the Fox response team works, but hardly the only one. Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal wrote a profile of Roger Ailes in 2005. Again, her coverage was right up the middle, but that is not the way that Fox News saw it, and she was held out for ridicule over and over in items on various blogs penned by Fox News staff when she jumped the gun on the start date for the Fox business channel. (Ms. Angwin is on book leave and did not answer a message left on her cellphone.)

Earlier this year, a colleague of mine said, he was writing a story about CNN’s gains in the ratings and was told on deadline by a Fox News public relations executive that if he persisted, “they” would go after him. Within a day, “they” did, smearing him around the blogs, he said. (I did not ask him for a comment because the information was of a private nature.)

Some of the avenues of attack are easier to anticipate than others. Right now, there are advance copies circulating of a reported memoir I wrote about my times as a drug addict and drunk. I’ve already been called a “crack addict” on Bill O’Reilly’s show, which at least has the virtue of being true, if a little vintage. Expect a return engagement with some added detail. I have a bit of an advantage in that my laundry is already hanging on the line, not to mention that with a face made out of potatoes, the Photoshopped picture of me will have to go a long way to make me any uglier than I actually am. Having pointed a crooked columnist finger at Fox, at least I have it coming. Not so for many of the beat reporters who go to work every day confronted by a public relations machine that will go feral if it doesn’t get what it wants.

When I started calling around about Fox News, Mr. Lewis, the public relations head, made himself available on very short notice on the Fourth of July. He patiently explained that while yes, the game had changed, it was hardly in the way I was describing. There are no dark ops, he said, and no blacklist — “a myth” — only good relationships and bad ones.

Mr. Lewis said that members of his staff were not in the business of altering photos, that they had no control over stories that appeared on “Fox and Friends” or other shows, and he pointed out that it makes their job harder when they go after reporters. He called my suggestion that there was something anti-Semitic about the depiction of Mr. Steinberg “vile and untrue.” Mr. Lewis denied that his staff had threatened one of my colleagues or planted private information about him on blogs.

That comes as a surprise to reporters I talked to who say they have received e-mail messages from Fox News public relations staff that contained doctored photos, anonymous quotes and nasty items about competitors. And two former Fox employees said that they had participated in precisely those kinds of activities but had signed confidentiality agreements and could not say so on the record.

“Yes, we are an aggressive department in a passive industry, and believe me, the executives and talent appreciate it,” Mr. Lewis said, adding that with the 24-hour news cycle and the proliferation of blogs, a new kind of engagement and activism was required.

“We are the biggest target in the industry and we accept that,” he said. “We embrace controversy,” but he said that he and his colleagues respect that reporters have a job to do.

Many of the television-beat reporters I called had horror stories, but few were willing to be quoted. In the last several years, reporters from The Associated Press, several large newspapers and various trade publications have said they were shut out from getting their calls returned because of stories they had written. Editors do not want to hear why your calls are not being returned, they just want you to fix the problem, or perhaps they will fix it by finding someone else to do your job.

David Folkenflik, now the media reporter for National Public Radio, ended up on the outs with Fox News in 2001 when he was at The Baltimore Sun. After he wrote that Fox’s Geraldo Rivera had not been at the site of an incident of friendly fire in Afghanistan as he had told viewers, Mr. Folkenflik said, his calls to Fox News were not returned for more than 15 months.

“My sense was that it was designed to make it appear that I was having trouble doing my job, but also to intimate that the people who cross them will be shut out,” he said.

Mr. Folkenflik said he did not take it personally because it was not aimed just at him. “I think it is a notably aggressive effort to manage the Fox News brand and image,” he said. “I think it is suffused with a political sensibility, and I don’t think it is any secret that it comes from the top with Roger Ailes. They behave less like a competitive news outlet and more like a political campaign when it comes to managing coverage.”

But he holds no grudge.

“I currently have a perfectly good relationship with Fox News,” Mr. Folkenflik said. “I touch base with them all the time, and I write the good and bad news as it occurs.”

Bill Carter has covered television for The New York Times for many years and has always had a good working relationship with Fox News, but he was appalled to see what he viewed as an anti-Semitic caricature of Mr. Steinberg, a colleague and a friend.

“I have not had a big problem with them, in part because their success has been such a great story, but this seemed over the line and really hateful,” Mr. Carter said. “It doesn’t seem like you can deal with them professionally. You do this kind of thing to a guy who’s writing a story for a newspaper?”

Fox News has long held that it is its politics and not its tactics that set it apart and require such vigilance. But working reporters have been shaking their heads for years about the nightmare of dealing with Fox News and as a result, the antagonism they believe they are fighting against seems to be on the march.

Mr. Lewis made it clear that Fox News has no problem working with reporters when they don’t have an agenda, and of course, I called with a very clear one. For the record, everyone I dealt with at Fox News in connection with this column was polite, highly responsive, and got right to the point, while still not giving ground on a single material fact. A guy could get used to that.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com

George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words

2008-06-23T22:30:00.002-04:00

George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words

The big seven words you weren't allowed to broadcast were:

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.

Here is the original Carlin comedy routine that caused the Fracas.

"I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love..as I say, they're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have really.

We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid. You know, [humming]. And, then we assign a word to a thought, [clicks tongue]. And we're stuck with that word for that thought. So be careful with words. I like to think, yeah, the same words that hurt can heal. It's a matter of how you pick them.

There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' 'Awwww.' There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.

And words, you know the seven don't you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off . But I mean that word does not belong on the list.

Actually, none of the words belong on the list, but you can understand why some of them are there. I am not completely insensitive to people's feelings. You know, I can dig why some of those words got on the list...like cocksucker and motherfucker. Those are...those are heavy-weight words. There's a lot going on there, man. Besides the literal translation and the emotional feeling. They're just busy words. There's a lot of syllables to contend with. And those K's. Those are aggressive sounds, they jump out at you. CocksuckerMotherfuckerCocksucker. It's like an assault, on you. So I can dig that.

And we mentioned shit earlier, of course. Two of the other 4-letter Anglo-Saxon words are Piss and Cunt, which go together of course. But forget about that. A little accidental humor there. Piss and Cunt. The reason Piss and Cunt are on the list is that a long time ago certain ladies said 'Those are the two I am not going to say. I don't mind Fuck and Shit, but P and C are out. P and C are out.' Which led to such stupid sentences as 'OK, you fuckers, I am going to tinkle now.'

And of course the word Fuck. The word Fuck, I don't really...well, this is some more accidental humor, but I don't really want to get into that now. Because I think it takes too long. But I do mean that. I mean, I think the word fuck is an important word. It's the beginning of life, and, yet it's a word we use to hurt one other, quite often. And uh, people much wiser than I have said, I'd rather have my son watch a film with two people making love than two people trying to kill one other. And I of course agree. I wish I know who said it first, and I agree with that. But I would like to take it a step further. I would like to substitute the word fuck, for the word kill in all those movie cliches we grew up with. 'Okay Sheriff, we're gonna fuck ya now. But we're gonna fuck ya slow.' So maybe next year I'll have a whole fuckin' rap on that word. I hope so.

Uh, there are two-way words, but those are the seven you can never say on television. Under any circumstances you just can not say them ever, ever ever, not even clinically. You can not weave them in the panel with Doc and Ed and Johnny, I mean it's just impossible, forget those seven, they're out.

But, there are some two-way words. There are double-meaning words. Remember the ones your giggled at in sixth grade? 'And the cock crowed three times.''Hey, the cock the cock crowed three times. It's in the bible.' There are some Two-way words, like it's okay for Curt Gowdy [mis-spelled in original transcription. -ed.] to say 'Roberto Clemente has two balls on him.' But he can't say, 'I think he hurt his balls on that play Tony, don't you? He's holding them. He must have hurt them by God.' And the other two-way word that goes with that one is prick. It's okay if it happens to your finger. Yes, you can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick. No, no."

Obama and Dean recast the political map

2008-06-08T21:13:00.000-04:00

Sixteen months after he launched his campaign for the White House, Sen. Barack Obama may, just now, be entering his campaign's most perilous stage. Facing a rift of sorts within the Democratic Party and concerns over the scope of his political base, the Illinois Democrat is pursuing an unconventional path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave: unlike those before him, he has pledged to redraw the electoral map by putting new, traditionally Republican states in play.

A slew of political factors will determine Obama's success in turning red states blue. But the Senator, in no small measure, will be aided in his task by reforms that preceded his run for the presidency. For all of the hoopla surrounding the candidates, the 2008 presidential election will be the first truly national test of the viability and prescience of Howard Dean's 50-state strategy.

Four years ago, when Dean was vaulted to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee -- following a failed presidential bid months earlier -- he pledged to rewrite the rules concerning where and how Democrats would compete. In the subsequent months, resources and staff were invested into unconventional and even previously untouched locales. The idea was that the party simply couldn't compete without a margin for error.

But at the time, party insiders, who believed Dean was stripping away important resources from key races, were privately and, on occasion, publicly livid.

"He says it's a long-term strategy," said Paul Begala, the longtime Clinton aide and Democratic strategist. "What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose."

When the Democrats made major congressional gains in 2006, questions persisted as to whether the electoral success had simply been the product of a fortunate circumstance. Dean himself admitted to Time Magazine, "I didn't expect much to come of this strategy for four or even six years."

Now, four years have passed. And the Democrats have nominated a candidate that seems perfectly equipped to test-drive the party's 50-state vehicle. Obama has built his candidacy off of the pledge to expand the electoral playing field. Moreover, his campaign has leaned on an ability to drum up both grassroots support and the recruitment of Republicans and independents -- two stated objectives of the Dean vision.

On Thursday, Obama symbolically endorsed the DNC's efforts, declaring that Dean would remain party chairman heading into the general election.

As Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod, told The Huffington Post: "I think that we are going to have a larger battlefield in 2008... I think we are going to stretch the Republicans. I don't think they can take for granted nearly as many states as they have in the past. And I think we are going to add several to the Democratic column this year and so our coalition is going to be broader."

* * *

But what tangible benefits will the 50-state strategy actually provide?

Obama will likely start the general election with 180 or so "reliably Democratic" electoral votes. With the goal of getting to 270, the DNC believes it could play a role in carrying the rest of the burden. The party already has more than 200 field staffers on the ground, and grassroots training programs in all fifty states. In addition, new Internet and communications operations have been started with the goal of facilitating participation in, and donations to, Democratic causes.

These might seem like ad-hoc measures. But if Sen. John Kerry had received ten additional votes per precinct in 2004, he would have won Iowa, Ohio, New Mexico, and, subsequently, the White House.

Perhaps the most significant, and controversial, move made under the 50-state strategy has been the modernization of the party's voter file, in which Dean has invested more than $8 million dollars.

"We have gone light years from four years ago," said Moses Mercado, a Democratic operative and a former adviser to Dick Gephardt's presidential campaign. "Then it was a rag tag of what the party had accumulated and it wasn't what other local officials were using. The DNC got every state on a national voter file. The new file has better tracking to include voter history -- they now know the political habits of those who have moved... I don't feel the urgency now that we are behind because we have the infrastructure to capture the excitement of the primary."

But not everyone has been on board. Before he joined Hillary Clinton's campaign, Harold Ickes constructed a voter database of his own, in part because he wanted to target left-leaning interest groups, in part because he didn't particularly trust Dean. A debate currently rages as to which database is more useful. But in the end, having options will prove better than having none. And Obama seems poised to benefit from this type of ground work.

"The 50-state strategy has been implemented to varying degrees in a lot of states and Obama is going to make a lot of these states competitive," said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and Center for American Progress. "And in a lot of these states, by virtue of the primary competition, they have generated a lot of registration and work on top of what the Dean folks have done. The whole controversy as to whether the 50 state strategy was a good idea -- with the establishment Democrats poo-pooing it -- I'm getting the impression that is less of a controversial idea then it once was, and it does fit into what Obama is trying to do."

* * *

The evidence of at least some progress is already visible on the ground. In late May, the Boston Globe identified six traditionally Republican states that Obama would have the greatest shot of turning.

Next to Virginia, Colorado appeared most ripe. Even though the state, with the exception of 1992, hasn't voted Democratic in more than four decades, it has witnessed an influx of younger, more liberal voters, as well as suburbanites emigrating from California. Spurred by the DNC, the state's Democratic Party has taken productive steps to improve its fortunes. Starting in 2005, field directors were sent out to rural areas, a new voter file was purchased, and ballot initiatives were run in non-traditional counties. In time, electoral results materialized. Currently, Colorado's governor, both houses of the state legislature and one of its Senators are Democratic; all of which, official claim, will transfer well to the presidential level.

"The thing about the Obama campaign that was interesting is that when they came into Colorado they set up about ten offices in the state," said Pat Waak, chair of the Colorado Democratic Party. "It was great. It reinforced the same effort that we had been working on for the past three years or so. It means that with all the training that we've done over the past three years and with our own efforts we are enabled for success in the fall campaign."

Added Democratic pollster Celinda Lake: "I think the 50 state strategy put in play a lot of western states that are extremely good for Obama, because they are change oriented and increasingly Democratic. Though no one noticed it, the west is purple."

Obama's task, however, is not just to flip states into his column, but rather to make enough areas competitive so that McCain and the Republican Party are forced to drain their resources. In this regard, Dean's vision may prove more successful.

Take Idaho. In 2006, the Democratic Party was able to field an aggressive challenger in what had been, since 1994, a safe GOP district. With help from on-the-ground staffers and the influx of small but strategic resources, Larry Grant forced his Republican opponent, Bill Sali, to turn to Washington for money and two separate appearances by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Grant ultimately lost, but ripple effects were felt on other races. Among the Obama folks, the lessons from that 2006 race apparently still resonate. According to the state's Democratic Party chair, the Illinois Democrat has pledged to open an office in Idaho for the fall -- an unheard of development in recent presidential elections.

"Bear in mind that I received assurance when I was back in Chicago that they would have paid people on the ground in Idaho," said Idaho Democratic Party Chairman Keith Roark. "Now clearly they won't have the same presence in Idaho as they do in Colorado and New Mexico where Obama has a chance of winning. But they will have people on the ground here and we haven't had that since 1964. If you mix that kind of operation with what our state party already has, who knows what is going to happen."

* * *

Not every Democratic operative or political observer is convinced that the 50-state-strategy will prove consequentially beneficial for Obama. For starters, the DNC is currently strapped for money compared to its Republican counterpart, with $4.4 million in the bank going into the general election (the RNC has $40 million). As such, the party may be indirectly forcing Obama's hand -- persuading the Illinois Senator to forgo public funding despite the hits he may take from good government reform groups.

"I think there is some infrastructure, even if it is minimal, that will be a benefit for anyone who pursues the [50-state-strategy]," said Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic operative and adviser to Kerry. "And the way to do it, and I wish we did it in the Kerry campaign, is to stay outside of public funding, amass a resource advantage bigger than your opponent and put new states in play. The way to win is to target the states that not only you can win but forcing your opponent to defend... Obama can do this by arguing that he has a whole new system of public funding."

But other steps are needed. Indeed, with unsure financial commitments from the DNC -- their coffers should bulge now that the primary is over -- and with the 50-state strategy still in its early stages, the Obama campaign faces the uphill task of organizing its own efforts in non-Democratic states in a matter of months.

In early May, the Senator took the first step down that road by launching a country-wide voter registration drive, with the hopes of playing off of his primary successes. The campaign would not discuss how and where Obama would look to open offices, spend advertising dollars, or coordinate resources. Since securing the nomination, however, the Senator is tightening his control over the party. News circulated this week that Obama will persuade the DNC to refuse any lobbyist funding, a stance in line with his own campaign. And a high-ranking Obama official, Paul Tewes, is slated to help oversee fundraising efforts at the committee.

The potential beneficiaries of the Obama-Dean alliance could be numerous. Down-ticket Democrats are not only banking on an influx of resources into their races, but are hoping that a synthesized effort between the presidential candidate and campaign committees provides a political boost even in traditionally hostile locales. The environment is certainly ripe. Already Democrats have ripped three congressional seats away from the GOP in special elections. The Cook Political Report list 27 seats GOP House seats that will be in play, in addition to seven in the Senate.

"It is not that Obama needs what the DNC under what Dean has done," said Thomas Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institute. "It is that the Obama nominating campaign has reinforced what the DNC was doing. And all of this will be primarily helpful down ticket. It gives Democrats some opportunities to win Senate, House and other legislative contests and over time puts them in the position of turning around some truly red states."

Right wing and Left wing brains we have, Cf.

2008-04-20T16:52:00.000-04:00

Study finds Difference between
Right Wing brain and Left wing brain.

Even in humdrum nonpolitical decisions, liberals and conservatives literally think differently, researchers show.
By Denise Gellene, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 10, 2007

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported todayin the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W.

M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared.

Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity."

Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.

"There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Lead author David Amodio, an assistant professor of psychology at New York University, cautioned that the study looked at a narrow range of human behavior and that it would be a mistake to conclude that one political orientation was better. The tendency of conservatives to block distracting information could be a good thing depending on the situation, he said.

Political orientation, he noted, occurs along a spectrum, and positions on specific issues, such as taxes, are influenced by many factors, including education and wealth. Some liberals oppose higher taxes and some conservatives favor abortion rights.

Still, he acknowledged that a meeting of the minds between conservatives and liberals looked difficult given the study results.

"Does this mean liberals and conservatives are never going to agree?" Amodio asked. "Maybe it suggests one reason why they tend not to get along."

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/linkframe.php?linkid=57431

PAINFUL THINGS HILARY SHOULD KNOW...

2008-03-22T11:29:00.003-04:00

HALPERINS TAKE: Painful Things Hillary Clinton Knows — Or Should Know

1. She can't win the nomination without overturning the will of the elected delegates, which will alienate many Democrats.

2. She can't win the nomination without a bloody convention battle — after which, even if she won, history and many Democrats would cast her as a villain.

3. Catching up in the popular vote is not out of the question but without re-votes in Florida and Michigan it will be almost as impossible as catching up in elected delegates.

4. Nancy Pelosi and other leading members of Congress don't think she can win and want her to give up. Same with superdelegate-to-the-stars Donna Brazile.

5. Obamas skilled, close-knit staff can do things like silently kill re-votes in Florida and Michigan and not pay a political price.

6. Many of her supporters and even some of her staffers would be relieved (and even delighted) if she quit the race; none of his supporters or staff feel that way. Some think she just might throw in the towel in June if it appears efforts to fight on would hurt Obamas general election chances.

7. The Rev. Wright story notwithstanding, the media still wants Obama to be the nominee and that has an impact every day.

8. Obama might not be able to talk that well about the new global economy, but she (and McCain) can't either.

9. Many of the remaining prominent superdelegates want to be for Obama and she (and Harold Ickes) are just barely keeping them from making public commitments to him.

10. She can't publicly say more than 2% of all the things she would like to say about race, electability, beating McCain and experience.

11. If she somehow found a way to win the nomination, she would have to offer Obama the veep slot, and she doesn't want to do that.

12. This is a change election, and Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton can never truly be change.

13. Obama is having fun most days, and she isn't.

14. Even though her campaign staff is having more fun than it has for a long time, there’s hardly anyone there who, given half a chance, wouldn't slit Mark Penns throat and such internal dissension won't help her in the home stretch.

COMMNENT?

Yes, He Can (on Obama) "Hope is a theological virtue"

2008-03-20T17:36:00.005-04:00

March 14, 2008 / Volume CXXXV, Number 5 COMMONWEAL.

Yes He Can: The Case for Obama

Robert N. Bellah

Author, HABITS OF THE HEART, and THE GOOD SOCIETY.

This year's presidential election is surely one of the most important in recent history. After more than seven years of the most incompetent administration in American history, it is time for a change. The question is, What kind of change?

Before trying to answer that question, let me put my cards on the table: I am highly partisan. I have never voted for a Republican in my sixty years as a voter. I have on rare occasions voted for a third-party candidate, but on the whole, often as the lesser evil, I have voted for Democrats. Although I think I would have done the same wherever I lived, I must also confess that I am conformist in terms of my immediate environment. It is rumored that there are Republicans in Berkeley, but no one knows who they are: they are perhaps a secret society. Voting consistently for Democrats makes one something of a conservative in Berkeley terms. I suspect if I had lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as I did for the first twenty years of my academic life, it wouldn’t have been much different.

I must also confess that I am highly partisan in the present Democratic primary race. I have a high regard for both Clintons and I believe Hillary Clinton is a strong candidate. But Barack Obama has stirred my political hopes like no one since Franklin Roosevelt. Yes, I am old enough to remember Roosevelt. He became president when I was five years old and died when I was eighteen. Even as a child I was partisan and, while too young to know enough to support him in 1932, I did strongly support him in 1936, 1940, and 1944, though I was not yet old enough to vote.

Hearing Obama give the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention was one of the most electrifying experiences of my political life. Who is this person? I thought. How is it possible for anyone today to formulate the very best of the American tradition in such eloquent terms? (Needless to say, with a sense of the centrality of rhetoric to the Western political tradition from Aristotle and Cicero to Jefferson and Lincoln, I have never accepted the derogatory use of the word. I believe that speaking well and thinking well usually go together, and vice versa, as the incumbent president so vividly illustrates. It will be easier for John McCain to attack Obama’s “rhetoric” than to equal it.) Recently going over my 2007 checkbooks for tax purposes, I noted that I wrote a check to Obama for America on February 10, 2007, which was the very day he announced his candidacy. What impressed me during the last long year of campaigning was not so much his stand on particular issues (I generally agree with him, though on health care I think Clinton’s plan may be slightly better); it was the way Obama framed where we are today and how we can move to a better place. In other words, what I first heard in 2004 has only become clearer in the past year: Obama, like no one I have heard in a very long time, understands our political tradition, how it has been distorted in recent years, and how we can return to it at its best. I know Obama talks a lot about hope, but that is what he has given me: hope, when I had begun to believe that the situation in my country was hopeless.

I believe both Clintons have read Habits of the Heart and The Good Society, because they have told me that they have, and I believe Hillary Clinton would try to put into practice some of the things that I and my coauthors were talking about in those books. I have no reason to believe that Obama has read the books, yet he has caught their spirit in a most remarkable way and expressed it more eloquently than anyone in living memory. In Habits of the Heart I and my coauthors described four traditions that are powerful in America today. We called our primary moral language “utilitarian individualism,” the calculating concern for self-interest that is natural in our kind of economy, and a language that all candidates, Republicans and Democrats, must often use as they appeal to various interest groups to support them. But we have three secondary moral languages that give a greater richness and moral adequacy to our discourse (even as they are often shunted aside by the dominance of the language of self-interest), expressive individualism, biblical language, and the language of civic republicanism. All candidates use the language of expressive individualism when they try to show us their human side, tell their individual stories and the stories of those who support them. But the substantial alternatives to the language of utilitarian individualism are biblical and civic republican. Biblical language, like all the others, comes in several forms, but here I am referring to the language of Martin Luther King Jr. and William Sloane Coffin—that is, a language that expresses the dominant biblical concern for those most in need, a language that reminds us of our solidarity with all human beings. When Obama says “we are our brothers’ keepers; we are our sisters’ keepers,” when he suggests, as he does in so many ways, that we all need one another, all depend on one another, he is using that biblical language at its most appropriate. And in his emphasis on public participation at every level, in his refusal to take money from lobbyists and political action committees, he is reviving the spirit of civic republicanism, of voters as citizens responsible for the common good, not political consumers concerned only with themselves.

The probable Republican nominee, John McCain, seems to be a better human being than his Republican rivals, more human and more moral. But to the degree that he relies on the politics of fear—apparently the Republicans’ only hope (Paschal: He just did, again, yesterday if you are paying attention)—and demonizes Islam in the process, he would lead us to follow our worst instincts and continue a policy that has the gravest consequences for the world and the place of America in the world. That leaves the only real choice (I’m writing this in late February) as that between Clinton and Obama. I am not sure Obama can deliver on what he promises—he will surely face fanatical and powerful opposition to anything he tries to do. And I am not sure he can resist the temptations of our political culture to compromise—not to compromise for the sake of doing what is realistically possible, but to compromise principles. And I believe Hillary Clinton is probably better prepared to deal with the realities of the presidency from “day one,” as she has said. But there is a grandeur and a hope in Obama that makes me want to give him the chance to lead our country.

Should Clinton be the nominee, I would strongly support her. I hope that Obama’s example would encourage her best instincts, as Edwards’s example has encouraged both Obama and Clinton. But if Obama is not the nominee, and if he is never elected president, I am sure that, God willing, he will long be a political presence that will forever be calling us to heed “the better angels of our nature.”

I am not as confident as many that the Democratic nominee will win in November. Americans of late have been very vulnerable to the politics of fear, as have many nations in the past. I am reasonably sure that the Democrats will have a significant majority in both houses of Congress, that if McCain wins it will be a personal victory with very short coattails. That means a great deal of conflict and gridlock in a period when we can ill afford it.

If we have, as expected, a Democratic president next year, the road will still not be easy. Both Democratic candidates have promised what amounts to universal health care, but opposition to that is enormously well financed and it will be a struggle to keep even a significant Democratic majority sufficiently together to pass it. Every significant issue, domestic and foreign, will be contested, will require both presidential leadership of a high quality and public pressure on the Congress to do the right thing. We may be confident that, whoever is elected, things cannot be as bad as under George W. Bush. Yet that is a very low standard. I cannot say I am very optimistic that the standard will be significantly lifted. Still, hope is a theological virtue; it is something required of us. Whatever we may fear, we must keep hope alive.

I agree mostly with these sentiments, except that with her (and Bill's) strong corporate support, and her fundamentalist religious views (new book due out in May), I do NOT think she is better prepeared and I believe that she is less free.

Comment?

New Hampshire, Granite State Reps vote to Impeach.

2008-02-21T15:46:00.000-05:00

In a packed hearing room on Feb 19th, under a carved wooden sign reading "Live Free or Die"-, the New Hampshire House committee of State-Federal Relations and Veterans' Affairs heard testimony on Representative Betty Hall's HR 24, which calls on the U.S. Congress to begin impeachment hearings for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

What was most notable about the four straight hours of testimony was not that opponents of the resolution could only muster two people willing to testify against it, both Republican stalwarts using selected excerpts from Jefferson's parliamentary manual or from the bill itself, whose arguments were embarrassingly empty.

It was not that Kris Roberts, the committee chair, had taken this hearing seriously enough to have researched the law, history and nuances of the subject, and that he used this to inform the proceedings in a reasonably fair manner.

It was not the fact that after the hearing ended, several pro-impeachment witnesses were approached by committee members and thanked for their clarity and useful testimony.

It was not even the novelty of the interjections by one committee member that would periodically steer the conversation abruptly into Rockefeller/Trilateral Commission territory.

The most remarkable moment came late in the afternoon when Republican House member Steve Vaillancourt strode into the room to testify. After passing out copies of the second chapter of Patrick Buchanan's "Day of Reckoning"- as supporting evidence, Vaillancourt opened his remarks quoting "fools rush in where wise men fear to tread"-, and it sounded like a set up to condemn a rush to impeach. But instead he said that Betty Hall is neither fool nor wise man, but is a model of courage and that her impeachment resolution should be supported.

And then the fun began.

Member Vaillancourt then gave a short history lesson, telling the committee that until Bush/Cheney, America had never engaged in an offensive war [sic.], and pointing out that the Truman, Eisenhower. Kennedy and Reagan "Doctrines"- had all been based on defense and had not been offensive in nature. Warming to the subject, he delved into the ramifications of Bush/Cheney's actions, saying that their reckless foreign policy has been anti-American, unconstitutional, and ruinously costly to the nation.

He was fairly thundering by the time that he pronounced that not only should Bush and Cheney be impeached, but also they should be tried as war criminals in a Nuremburg style trial for crimes against humanity. He flatly stated that the war in Iraq has provided grounds for war crimes charges against the President and Vice President. And there was not one word of protest from a single committee member. They may or may not support this resolution to impeach, but there seems to be no one left with a credible argument to defend Bush/Cheney.

Vaillancourt said that he spoke not as a Republican, a New Hampshire citizen or an American, but as a member of humanity. His remarks made a common sense plea for an honest appraisal of our current political situation, for the acknowledgement that we have a duty to act as a decent and responsible people, and that principle be the governing factor of our government's actions. These are all values that should, and once did, cut across party lines. If the current political parties have forgotten this, and become so degraded as to allow the lawlessness and criminality of this administration to go unchecked, the people have not.

And at that hearing the people had their chance to speak. One member of the committee remarked that she had never before seen such a wide range of viewpoints as represented by the witnesses, to be so united on one issue.

After deliberation the next day, loyalty to party leadership proved a stronger pull than reasoned argument, for five committee members voted to recommend the bill, with eleven voting against. Now facing an uphill battle to get it passed in a full House vote in March, Betty Hall was still encouraged by the committee hearing and vote. She has received much more support for this resolution than she did with a similar effort last year, and is already working to get grass roots supporters out between now and the vote to get their legislators' attention.

If the grass roots continue to pour out as they did on Tuesday, and if there were a few more politicians like Steve Vaillancourt and Betty Hall, we might see things begin to change. It's instructive to remember that some politicians who are now leading the charge for impeachment did not want to talk about it only a few short months ago. The spotlight is now on the New Hampshire House, the third largest deliberative body on the planet, and arguably one of the more democratic representative systems anywhere as well.

These representatives may listen to an outsider's viewpoint on what to do about the Constitution, but they will be influenced most by the neighbors whom they represent. The question is, is New Hampshire angry enough and organized enough to convince the legislature to call for impeachment?

For those outside of New Hampshire the question is, how can we raise the temperature everywhere else, making it all the more plausible that the Granite State will reach the boiling point.

Dan Dewalt is a musician/woodworker/teacher who authored the Newfane impeachment resolution passed at March 2006 town meetings.

KEATS SECRET: THE POWER OF THE IMAGINATION.

2007-11-25T14:19:00.000-05:00

John Lundberg
Keats Secret: the Power of the Imagination.

If you live under a rock like I do, you may have missed out on the phenomenon that is The Secret, an uber-popular film (turned book) by Australian writer and producer Rhonda Byrne. I know, I know. How could I resist opening one of those faux-parchment paperbacks with the "secret" emanating toward me in glossy beams of light? Well, curiosity finally got the better of me this week. If you don't know already, The Secret claims that "people's feelings and thoughts attract real events in the world into their lives; from the workings of the cosmos to interactions among individuals in their physical, emotional, and professional affairs." More simply: if you imagine something you want hard enough, it happens.

In a materialistic twist, the film actually encourages people to use this imaginative power to get rich and collect stuff they want. As Reason's Greg Beato put it, for Secret believers, "The universe is a giant vibrating ATM, ready to shower you with new cars, fine jewelry, unexpected checks in the mail, and magical sunsets." Byrne herself admitted that her inspiration for the film came from a book called The Science of Getting Rich Quick.

No, this is not your daddy's New Age philosophy. I miss those days. When I was in college, a girl approached me at a coffee shop convinced that I had something to tell her. I tried to laugh it off, but she insisted that I was supposed to be some sort of guide. You see, she'd been reading The Celestine Prophecy. I could have given her a dead-serious look and told her to go to Machu Picchu and wait for Miguel, but I ended up offering advice so banal I can't even remember what it was.

Some guru I would be.

Anyway, according to Byrne, the Secret isn't something she invented. It has been known to certain highly successful people throughout history. Her list of "keepers" includes Plato, Einstein and Alexander Graham Bell(!) but is surprisingly bereft of great writers. Honestly, if the guy who may have invented the telephone made the list, how about a poet or two?

In fact, long before Byrne had ever been thought up, the English poet John Keats was exploring the power of the imagination. In a letter to a friend, Keats famously wrote: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affection and the truth of Imagination--what the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not..." Keats didn't think that the imagination could create, say, money or a woman, but it could create beauty--and he was certain that beauty, even when imagined, is real.

Whether you agree or not, the beauty you imagine can certainly spill into and impact your reality. I experienced this idea firsthand a few years back when I had a dream about a friend of mine. I'd never been attracted to her before, but in the dream I was, and when I woke up I was still attracted. The beauty I'd imagined had changed the way I really felt. We even ended up dating. How'd it go? Let's just say that was the last time I let my imagination set me up.

Keats explores this phenomenon in some of his poems. In "The Eve of St. Agnes," Madeline, a young heroine, is dreaming of her lover Porphyro when the real Porphyro wakes her up. Madeline finds that her imagination has changed the way she feels about the real Porphyro, who's now a little disappointing:

"Ah Porphyro! said she, "but even now

Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear...

How changed thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!"

She implores him to act more like the man she'd been dreaming of:

"Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,

Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!"

In Keats's ballad "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," a traveler comes across a "haggard" and "woe begone" knight, whose reality has been shattered by a beautiful woman who lures men in and traps them. She seems to exist somewhere between reality and a dream:

"I saw pale kings, and princes too,

Pale warriors, death pale were they all;

they cried--La belle dame sans merci

Hath thee in thrall.

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill's side."

Why is this important? When we explore how the imagination impacts real life, we explore the potential power of art. Because instead of coming from a dream, couldn't the imaginative spark come from a novel, a poem, or even a movie? It's something to think about. That is, when you're not thinking really hard about the promotion and the Jaguar you want.

For more on Keats, take a look at John Lundberg's Poem of the Week blog

School of Americas: now 20,000 protest

2007-11-19T16:54:00.000-05:00

Twenty Thousand Protest at Fort Benning: Eleven Face Federal Criminal Trials
By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 19 November 2007

In what has become the nation's largest annual gathering for peace and human rights, over twenty thousand people protested outside the gates of Fort Benning, GA, on November 18, 2007. Eleven people were arrested on federal criminal charges and face up to six months in prison.

Fort Benning is the site of the internationally notorious US Army training school for Latin American military and security personnel. For decades it was called the School of the Americas (SOA) - it is now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The school has graduated hundreds of military officers who have led or participated in nearly every human rights atrocity in the hemisphere. Organizations across the world, including Amnesty International USA, have called for its closure since discovering copies of torture manuals used at the school. In June 2007, 203 members of the US House of Representatives voted to close the scandal-ridden school - six votes shy of the margin of victory.

Thousands listened quietly as Adriana Portillo-Bartow told how her father, stepmother, sister, sister-in-law and two daughters, ages nine and 11, were "disappeared" in Guatemala in a war directed and carried out by graduates of the US Army School of the Americas. Thousands moved towards the gates of the Fort and called out "presente!" as the names of hundreds of other victims of graduates of the school were sung out.

Veterans of WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the never-ending Gulf Wars marched side by side with Catholic sisters and Buddhist monks.

Flowers, posters, pictures and thousands of small white crosses bearing the names of people executed by graduates of the school were put on the closed padlocked gates topped with barbed wire. Thousands of college and high school students chanted and prayed Grandmothers for Peace as military loudspeakers blared warnings and law enforcement helicopters hovered overhead. Huge puppets, singing children and drum circles alternated with the spirited calls of priests, rabbis and ministers of many faiths and races. Songs in many languages, indigenous chants, guitars, horns and mountain flutes filled the air.

The eleven people who crossed onto the grounds were arrested by military police. The eleven, ranging in age from 25 to 76, are scheduled for federal criminal trial January 28, 2008, for trespass - punishable by up to six months in federal prison. Over 200 people have served federal prison time for civil disobedience at prior protests - dozens of others arrested have served years of supervised federal probation. The movement to close the school started in 1990 when about 20 people held the first protest outside Fort Benning.

Even if the US government is reluctant to close the school, Latin American countries look like they will do it themselves. Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Uruguay and Venezuela have announced they are withdrawing their militaries from the school.

Crimes by graduates continue. Colombia recently arrested five high-ranking military officers who received training at the US Army School of Americas and two additional officers who were instructors at WHINSEC. All are charged with providing security and troops for the major drug cartel in Colombia.

Simultaneous protests occurred in Santiago, Chile, Tucson, Arizona - outside of Fort Huachuca - where three people were also arrested and face federal criminal charges, Toronto, Canada, as well as Berkeley and Monterey California.

For more on the movement to close the School of the Americas see www.soaw.org.

--------

Bill is a human rights lawyer and professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. Bill is also a member of the legal collective of School of Americas Watch. Quigley@loyno.edu

Hidden Epidemic: Military Suicides.:

2007-11-13T14:43:00.000-05:00

Tonight CBS will air the first of a two-part series on the "hidden epidemic" of military suicides, revealing numbers that CBS calls "stunning." The report examines data on the suicide rate amongst veterans once they return home, which indicates a serious mental health issue — and a hidden mortality rate.

"We first started researching military suicides because it had never been done before," said Armen Keteyian, CBS News' chief investigative correspondent in a statement forwarded by CBS News. "But when all the data was collected, we were astonished. I had no idea how much of an epidemic CBS uncovered. We expect this to be a wake up call."

Keteyian previewed the segment on the "CBS Early Show" today, saying that the CBS five-month study found that vets were "more than twice as likely to commit suicide in 2005 as non-vets." Chillingly, though the Veterans Affairs Department estimates that "some 5,000 ex-servicemen and women will commit suicide this year,' that's a lowball estimate. Said Keteyian: "Our numbers are much higher than that, overall."

According to a CBS spokesperson, the report represents the first time an actual count of veteran suicides at home has been tallied, as opposed to estimates. "We also have number from the DOD of active duty suicides that we believed have never been reported before dating back to 1995," said the spokesperson. "Many believe, including the family members, that they VA hasn't done a true nationwide count of the numbers (which are stunning) because they just don't want to know."

This echoes findings in a CBS report on the matter back in January 2004, which focused on soldier suicides during deployment but which also noted that the Pentagon did not count post-release suicides, and that a pre-Iraq war army study had predicted "an impending soldier-suicide crisis" (which, according to critics, was "largely ignored").

The two-part series will focus tonight on the numbers, and tomorrow on how the Dept. of Veterans Affairs is handling this problem (our guess, based on the above: Not well). According to CBS, tonight's segment runs 5 minutes — long for a newscast (though tonight is a single-sponsor broadcast (Pfizer) which will definitely save a few minutes).

Military suicides have been in the news recently owing to the passage last month of the Joshua Omvig Veterans Suicide Prevention Act (HR. 327), named for 22-year-old Army Reservist Joshua Omvig who commited suicide a few months after his return from Iraq. The bill "directs the Department of Veterans Affairs to develop and implement a comprehensive program to reduce the incidence of suicide among veterans," by virtue of better screening of veteran patients for mental health, tracking of veterans, better suicide prevention training for VA staff (including designating one suicide-specific counselor at each facility), and a 24-hour mental-health care, including a hotline. The legislation also requires the VA to report back on "status, timeline and costs for complete implementation within 2 years" within 90 days (i.e. by late January). Hopefully they can reverse the trend. If not, hopefully CBS will still be there.

Vets' Suicide Rate "Stunning" [CBS]

Another way we got into the Iraqi war mess revealed: false reports on biological weapons.

2007-11-02T05:28:00.000-04:00

Faulty Intel Source "Curve Ball" Revealed

Nov. 1, 2007

(CBS) 60 Minutes has identified the man whose fabricated story of Iraqi biological weapons drove the U.S. argument for invading Iraq. It has also obtained video of "Curve Ball," as he was known in intelligence circles, and discovered he was not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be.

60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon's two-year investigation will be broadcast this Sunday, Nov. 4, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Curve Ball is an Iraqi defector named Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who arrived at a German refugee center in 1999. To bolster his asylum case and increase his importance, he told officials he was a star chemical engineer who had been in charge of a facility at Djerf al Nadaf that was making mobile biological weapons.

60 Minutes has learned that Alwan’s university records indicate he did study chemical engineering but earned nearly all low marks, mostly 50s. Simon’s investigation also uncovered an arrest warrant for theft from the Babel television production company in Baghdad where he once worked.

Also appearing in Sunday's segment is video that 60 Minutes obtained of Alwan at a Baghdad wedding in 1993 - the first time images of him have ever been made public.

He eventually wound up in the care of German intelligence officials to whom he continued to spin his tale of biological weapons. His plan succeeded partially because he had worked briefly at the plant outside Baghdad and his descriptions of it were mostly accurate. He embellished his account by saying 12 workers had been killed by biological agents in an accident at the plant.

More than a hundred summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA, which then became a pillar - along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons - for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq. The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the U.N. in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

Tenet gave the information to Powell despite a letter - a copy of which 60 Minutes obtained - addressed to him by the head of German intelligence stating that Alwan appeared to be believable, but there was no evidence to verify his story.

Through a spokesman, Tenet denies ever seeing the letter. "[Tenet] needs to talk to his special assistants if he didn’t see it," says Tyler Drumheller, a former CIA senior official. "I am sure they showed it to him and I am sure ... it wasn’t what they wanted to see," he tells Simon.

Other CIA officials doubted Curve Ball’s authenticity, including former Central Group Chief Margaret Henoch, who speaks publicly for the first time, telling Simon she openly refuted Alwan’s story. "And it was like 'Whack a Mole.' He just popped right back up. It was unbelievable."

Alwan was caught when CIA interrogators were finally allowed to question him and confronted him with evidence that his story could not be as he described it. Weapons inspectors had examined the plant at Djerf al Nadaf before the fall of Baghdad and found no evidence of biological agents.

In the end, however, Alwan got what he wanted. He is believed to be in Germany, free and probably living under an assumed name.

Why did he do it?

"It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth," says Drumheller. "It just shows ... the law of unintended consequences," he tells Simon.

Paschal: when government wants to do something, it will do it, hook or crook. This is true of every administration, Democratic and Republican.

It is the arrogance and blindness of power, and further the filtering out of data that would challenge the drive already underway to impose will on another without reckoning consequences.. Name every disaster: the failed Cuban invasion, Vietnam, two space disasters, Katrina, and now the Iraqi invasion and war.

Bush hiding behind the General?

2007-09-09T16:47:00.000-04:00

Hiding Behind the General
The New York Times | Editorial

Sunday 09 September 2007

The military commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is to deliver a report to Congress on Monday that could be the most consequential testimony by a wartime commander in more than a generation. What the country desperately needs is an honest assessment of the war and a clear strategy for extricating American forces from the hopeless spiral of violence in Iraq.

President Bush, however, seems to be aiming for maximum political advantage - not maximum clarity on Iraq's military and political crises, which cannot be separated from each other. Mr. Bush, we fear, isn't looking for the truth, only for ways to confound the public, scare Democrats into dropping their demands for a sound exit strategy, and prolong the war until he leaves office. At times, General Petraeus gives the disturbing impression that he, too, is more focused on the political game in Washington than the unfolding disaster in Iraq. That serves neither American nor Iraqi interests.

Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus's strategy - as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell - another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier's duty - play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war.

General Petraeus has his own credibility problems. He overstepped in 2004 when he published an op-ed article in The Washington Post six weeks before the election. The general - then in charge of training and equipping Iraq's security forces - rhapsodized about "tangible progress" and how the Iraqi forces were "developing steadily," an assessment that may have swayed some voters but has long since proved to be untrue.

And just last week, senior military commanders in Baghdad who work for General Petraeus entered the political fray by taking issue - anonymously - with the grim assessment of Iraq's politics and security by non-partisan Congressional investigators.

As Congress waited anxiously for General Petraeus's testimony, a flurry of well-timed news reports said that he told the White House he could go along with the withdrawal of about 4,000 American troops beginning in January but wanted to maintain increased force levels well into next year - just like Mr. Bush. Democrats who once demanded a firm date for the start of a troop pullout immediately started backpedaling.

Withdrawing 4,000 troops and dangling the prospect of additional withdrawals is a token political gesture, not a new strategy. If it proves enough to cow Congress into halting its push for a more robust and concrete exit strategy, that would be political cowardice at its worst.

We hope that General Petraeus can resist the political pressure and provide an unvarnished assessment of the military situation in Iraq. He is an important source of information, of course, but he is only one source - and he is not the man who sets American policy. If Mr. Bush insists on listening only to those who agree with him, Congress and the public must weigh General Petraeus's report against all data, including two new independent evaluations sharply at odds with the Pentagon's claim that things in Iraq are substantially better.

The Government Accountability Office found that the Iraqi government has not met 11 of 18 benchmarks set by Congress and that violence remains high, despite the White House's disingenuous claims of success. And a commission of retired senior military officers determined that Iraq's army will be unable to take over responsibility for internal security in the next 12 to 18 months. That is four years beyond what the Pentagon predicted in 2004. It is too long.

Nothing has changed about Mr. Bush's intentions. Waving off the independent reports, he plans to stay the course and make his successor fix his Iraq fiasco. Military progress without political progress is meaningless, and Mr. Bush no more has a plan for unifying Iraq now than when he started the war. The United States needs a prudent exit strategy that will withdraw American forces and try to stop Iraq's chaos from spreading.

Fathers and Sons: perspective

2007-09-08T17:02:00.001-04:00

Questions for Christopher Dodd

A Son’s Story

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Your new book, "Letters from Nuremberg," takes us back to the rubble of postwar Germany, when your father, former U.S. Senator Thomas J. Dodd, was a young attorney assigned to prosecute Nazi criminals. Why did you wait so long to publish his letters? I didn’t find them until 1990. My sister had them in the basement of her house, and she gave them to my brother, and he gave them to me.

What did you think when you first read through them? I wept. My father was one of four people doing interrogations, and in one letter he is interviewing a thug like Hermann Goring at 4 p.m. — a man responsible for the incineration of millions of people — and writing my mother an intimate letter that night. He could really change gears.

Virtually all the letters he wrote to your mom are love letters that offered him what he described as an “all too brief few minutes with you.” He absolutely adored her. And she him. When he was coming home, it was very clear that everything else was secondary. We were there, but we were not the central event. There was never any doubt in my mind as to where his greatest affection was.

You seem eager in the book to contrast the idealism of the American past with the moral disasters of the present. Nuremberg — say the word and it conjures images of moral authority, of global leadership, of responsibility. Say the words Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and what images come to mind?

You’re probably aware that the position of U.S. attorney general is currently available. I don’t think I am a candidate for attorney general. I don’t think I’m on the short list.

I hear you’re running for president. Yes, Ma’am. I hear as well. Thank you for hearing!

You’re barely a blip in the polls. As a fifth-term senator with decades of experience, why do you think you’ve failed to generate at least as much interest as, say, John Edwards? Well, he ran for vice president. This is all about names that people recognize.

Do you think Connecticut is the problem? It’s doesn’t exactly have a populist image. That’s an interesting question. Living between New York and Boston is sort of like living in Alsace-Lorraine, between the French and the Germans. We’re the quiet zone between two very robust cities.

Do you think the recent debates helped you distinguish yourself from the other Democratic candidates? No. At the debates, I felt like I was back at St. Thomas the Apostle School with Sister Louise, trying to be recognized in the room. If you had a parochial education, you’d appreciate how frightening that can be — trying to be recognized.

It’s true you’re not overexposed. The only time you made national headlines this summer was when your office in Hartford was burglarized by a homeless man. Well, as someone once said, as long as they spell your name right.

You came late to fatherhood. You’re 63 and have two young children. Grace was born two days after 9/11. She’s 5, and Christina is 2. Little girls are wonderful. Fathers and little girls have special relationships.

All of this represents a departure from your former image as a longtime bachelor who dated Bianca Jagger and Carrie Fisher. I wouldn’t even begin to make a comment on that.

Do you think Americans have a right to know about a candidate's personal life? Well, look. What’s that great line? There’s no such thing as a saint without a past and a sinner without a future.

Who said that? I just did.

2007-09-08T17:02:00.000-04:00

Questions for Christopher Dodd

A Son’s Story

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Your new book, “Letters from Nuremberg,” takes us back to the rubble of postwar Germany, when your father, former U.S. Senator Thomas J. Dodd, was a young attorney assigned to prosecute Nazi criminals. Why did you wait so long to publish his letters? I didn’t find them until 1990. My sister had them in the basement of her house, and she gave them to my brother, and he gave them to me.

You’re probably aware that the position of U.S. attorney general is currently available. I don’t think I am a candidate for attorney general. I don’t think I’m on the short list.

I hear you’re running for president. Yes, Ma’am. I hear as well. Thank you for hearing!

All of this represents a departure from your former image as a longtime bachelor who dated Bianca Jagger and Carrie Fisher. I wouldn’t even begin to make a comment on that.

Do you think Americans have a right to know about a candidate’s personal life? Well, look. What’s that great line? There’s no such thing as a saint without a past and a sinner without a future.

Who said that? I just did.

WHAT THE CONSTITUTION SAYS ABOUT WAR...

2007-09-03T20:39:00.000-04:00

What The Constitution Says About Iraq
Congress and The Courts Must Recommit To The Legislative Branch’s Sole Authority To Declare War.

by Mario M. Cuomo

Most Americans want the war in Iraq ended, but it continues and Americans are killed, mutilated or wounded every day, as the Democratic majorities in Congress struggle to produce legislation that will take our forces out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, President Bush continues to insist that as commander in chief, he has the constitutional power to go to war and decide when to end it, unilaterally. At the same time, another possible disaster emerges from the shadows: Bush appears to be considering a military assault on Iran, again apparently without Congress declaring war first.

How did we get to this point and what, if anything, can we do now?

The war happened because when Bush first indicated his intention to go to war against Iraq, Congress refused to insist on enforcement of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. For more than 200 years, this article has spelled out that Congress — not the president — shall have “the power to declare war.” Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this constitutional mandate was not erased by the actions of timid Congresses since World War II that allowed eager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without a “declaration” by Congress.

Nor were the feeble, post-factum congressional resolutions of support of the Iraq invasion — in 2001 and 2002 — adequate substitutes for the formal declaration of war demanded by the founding fathers.

What can be done now?

First, Democrats should make clear that it is the president who is keeping the war in Iraq from ending. Even if Congress were able to pass a veto-proof bill with respect to withdrawal, the president would resist enforcement of the bill, insisting that as commander in chief, he is immune from Congress’ decision. That would raise a constitutional issue for the courts.

But judging by the courts’ history concerning constitutional war powers, including decisions involving the Iraq war in the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Massachusetts, the judiciary would, in all probability, choose not to intervene, claiming that the disagreement between the president and Congress is a political question.

However, the political-question thesis is nowhere referred to in the Constitution, and it denies the people the protection of the Constitution in dealing with perhaps the most serious question the nation has to face: “Should we go to war?” That position should be challenged as an abdication of constitutional duty by the courts, but the sad truth is that the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court would probably support our current conservative president. As a practical matter, that means only the president can end this waror change our strategy in Iraq.

Even if it is too late for Congress to remedy its failure to comply with the Constitution with respect to Iraq, at the very least our candidates for president and our congressional leaders should assure us that they will not allow this lapse to result in further unilateral acts of war — against Iran, Pakistan or any other nation — by this president or any other. Our leaders must make it clear that in the future, Congress will insist on compliance with Article I, Section 8 for any military action that is not fairly deemed an unexpected emergency.

It is frightening that our government has permitted this fundamental and costly constitutional transgression to persist for more than four years.

We must do everything we can to end the war in Iraq and avoid a new tragedy abroad by recommitting to strict adherence to the rule of law and to the Constitution by the president, Congress and the courts — especially with respect to war powers.

Mario M. Cuomo, the governor of New York from 1983 to 1995, now practices law in New York.

What is changing for the ordinary guy and gal at work?

2007-09-01T14:39:00.000-04:00

Anxious About Tomorrow
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Saturday 01 September 2007

You know you've stepped into a different universe when you hear a major American labor leader saying matter-of-factly that employer-based health insurance and employer-based pensions are relics of a bygone industrial economy.

Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, which has 1.9 million members and is the fastest-growing union in the country, is not your ordinary union leader. With Labor Day approaching, he was reflecting on some of the challenges facing workers in a post-20th-century globalized economy.

"I just don't think that as a country we've conceptualized that this is not our father's or our grandfather's economy," Mr. Stern said in an interview. "We're going through profound change and we have no plan."

The feeling that seems to override all others for workers is anxiety. American families, already saddled with enormous debt, are trying to make it in an environment in which employment is becoming increasingly contingent and subject to worldwide competition. Health insurance, unaffordable for millions, is a huge problem. And guaranteed pensions are going the way of typewriter ribbons and carbon paper.

"We're ending defined benefit pensions in front of our eyes," said Mr. Stern. "I'd say today's retirement plan for young workers is: 'I'm going to work until I die.'"

The result of all of this - along with such problems as the mortgage and housing crisis, and a domestic economy that is doing nothing to improve living standards for ordinary Americans - is fear.

"Workers are incredibly, legitimately scared that the American dream, particularly the belief that their kids will do better, is ending," said Mr. Stern. He is trying to get across the idea that in a period of such profound change, the old templates, the traditional ideas and policies of even the most progressive thinkers and officeholders, will not be sufficient to meet the new challenges.

"We can't be the only country on earth that asks our employers to put the price of health care on its products when a lot of our competitors don't," he said. "And job security? Even if you want to stay with your employer, as in the old economic model, we're seeing in many industries that your employer is not going to be around to stay with you."

A comprehensive new approach is needed, but what should that approach be? Franklin Roosevelt always hoped to inject a measure of economic security into the lives of ordinary Americans. But the New Deal was seven decades ago. Workers are insecure now for a host of different reasons and Mr. Stern wants the labor movement to be part of a vast cooperative effort to develop the solutions appropriate to today's environment.

He told me, "I'd like to say to the Democrats that we are as far today from the New Deal as the New Deal was from the Civil War."

He wants more people to pay attention to the big issues that affect not just union workers but all working families: How do you bring health care to all? What do you do about retirement security? How will the jobs of the 21st century be created?

And what about schools, energy, global warming, the environment?

Mr. Stern tends to see the nation as a team and wants the team to pull together to develop a creative vision of what the U.S. should be about in the 21st century. A cornerstone of that vision, he said, should be adherence to the "primary value" of rewarding work.

"We're a team in the 21st-century period of rapid change and competition," he said. "And right now, we don't have leadership, and we don't have a plan. At the same time, a group of people are enriching themselves far beyond anything that's reasonable."

What he would like to see, he said, is a large group of thoughtful people from various walks of American life - business, labor, government, academia and so forth - convened to begin the serious work of cooperatively developing a real-world vision of a society that is fairer, healthier, better educated, better prepared to compete globally, and more economically secure.

"I think you're already seeing the beginnings of odd formations of people who appreciate, issue by issue, that we have to do something different here," he said.

The kind of effort Mr. Stern would like to see would logically be initiated at the highest levels of government, preferably the White House. But if that's not in the cards, someone else should take up the challenge. And there should be a sense of urgency about it.

The fears of America's workers are well founded. "There's something wrong with the system right now," said Mr. Stern, "and we can't just say, 'Well, it's all going to work out.' It's not."

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children's health care, a socialist plot: just ask a conservative.

2007-08-28T19:25:00.000-04:00

A Socialist Plot
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 27 August 2007

Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release attacking the liberal view that even children whose parents could afford to send them to private school should be entitled to free government-run education.

They'd have a point: many American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids to school at public expense, so taxpayers without school-age children subsidize families that do. And the effect is to displace the private sector: if public schools weren't available, many families would pay for private schools instead.

So let's end this un-American system and make education what it should be - a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn't have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America's education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models.

O.K., in case you're wondering, I haven't lost my mind, I'm drawing an analogy. The real Heritage press release, titled "The Middle-Class Welfare Kid Next Door," is an attack on proposals to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Such an expansion, says Heritage, will "displace private insurance with government-sponsored health care coverage."

And Rudy Giuliani's call for "free-market solutions, not socialist models" was about health care, not education.

But thinking about how we'd react if they said the same things about education helps dispel the fog of obfuscation right-wingers use to obscure the true nature of their position on children's health.

The truth is that there's no difference in principle between saying that every American child is entitled to an education and saying that every American child is entitled to adequate health care. It's just a matter of historical accident that we think of access to free K-12 education as a basic right, but consider having the government pay children's medical bills "welfare," with all the negative connotations that go with that term.

And conservative opposition to giving every child in this country access to health care is, in a fundamental sense, un-American.

Here's what I mean: The great majority of Americans believe that everyone is entitled to a chance to make the most of his or her life. Even conservatives usually claim to believe that. For example, N. Gregory Mankiw, the former chairman of the Bush Council of Economic Advisers, contrasts the position of liberals, who he says believe in equality of outcomes, with that of conservatives, who he says believe that the goal of policy should be "to give everyone the same shot and not be surprised or concerned when outcomes differ wildly."

But a child who doesn't receive adequate health care, like a child who doesn't receive an adequate education, doesn't have the same shot - he or she doesn't have the same chances in life as children who get both these things.

And insurance is crucial to receiving adequate health care. President Bush may think that lacking insurance is no problem - "I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room" - but the reality is that the nine million children in America who don't have health insurance often have unmet medical or dental needs, don't have a regular place for medical care, and frequently have to delay care because of cost.

Now, the public understands the importance of health insurance, even if Mr. Bush doesn't. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an amazing 94 percent of the public regards the fact that many children in America lack health insurance as either a "serious" or a "very serious" problem.

So how can conservatives defend the indefensible, and oppose giving children the health care they need? By trying the old welfare queen in her Cadillac strategy (albeit without the racial innuendo that made it so effective when Reagan used it). That is, to divert public sympathy from people who really need help, they're trying to change the subject to the supposedly undeserving recipients of government aid. Hence the emphasis on the evils of "middle-class welfare."

Proponents of an expansion of children's health care have, as they should, responded to this strategy with facts and figures. Congressional Budget Office estimates show that S-chip expansion would, in fact, primarily benefit those who need it most: the great majority of children receiving coverage under an expanded program would otherwise have been uninsured.

But the more fundamental response should be, so what?

We offer free education, and don't worry about middle-class families getting benefits they don't need, because that's the only way to ensure that every child gets an education - and giving every child a fair chance is the American way. And we should guarantee health care to every child, for the same reason.

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Democrat response by former Senator Max Cleland, to Bush radio address

2007-08-26T20:34:00.000-04:00

Saturday , August 25, 2007

by former Senator Max Cleland.

Paschal: I stand four square with Mr. Cleland on this. I lost friends and classmates both in Korea and Vietnam. I have served in or with all four branches of our military, both enlisted and commissioned, active and reserve. Over one half of the 58,000 on the Vietnam memorial were lost after our leaders knew the war could not be won, and could not and would not face it. Max was a combat veteran of Vietnam.

This week, President Bush gave a speech comparing the ongoing war in Iraq to the Vietnam War. He used this analogy in his latest plea to the American people for yet more time to continue his war.

I know something about the Vietnam War. I know something about the price that was paid for continuing that war long after it was clear we could not succeed. I know something about years of war failing to produce a stable, secure and democratic country.

I know something about enemy attacks increasing and taking an ever higher toll on our troops. Fifty-eight thousand young Americans were killed in Vietnam; 350,000 were wounded. I was one of them.

There are similarities between the war in Iraq and the war in Vietnam. One of the lessons to be learned from Vietnam is that the commitment of American military strength alone cannot solve another country's political weakness. This should be a somber warning to us all to responsibly end the war in Iraq and the additional loss of precious American lives.

Congress has required the president to issue a report soon on the state of the war. This assessment gives him yet another opportunity to do the right thing and change course in Iraq.

Unfortunately, it appears he will continue to argue that, if the American people and the U.S. Congress will just be patient, things will work out. He is likely to say that, given more time, victory is just around the corner. He is likely to argue that there is light at the end of the tunnel.

But like political leaders during the Vietnam era, this president has a "credibility gap." The majority of Americans see a profound difference between President Bush's optimistic rhetoric and the grim reality which lies beneath. Our history in Vietnam and the facts on the ground in Iraq today prove the American people are right.

How do I know? Because I've seen this movie before. I know how it ends. I know that all the P.R. in the world didn't change the truth on the ground in Vietnam and won't change the truth on the ground today in Iraq.

What is this truth? The truth is that more than 3,700 Americans have already lost their lives, more than 20,000 have been wounded, and nearly $500 billion in American taxpayer funds have been expended.

The truth is that, despite this enormous sacrifice, we find ourselves mired in a civil war with no end in sight and Iraqis unable or unwilling to make the political decisions necessary to end this conflict.

And the truth is President Bush's decision to go to war and stay at war has actually encouraged thousands of new recruits for Al Qaida in Iraq and around the world, has made the Middle East and other parts of the globe less safe, has alienated the Muslim world and allowed Al Qaida — the enemy that attacked this nation six years ago — a chance to rebuild and restore its terror network.

These are the facts. But the facts will not stop the president and his fellow Republicans from trying once again to sell the American people a bill of goods on the Iraq war.

The failures in Iraq are not the fault of our troops or their courage in battle. They have done everything asked of them and more. The conflict in Iraq is an Iraqi political problem, not a U.S. military problem.

We can't continue to sacrifice American lives, deplete our treasury and weaken our national security. We can't expect our soldiers to continue to risk their lives, especially when the Iraqi leaders themselves show no interest in achieving a peaceful political solution.

President Bush's report to Congress will attempt to show that his escalation has produced improved security in certain parts of Iraq. But it will ignore the stark truth in Iraq: that his overall strategy to buy time for Iraqis to make the needed political decisions has failed and, just like Vietnam, we are enmeshed now in an open-ended war for which our troops and our country will pay the price for decades to come.

That's why we must act now. This fall, Democrats in Congress will continue to stand with our troops and with the American people to remember the lessons of history and end the Iraq war.

Amen.

Why our pullout from Vietnam worked and Bush is wrong...

2007-08-25T21:22:00.000-04:00

Why America's Pullout From Vietnam Was a Success
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek

Thursday 23 August 2007

The truth behind Bush's mangling of Cold War history.

The Soviet Union was in its final days of existence when I visited Vietnam in late December of 1991. The cold war was about to end forever with the collapse of one of the two adversaries that had kept it going for 40-odd years. A lot had changed in Vietnam, too, I discovered during my trip. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades within the Soviet bloc, had curdled into mutual hatred. Throughout the country, but especially in the North, the Vietnamese had come to despise the large resident Russian population for its cheap spending habits and arrogance. Visiting Americans, by contrast, were welcomed with smiles ("Russians with dollars," we were called.) On the day I visited the old U.S. Embassy in Saigon - the where some of those iconic photos symbolizing American defeat were taken - I discovered government workmen removing a plaque that once commemorated the North's victory over the "U.S. imperialists." In the waning days of that epochal year, 1991, the propaganda against American involvement in Southeast Asia was suddenly no longer politically correct. Hanoi's new message: Yankee Come Back (and bring your investment dollars). Today Vietnam remains nominally communist, but Hanoi knows it is an ideological relic surrounded by Asian capitalist tigers, all of them U.S. allies or dependents (one reason Vietnam was so eager to have Bush visit last November: it wants to be part of that club). The cold war dominoes did fall - but the opposite way.

This was the "harsh" aftermath that George W. Bush attempted to describe this week when he warned against pulling out of Iraq as we did in Vietnam. His remarks to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City on Wednesday were an abuse of historical fact - no surprise, perhaps, coming from a president who is just now catching up with the Political Science 101 reading he shrugged off at Yale. Yes, a lot of Vietnamese boat people died on the high seas; but many others have returned to visit in the ensuing years. Above all, we have learned that Vietnam and Southeast Asia were never really central fronts in the cold war (although Korea at the time of the outbreak of war in 1950, when Beijing still kowtowed to Moscow and before the Soviet Union and China split, might have fit that bill). The decision to pull out had very little effect on the ultimate outcome. America triumphed in the cold war because it had the right kind of economy - an open one - compared to Moscow and Beijing, and its ideas about freedom were more attractive to the states within the Soviet bloc than their own failed ideas were.

The president would like to make the argument that Iraq is about the same struggle. It's not, for several important reasons. In contrast to the Soviet and Chinese communists, or for that matter the fascists of the 1930s and '40s, Al Qaeda and its ilk have no universalist program, no persuasive alternative ideology to globalization and some brand of democracy. They are nihilists, and they have failed to capture half the world's attention as communism and socialism once did. So, yes, while a U.S. pullout would no doubt inspire a great deal of Al Qaeda propaganda about how they succeeded in forcing the Americans to withdraw from Iraq as they forced the Soviets to do in Afghanistan, the majority of the world's elites won't buy it. And the truth is, the slow bleed of America's might and prestige on the streets of Iraq makes for a far more compelling picture of U.S. weakness than any Al Qaeda propaganda could ever do. If we leave, Al Qaeda will rant triumphantly on the Web sites and perhaps win more adherents, but that won't get them any closer to "victory" over us than they are now.

We need to face facts. The problem of Iraq has very little to do with "the terrorists" whom Bush vaguely refers to in speech after speech. The problem of Iraq is that four years of a botched bloody occupation have created a failed state defined by fear, sectarian slaughter and the flight of Iraq's educated class. Iraq is being held together by just one thing now: American glue, the glue of U.S. troops on the ground. The noises you hear now about the ineffectiveness of the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki are merely the sound of an approaching collapse long in the making. The only really appropriate analogy to Vietnam is that Bush's policy of Iraqification - handing over things to the Iraqis - is far too similar to Vietnamization. Like the South Vietnamese government, the Iraqi politicians hunkered down in the Green Zone have little legitimacy any longer. Whatever authority they gained in the January 2005 elections has long since been frittered away and overtaken by the sectarian power struggle that is the governing reality on the ground. This power struggle is the reason why the Parliament is hopelessly paralyzed and why Maliki has almost no freedom of action. As a loyal Shiite of the Dawa Party, he is and will remain incapable of defying the new consensus among his sect for Shiite dominance. So powerful are these centrifugal forces pulling Iraq apart that the Iraqi Army seems to be disintegrating faster than it can be trained up. As seven soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division wrote in The New York Times on Aug. 19: "Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias."

Iraq will have to sort out these problems itself. There needs to be dramatic scaling back of the U.S. presence so that U.S. attention and resources can turn to the real terrorists. Most of them are still outside Iraq, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the whole thing started and where the "war on terror" should have always been focused. Even some very smart people don't seem to understand that Bush's larger idea of a "war on terror" has always been a fraudulent concept ginned up to justify his invasion of Iraq by broadening the enemy beyond the handful of Afghanistan-based bad guys who attacked us on 9/11. Mark Lilla, the Columbia University professor whose forthcoming book, "The Stillborn God," was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine last Sunday, is so intimidated by the threat of Islamism that he argues, nonsensically, that the separation of religion and politics achieved in the West is the exception rather than the rule in the world today. Lilla writes: "A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism."

This is a misreading of history almost as profound as Bush's. In fact this process has happened. It's called globalization. Yes, there are some pretty large parts of the globe that haven't experienced it much yet: much of the Islamic world - let's narrow that to certain Islamist and Arab countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran - and most of Africa. But in every other developed or developing part of the globe - the Americas, Europe, most of Asia, even Putin-controlled Russia - this Western-engendered system in which secularism eclipses religion in politics and governance has been accepted. (In fact, when it comes to mixing religion and politics, the most backsliding we've seen in the developed world in recent years has been right here in the United States, with the rise of the evangelical right). Even if we were to vastly oversimplify the terms of the conflict, we'd have to conclude it's the 4 or 5 billion (give or take a few hundred million) of the international community versus 1 billion or so Muslims. And thanks to this process, we of the majority - the international community - are still winning. Just ask that dwindling band of communists in Hanoi.

Go to Original

Recommended: The Politics of God, by Mark Lilla,

2007-08-19T12:14:00.000-04:00

There is in today's Sunday Magazine of the NY Times, a very relevant and important analysis of how and why our society has the conflicts it currently experiences and some thoughtful recommendations of what is necessary for peace and justice.

You can go to the New York Times, find the Sunday Magazine button on the left of indices, and go to the article itself and print it if you choose for reading. It is 12 pages, but here I will copy the last two, re recommendations.

VII. The Opposite Shore

This is not welcome news. For more than two centuries, promoters of modernization have taken it for granted that science, technology, urbanization and education would eventually “disenchant” the charmed world of believers, and that with time people would either abandon their traditional faiths or transform them in politically anodyne ways. They point to continental Europe, where belief in God has been in steady decline over the last 50 years, and suggest that, with time, Muslims everywhere will undergo a similar transformation. Those predictions may eventually prove right. But Europe’s rapid secularization is historically unique and, as we have just seen, relatively recent. Political theology is highly adaptive and can present to even educated minds a more compelling vision of the future than the prospect of secular modernity. It takes as little for a highly trained medical doctor to fashion a car bomb today as it took for advanced thinkers to fashion biblically inspired justifications of fascist and communist totalitarianism in Weimar Germany. When the urge to connect is strong, passions are high and fantasies are vivid, the trinkets of our modern lives are impotent amulets against political intoxication.

Realizing this, a number of Muslim thinkers around the world have taken to promoting a “liberal” Islam. What they mean is an Islam more adapted to the demands of modern life, kinder in its treatment of women and children, more tolerant of other faiths, more open to dissent. These are brave people who have often suffered for their efforts, in prison or exile, as did their predecessors in the 19th century, of which there were many. But now as then, their efforts have been swept away by deeper theological currents they cannot master and perhaps do not even understand. The history of Protestant and Jewish liberal theology reveals the problem: the more a biblical faith is trimmed to fit the demands of the moment, the fewer reasons it gives believers for holding on to that faith in troubled times, when self-appointed guardians of theological purity offer more radical hope. Worse still, when such a faith is used to bestow theological sanctification on a single form of political life — even an attractive one like liberal democracy — the more it will be seen as collaborating with injustice when that political system fails. The dynamics of political theology seem to dictate that when liberalizing reformers try to conform to the present, they inspire a countervailing and far more passionate longing for redemption in the messianic future. That is what happened in Weimar Germany and is happening again in contemporary Islam.

The complacent liberalism and revolutionary messianism we’ve encountered are not the only theological options. There is another kind of transformation possible in biblical faiths, and that is the renewal of traditional political theology from within. If liberalizers are apologists for religion at the court of modern life, renovators stand firmly within their faith and reinterpret political theology so believers can adapt without feeling themselves to be apostates. Luther and Calvin were renovators in this sense, not liberalizers. They called Christians back to the fundamentals of their faith, but in a way that made it easier, not harder, to enjoy the fruits of temporal existence. They found theological reasons to reject the ideal of celibacy, and its frequent violation by priests, and thus returned the clergy to ordinary family life. They then found theological reasons to reject otherworldly monasticism and the all-too-worldly imperialism of Rome, offering biblical reasons that Christians should be loyal citizens of the state they live in. And they did this, not by speaking the apologetic language of toleration and progress, but by rewriting the language of Christian political theology and demanding that Christians be faithful to it.

Today, a few voices are calling for just this kind of renewal of Islamic political theology. Some, like Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, challenge the authority of today’s puritans, who make categorical judgments based on a literal reading of scattered Koranic verses. In Abou El Fadl’s view, traditional Islamic law can still be applied to present-day situations because it brings a subtle interpretation of the whole text to bear on particular problems in varied circumstances. Others, like the Swiss-born cleric and professor Tariq Ramadan, are public figures whose writings show Western Muslims that their political theology, properly interpreted, offers guidance for living with confidence in their faith and gaining acceptance in what he calls an alien “abode.” To read their works is to be reminded what a risky venture renewal is. It can invite believers to participate more fully and wisely in the political present, as the Protestant Reformation eventually did; it can also foster dreams of returning to a more primitive faith, through violence if necessary, as happened in the Wars of Religion.

Perhaps for this reason, Abou El Fadl and especially Ramadan have become objects of intense and sometimes harsh scrutiny by Western intellectuals. We prefer speaking with the Islamic liberalizers because they share our language: they accept the intellectual presuppositions of the Great Separation and simply want maximum room given for religious and cultural expression. They do not practice political theology. But the prospects of enduring political change through renewal are probably much greater than through liberalization. By speaking from within the community of the faithful, renovators give believers compelling theological reasons for accepting new ways as authentic reinterpretations of the faith. Figures like Abou El Fadl and Ramadan speak a strange tongue, even when promoting changes we find worthy; their reasons are not our reasons. But if we cannot expect mass conversion to the principles of the Great Separation — and we cannot — we had better learn to welcome transformations in Muslim political theology that ease coexistence. The best should not be the enemy of the good.

In the end, though, what happens on the opposite shore will not be up to us. We have little reason to expect societies in the grip of a powerful political theology to follow our unusual path, which was opened up by a unique crisis within Christian civilization. This does not mean that those societies necessarily lack the wherewithal to create a decent and workable political order; it does mean that they will have to find the theological resources within their own traditions to make it happen.

Our challenge is different. We have made a choice that is at once simpler and harder: we have chosen to limit our politics to protecting individuals from the worst harms they can inflict on one another, to securing fundamental liberties and providing for their basic welfare, while leaving their spiritual destinies in their own hands. We have wagered that it is wiser to beware the forces unleashed by the Bible’s messianic promise than to try exploiting them for the public good. We have chosen to keep our politics unilluminated by divine revelation. All we have is our own lucidity, which we must train on a world where faith still inflames the minds of men.

Mark Lilla is professor of the humanities at Columbia University. This essay is adapted from his book “The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West,” which will be published next month.

HOuse of War, by James Carroll, review by Mick J

2007-08-16T19:53:00.000-04:00

August 16, 2007

Book Review "House of War" by James Carroll

By Mick J

I have just completed James Carroll's "House of War"which is a history of the Pentagon. I should start with a disclaimer - I read it as a CD during my daily commute and I was not planning on reviewing it before I started.

The basic statement of the book is that the Pentagon, almost from its inception, has been a "House of War" intent on propagating its own huge defense (offense) budgets by persistently and erroneously inducing paranoia among administration, politicians, and citizens. Carroll's thesis is that it has largely failed in its wars and that its much touted success of "winning the cold war" is not true. It was the citizens of the Communist world that did that, as well as the Communist systems internal inefficiencies.

I chose to read the book because I had been extremely impressed by "Constantine's Sword" a previous Carroll tome (and Carroll's books are tomes - long and wandering while also being informative and well written). Lurking within each of these massive books is a more readable book 70% of the length, never to be published. "Constantine's Sword" deals with the Roman Catholic church, anti-semitism and much European history.

"House of War" deals with a totally different subject and is focused on a mere 60 years of history. It shares with "Constantine's Sword" much personal anecdotal information. In "House of War" this is more relevant since Carroll's father was a 4-star Air Force general in the Pentagon and Carroll , as a young boy, sometimes used to play in the Pentagon on Sundays when his father was in the office. He also was able to interview many people who knew his father, e.g. McNamara, because of their connection to his father.

The Pentagon was dedicated in 1943, which year also happens to mark Carroll's birth. The book spends many chapters discussing American bombing in WW II leading up to the double dropping of the atomic bomb. In that discussion it is interesting to note that the Americans, initially, were much more reluctant to bomb civilians than the British, but moved quickly to the British position of high level bombing of cities. The death toll of this bombing was very high in some of the cities e.g. the bombing of Tokyo. Curtis LeMay, who Carroll calls his 'dark hero" was an advocate of such bombing and said of the Japanese that there are "no innocent civilians". Hmmm, I thought, that is what Osama Bin Laden might say today of Americans.

The first secretary of defense at the Pentagon was James Forrestal who set the pattern for much of the aggressive paranoid thinking that marks so much of the Pentagon's history. Today, a large statue of Forrestal greets the visitor at the main entrance to the Pentagon. Forrestal was a man who had an obsessive fear of Communism. He saw the nuclear bomb as just an instrument of war to be put under military control, as did Curtis LeMay. As we move on to the development of the H-bomb, and thermonuclear war we meet with Paul Nitze who was to remain a cold war warrior over 35 years and serve with nearly all the presidents during that period. He, along with George Kennan, totally distrusted the Soviets, and yet failed to see the obvious fact that in the development of the A-bomb, the H-bomb, submarine nuclear launch facility, intercontinental rockets, multiple independent nuclear warheads, Anti-Ballistic Missile systems, and many more such defense systems the Russians always lagged the Americans.

Truman, to his credit, firmly placed use of nuclear weapons under presidential control and thus made the use of nuclear weapons much more unlikely. In the book we learn, not surprisingly, that Kennedy put the US on highest nuclear alert during the Cuban crisis. We also learn that Nixon secretly did it three times. No other US president has ever put the country on the highest alert; nor did the Soviets, ever. It does not add much gratification when Carroll relates that in Kissinger's memoirs he relates that he called the White House in the evening and spoke to the "drunk". How close the world was to a nuclear holocaust!!

Carroll joined the anti-Vietnam protestors and was a great admirer of the Berrigan brothers. He marched against the Pentagon in sight of his father's window but was hidden from identification by the anonymity of the vast crowd of demonstrators. Carroll constantly praises Gorbachev in the ways that he responded to the growing civil nonviolent protests to Communist rule.

We continue to the depressing Clinton years, which actually slowed the nuclear arms reductions. It makes sad reading how Clinton was dominated by Powell, then armed services chief. I had forgotten, or perhaps, I never registered the incident when Clinton boarded the aircraft carrier, Theodore Roosevelt, and a young sailor did not salute his commander-in-chief. Clinton did nothing in face of this insubordination, and neither did the Navy brass. The Lewinsky affair would have terminated any respect of the military for Clinton, except it was already zero.

The book closes with a discussion of the new Bush doctrine of preventive war. Carroll is careful to differentiate between "preventive" and "pre-emptive" wars. The latter which may be defined as an attack to prevent an certain, imminent enemy attack (e.g. Israel in the 1967 war), may be permissible under international law. The latter never are.

Carroll is optimistic, believing as he does in the power of citizens to effect major systemic changes. I hope he is correct, but I fear that in the US the citizenry, collectively speaking, may be compared to the farm animals that bleat "baa, baa".

Authors Bio: Mick is an immigrant working in the computer industry living in the US heartland. He immigrated from Great Britain about 30 years ago and became a citizen. He likes biking and hiking. He is married with three kids.

Catholic priests for Justice, opposed to USA military use of torture.

2007-08-13T21:28:00.000-04:00

Pre-Trial Continues for Priests Who Denounce Torture
By Sari Gelzer
T r u t h o u t | Report

Monday 13 August 2007

Two Roman Catholic priests, who were arrested as they approached the Fort Huachuca gatehouse on November 19, 2006, will face a continuance of their pre-trial hearing this August 13 in Federal Court in Tucson, Arizona. The intent of Franciscan Fr. Louis Vitale, 74, and Jesuit Fr. Steve Kelly, 58, was to speak with enlisted personnel and deliver a letter denouncing torture to Major General Barbara Fast, commander at the post.

The letter addressed to Major General Fast voices the priests' concern with what is being taught to interrogators who are being trained at Fort Huachuca, the headquarters for the intelligence services of the US military.

"The Army Field Manual on interrogation (Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual) was written at Fort Huachuca," wrote Bill Quigley, law professor and human rights lawyer at Loyola University New Orleans.

Quigley, who also happens to be representing both priests in this case, goes on to say: "A number of the officers and soldiers responsible for human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison have worked at or were trained at the Headquarters for Army Intelligence Training at Ft. Huachuca."

Before becoming the Commander of the US Army intelligence Center in Arizona, Major General Fast was the top US intelligence officer in Iraq. She was responsible for reviewing the status of detainees at Abu Ghraib before their release, and was serving her post during the period in which practices of torture by US military personnel were occurring in the prison.

The priests found it fitting to discuss US acts of Torture with Major General Fast and ask her what is specifically being taught to US military interrogators at the US base. In their letter, they address Major General Fast:

"We are here today as concerned US people, veterans and clergy, to speak with enlisted personnel about the illegality and immorality of torture according to international humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions. We condemn torture as a dehumanization of both prisoners and interrogators, resulting in humiliation, disability and even death."

The priests were at the base in Sierra Vista, Arizona as part of a demonstration of over 120 people that gathered on Sunday, November 19, 2006, to protest military training that fosters torture. Frs. Vitale and Kelly were stopped as they approached the military gates. When they were not allowed to go inside to speak with the service men and women being trained, the two men knelt in prayer and were arrested.

The demonstration at Fort Huachuca was held in conjunction with the 16th annual vigil at Fort Benning, Georgia, organized by the group, School of the Americas Watch. On Saturday, November 18, 2006, over 20,000 protesters arrived at Fort Benning to call for the closing of what was formerly known as the School of the Americas. The school's name was changed in 2000 to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).

A Congressional task force found that soldiers, responsible for the massacre of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in El Salvador in 1989, were trained at the School of the Americas, which moved to Fort Benning from Panama in 1984. The protesters accuse the school of participating in mass human rights abuses in Latin American and beyond.

Fr. Vitale and Fr. Steve Kelly face federal and state charges of trespass and refusal to follow police orders.

Fr. Vitale is co-founder of the Nevada Desert Experience, a faith-based organization that has opposed nuclear weapons testing for a quarter of a century. He was arrested at a Fort Benning Protest in 2005 and served six months in federal prison.

Fr. Kelley has served time in federal prison for the nonviolent, direct disarmament of nuclear weapon delivery systems. In December of 2005, he served as chaplain for Witness to Torture, a delegation of US anti-torture activists who peacefully marched in Cuba to the gates of the Guantanamo Bay naval base and prison camp.

Links

To View the Letter: http://tortureontrial.org/media.html#letter
For Information on the Trial: www.Tortureontrial.org
School of the America Watch: www.soaw.org/

The Terror we (USA) wrought on civilians 62 years ago.

2007-08-09T13:41:00.000-04:00

The Terror America Wrought
By Robert Scheer
Truthdig

Tuesday 07 August 2007

During a week of mayhem in Iraq, in which terrorists have rightly been condemned for targeting schoolchildren, it is sobering to recall that this week is also the 62nd anniversary of a U.S. attack that deliberately took the lives of thousands of children on their way to school in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As noted in the Strategic Bombing Survey conducted at President Harry Truman's request, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on April 6, 1945, "nearly all the school children ... were at work in the open," to be exploded, irradiated or incinerated in the perfect firestorm that the planners back at the University of California-run Los Alamos lab had envisioned for the bomb's maximum psychological impact.

The terror plot worked all too well, as Hiroshima's Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba recalled this week: "That fateful summer, 8:15 a.m. The roar of a B-29 breaks the morning calm. A parachute opens in the blue sky. Then suddenly, a flash, an enormous blast-silence-hell on Earth. The eyes of young girls watching the parachute were melted. Their faces became giant charred blisters. The skin of people seeking help dangled from their fingernails. ... Others died when their eyeballs and internal organs burst from their bodies-Hiroshima was a hell where those who somehow survived envied the dead."

Like most of the others killed by the two American bombs, neither the children nor the adults had any role in Japan's decision to go to war, but they were picked as the target instead of an isolated but fortified military base whose antiaircraft fire posed a higher risk. The target preferred by U.S. atomic scientists-a patch in the ocean or unpopulated terrain-was rejected, because the effect of hundreds of thousands of civilians dying would be all the more dramatic.

The victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were available soft targets, much like the children playing in Iraq, suddenly caught in the crossfire of battles waged beyond their control. In "White Light/Black Rain," a devastating HBO documentary released this week, there is an interview with the sole survivor of a Japanese elementary school of 620 students. The murder of the other 619, and the 370,000 overall deaths attributed to the bombings, 85 percent of which were civilian deaths, has never compelled a widespread examination of the "end justifies the means" morality of our own state-sanctioned acts of terror. Indeed, the horrifying footage taken by Japanese and American cameramen soon after the devastation, and shown in the HBO film, was long kept secret by the U.S. government for fear that an informed American public might question this nation's incipient nuclear arms race.

Just exactly what distinguishes the United States' use of the ever-so-cutely-named "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" atomic bombs on cities in Japan from the car bombs of Baghdad or the planes that smashed into the World Trade Center? To even raise the question, as was found in one recent university case, can be a career-ending move.

Of course, we had our justifications, as terrorists always do. Truman defended his decision to drop the atomic bombs on civilians over the objection of leading atomic scientists on the grounds that it was a necessary military action to save lives by forcing a quick Japanese surrender. He insisted on that imperative despite the objections of top military figures, including Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, who contended that the war would end quickly without dropping the bomb.

The subsequent release of formerly secret documents makes a hash of Truman's rationalization. His White House was fully informed that the Japanese were on the verge of collapse, and their surrender was made all the more likely by the Soviets' imminent entry into the fight.

At most, the Japanese were asking for the face-saving gesture of retaining their emperor, and even that modest demand would likely have been abandoned with the shift of massive numbers of Allied troops and firepower from the battlefront of a defeated Germany to a confrontation with its deeply wounded Asian ally. Instead, the U.S. played midwife to the birth of the nuclear monster, the ultimate terrorist weapon that presents a continuing and growing threat to the survival of human life on Earth.

This is a lesson to be pondered at a time when President Bush plays power games with a nuclear-equipped Russia while coddling Pakistan, the main proliferator of nuclear weapons to rogue regimes, and Congress authorizes an expansion of the U.S. nuclear program to better fight the war on terror by "improving" the ultimate weapon of terror, which the U.S. alone stands guilty of using.

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More Links:

For a fuller explanation of the suppression of footage taken shortly after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, follow this link.

Click here to go to HBO's site for "White Light/Black Rain."