A telling sign of the sad state of America’s reputation and profile in the world today.

Courtesy of ESPN Magazine….

“For security reasons, the US team bus was the only one of 32 team buses at the World Cup that was not adorned with its country’s flag.”

Hmm, wonder why? People in the States seem to want to plaster it on just about anything and everything. Guess they figured those socialist Europeans must just hate freedom. And if ‘they’ hate us ‘because of our freedoms’, then that might explain why the Bush administration is making such efforts to eliminate those very same American freedoms we too often take for granted. That way, if we don’t have those freedoms of ours any longer, then ‘they’ won’t hate us anymore and won’t attack us.

E.J. Dionne Jr. states it pretty well here…

The patriotism of the conservative goes unquestioned. But the progressive and the reformer have a problem with what passes for unadulterated patriotism. By nature, the reformer is bound to insist that the country, however glorious, is not a perfect place, that it is capable of doing wrong as well as right. Most reformers guard their patriotic credentials by moving quickly to the next logical step: that the true genius of America has always been its capacity for self-correction. I’d assert that this is a better argument for patriotism than any effort to pretend that the Almighty has marked us as the world’s first flawless nation.

Read his complete essay from The Washington Post Here

Sen. Pat Roberts is a coward and a sycophant to power. Here he proves his mighty metal as a steward of America, ‘the home of the brave’.

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you and may posterity forget that ye were once our countrymen.”
  -  Samuel Adams

America, as a bastion of liberal democracy sure is a nice idea, but God forbid if someone actually might get hurt in its defense or practice.

It might be worth recalling some of the words of one of America’s most notable Founders, Mr. Patrick Henry. Senator Roberts, may I introduce you Here?

My German born mother who adopted this country, America, as her own when I was but a baby, grew up in WWII Nazi Germany. My mother raised me to love and cherish our democracy. She more than most Americans knew how truly special it is to live under a system that respects the life and freedoms of the individual. She was a person who understood the meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. She understood very clearly what it was to grow up under a government that restricted/banned individual freedom of speech, or the freedom to assemble.

You tried Mom, but I didn’t understand.

As a young adult I enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp. In my idealistic and naive youth I remember thinking that the USA was the champion of freedom and if ever we were committed to war the reasons would be sound and just. And if I were to die while protecting our shores or even the rights and privileges of the oppressed in other parts of the world, then so be it. After all we “are the good guys.” Eight years later after marriage and the birth of our daughter I decided to leave the service and devote myself to my family and the American dream.

I was a little wiser, but I still didn’t understand.

In my thirties I worked hard, was lucky enough to find decent work with good pay. I paid my bills, and taxes. I voted. After each election cycle I turned my thoughts to other things, leaving the running of our country and democracy to our elected officials. They will know what is best. After all, they represent me, an American citizen. They will act in my best interest.

I still didn’t understand.

I’m now in my forties. I began to take notice. I’m not sure what it was, but I think it was the Republican party’s attempt and success of derailing any form of real governmental progress during the Clinton administration over what in my eyes should have been a private matter between President Clinton and his wife. Why were the Republicans so ready to put the governing of the American people on the back burner while they spent millions upon millions of our money trying to impeach him? Why did they hate him so? The government coffers had a huge surplus, and the economy at the time was booming. Something was going on, there were obviously other forces, other agendas at work here. For the first time in my life, I began to pay attention.

I was beginning to understand.

The rest is history. We have a president that was placed in office by the Supreme Court of the United States. We have an administration that condones the use of torture, and has been condemned by Amnesty International for human rights violations. (An organization that the USA in the past had been all too eager, rightfully so, to quote when pointing the finger at other oppressive governments, but conveniently rejects when the finger is pointing at us.) We have an administration that allows warrant-less spying on its citizens in direct violation of our Constitution. We have an administration that openly expresses its right to “pre-emptive” military attacks on sovereign nations. No country in the world is safe as long as you have an administration that is willing to cook the books with regard to bogus intelligence. We have a president who feigns open debate while his audiences are either pre-screened‚ “Bush friendly” or are in uniform and bound by duty to honor their “Commander-In-Chief.” I would remind those in uniform that their first duty is to protect the Constitution of the United States.

We have an administration that will do business with the oppressive tyrants of the world as long as it is in “America’s interest” while professing to the rest of the world that we adhere to the rights of all people to be free. We have an administration that currently represses free speech by shuffling dissenting protest off to cordoned off “free speech zones” or by passing ordinances that revoke the right to peaceful assembly as was done outside of his Crawford, TX, ranch. As Cindy Sheehan now knows, one is not even allowed to wear a T-shirt expressing dissent without risking arrest.

This list could go on for many more pages, from the corporate controlled media to the robbery of the American treasury by our elected officials. From no bid contracts to war profiteers like Haliburton to the unconstitutional “Patriot Act.”

But I now know what my mother tried so hard for me to understand when I was younger. That Democracy can never, ever be taken for granted. It needs to be loved and caressed. It needs to be cherished. And the citizens of this nation need to demand that its principles will be adhered to. For to ignore it we will lose it. Be a citizen and follow the very important issues that are a part of our world today. Follow them closely (and use internet/library sources to further investigate what you hear from the mass media). Contact your elected officials and let them know where you stand. Be a part of our democracy, get involved!

“That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
- Theodore Roosevelt

Mike Baker
Xenia, OH

Gotta hand it to the guy. This takes a little bit of courage. Of course, it would have been helpful had he become more aware of some of the stark realities around this corporate conglomerate disguised as a human being, to paraphrase Ralph Nader, but I am glad to have him on board with the rest of the ‘reality based community’.

An Apology From A Bush Voter
By Doug McIntyre
Host, McIntyre in the Morning
Talk Radio 790 KABC

There’s nothing harder in public life than admitting you’re wrong. By the way, admitting you’re wrong can be even tougher in private life. If you don’t believe me, just ask Bill Clinton or Charlie Sheen. But when you go out on the limb in public, it’s out there where everyone can see it, or in my case, hear it.

So, I’m saying today, I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that he’s the worst President, period.

He went on to make some salient points here…

We’re being governed by paper-mache patriots; brightly painted red, white and blue, but hollow to the core. Both parties have mastered the cynical arts of media manipulation and fund raising. They’ve learned the lessons of Watergate and burn the tapes. They have learned to divide the nation for their own gain. They have demonstrated the willingness to exploit any tragedy for personal advantage. The contempt they have for the American people is without parallel.

This is painful to say, and I’m sure for many of you, painful to read. But it’s impossible to heal the country until we’re willing to acknowledge the truth no matter how painful. We have to wean ourselves off sugar coated partisan lies.

With a belated tip of the cap to Ralph Nader, the system is broken, so broken…

Read The Full Apology Here

The Bureaucracy Strikes Back: Fallen Legion 3

There just seems to be no end to the politicization of *everything* with the Bush administration.

Here are more disturbing examples documented by Nick Turse of the TomDispatch.

In the first installment of this series, I offered 42 names to begin what now seems an endless - and ever-growing - list of top officials as well as beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their government posts in protest or were ridiculed, defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arm tactics, cronyism, and disastrous policies. In the second installment, I added what turned out to be a modest 175 further casualties to the rolls of “the Fallen.” With this latest installment, TomDispatch’s tally of the battling bureaucracy’s casualties stands at approximately 243 - and rising (so please continue to send your suggestions of deserving legionnaires to: fallenlegionwall@yahoo.com).

Despite this toll, now into the hundreds and counting, it seems that we’ve barely scratched the surface. In fact, since the last installment, other commentators have increased our knowledge of these folks by digging into what Tom Engelhardt has aptly called the Bush administration’s “war with the bureaucracy” - a battle between the Bush administration and the career civil servants (sometimes even Bush’s own appointees), who constitute “the only significant check-and-balance in our system since September 11, 2001.”

In one such effort, Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr., and Evan Thomas, writing for Newsweek chronicled a Palace Revolt - a secret war waged not by black-ops troops in the wilds of Waziristan, but behind closed doors in Washington where “loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees fought a quiet battle to rein in the President’s power in the war on terror.” They profiled a number of the unlikely rebels, including:

Read the list here

A newly discovered memoir by a German classified as “Aryan” describes the insidious early spread of Nazism and how hard it was to resist.

Charles Taylor writes in Salon about a book on how fascism can destroy a society from within, and how seemingly respectable societies allow for such events to transpire. I know it seems like a cliche anymore these days, but it is a lesson we are overdue in heeding with meaningful seriousness.

Here are just a few of the key points outlined in this review, though this is a highly recommended and relevant essay, that effectively and accurately puts the onus of responsibility on the course of events of a nation and society on all of its members, not just a few rogue leaders.

By not limiting his definition of history to the stories of the powerful (who are often presumed to be the only ones to make it), Haffner is, I think, committing an act of resistance. It isn’t just that Haffner is acknowledging political and historical reality (”The most powerful dictators, ministers, and generals are powerless against the simultaneous mass decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large”), but that he is insisting on the democratic idea that people are not merely “objects of history.” Writing in the midst of a crushing dictatorship, Haffner is saying that defiance can come even from an individual who simply refuses to accept the “truth” of the political rhetoric that is put before him.

The question that always springs from accounts of Hitler’s Germany is “Why didn’t the Germans resist?” Some of the reasons have long been obvious. There is a natural human instinct for survival, however odious the forms it takes or the lengths it may go to. And there is also the understandable refusal to believe that the worst will come to pass. Again and again in “Defying Hitler” Haffner’s acquaintances talk of the Nazis as clowns who, because they cannot help revealing their true natures, are destined to fall out of power.

Haffner’s endorsement of the idea that even dictators are powerless without the consent (or at least the passivity) of the masses means that “Defying Hitler” has no time for quibbling about how much the Germans knew and when; he was there shortly before World War II broke out, after all. Haffner takes it for granted that Germans knew about the brutality of Nazi rule — brutality that, logically, would only increase as the state consolidated its power — and that they lacked the will to resist it.

——————

This, then, is the chapter that none of the film versions of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” have given us: what life feels like to the pods, a fleeting taste of how easy it would be to submit, how pleasant to see the world through the eyes of the young Nazi who addresses them one morning: “What dismal faces you’re all making, in such glorious weather — and with such a satisfying occupation.” What a relief it would be to sleep.

Read The Full Article Here

Thomas Cadmus, national commander of the 2.7-million-member American Legion, made some pretty astounding comments in August of 2005.

“We had hoped that the lessons learned from the Vietnam War would be clear to our fellow citizens. Public protests against the war here at home while our young men and women are in harm’s way on the other side of the globe only provide aid and comfort to our enemies.”

You know, it might have been really good and wise if the legion had also “hoped that the lessons from the Vietnam War would be clear” to our government.

Resolution 3, which was passed unanimously by 4,000 delegates to the annual event, states: “The American Legion fully supports the president of the United States, the United States Congress and the men, women and leadership of our armed forces as they are engaged in the global war on terrorism and the troops who are engaged in protecting our values and way of life.”

This is oxymoronic. You can support the President, OR you can support the men and women and leadership of our armed forces, but you cannot do both, because they are at odds. No president who wants to cut veterans benefits during a war is in any remotely conceivable way supporting the troops. The key point that is being conspicuously ignored in this statement is that the “global war on terrorism” and the invasion of Iraq serve different, and more importantly, conflicting, purposes.

Cadmus advised: “Let’s not repeat the mistakes of our past. I urge all Americans to rally around our armed forces and remember our fellow Americans who were viciously murdered on Sept. 11, 2001.”

One more time for those who have been too willfully thick to bother informing themselves:
1. Saddam’s regime had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with the attacks on September 11.
2. There were NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION in Iraq when we invaded.
3. The Bush administration KNEW that objective intelligence analysis did not support their claims that Saddam had WMD
4. The Bush administration had warnings from the FBI and other government personnel that there was an attack being planned by Al Qaida. The Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) on August 6, 2001 is ample evidence of this.
5. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration pretended that the attack was unpredictable, just as they have recently done when they President Bush claimed that the effect of a major hurricane on the New Orleans levee system was unpredicted, despite warnings of just such a result, and pleas from the region not to take money out of the infrastructure budget for the region and divert it to Iraq.

If the “American” Legion doesn’t know all of this, they need to stop making public policy statements, and start reading something other than the National Review and Reader’s Digest. Their pronouncement is absurd. Time to protest outside their doors, and to publicly condemn them. They should have taken a lesson from Operation Truth, the VFW, and the VVA.

Ed Lacy
UnCommon Sense TV

We Must Take America Back
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Speech delivered at the Sierra Summit 2005 , San Francisco, California

As the communities that our parents gave us, we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the public lands, the fisheries, the wildlife, the public areas that connect us to our past, that connect us to our history, that provide context to our communities that are the source ultimately of our values and virtues and character as a people. Over the past 22 years as an environmental advocate, I’ve been disciplined about being non-partisan and bipartisan in my approach to these issues. I don’t think there is any such thing as Republican children or Democratic children.

I think the worst thing that could happen to the environment is it becomes the province of a single political party. It was mentioned that I have a book out there that is very critical of this president and that’s true but it’s not a partisan book. I didn’t write that book because I’m a Democrat and he’s a Republican. If he were a Democrat, I would have written the same book. I’m not objecting to him because of his political party and I’ve worked for Republicans if they’re good on the environment and democrats on the same level but you can’t talk honestly about the environment in any context today without speaking critically of this president. This is the worst [applause].

This is the worst environmental president we’ve had in American history.

If you look at NRDC’s website you’ll see over 400 major environmental roll backs that are listed there that have been implemented or proposed by this administration over the past four years as part of a deliberate concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.

It’s a stealth attack.

The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to conceal its radical agenda from the American people including Orwellian rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy Forest Act. When they wanted to destroy the air, they called it the Clear Skies Bill.

But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.

President Bush appointed as head of the Forest Service a timber industry lobbyist, Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious in history. He put in charge of public lands a mining industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. He put in charge of the air division of the EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, a utility lobbyist who has represented nothing but the worst air polluters in America. As head of Superfund, a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.

The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago we all read that as second in command of CEQ which is in the White House directly advising the president of environmental policy, he put a lobbyist of the American Petroleum Institute whose only job was to read all of the science from all the different federal agencies to make sure they didn’t say anything critical, to excise any critical statements about the oil industry.

He was there to lie to the American public, to protect one of the big corporate contributors to this White House. This is true throughout all of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce which regulates fisheries, the Department of the Interior, EPA of course, and the relevant divisions of the Justice Department. The same thing, all these agencies and sub secretariats, it is the polluters who are now running these agencies.

There is nothing wrong with having business people in government. It’s a good thing if you’re objective is to recruit competence and expertise but in all of these cases these individuals as I show in my book, have entered government service not to benefit the public interest but rather to subvert the very laws they’re now charged with enforcing in order to enrich the president’s corporate pay masters.

They have imposed enormous diminution in quality of life in this country.

The problem is most Americans don’t know about it, they don’t see the connection and the reason for that is because we have a negligent and indolent media and press in this country which has absolutely let down American democracy [applause]. All this right wing propaganda which is planned and organized and dominated this country, the political debate for so many years talking about a liberal media. Well, you know and I know there is no such thing as a liberal media in the United States of America.

There is a right wing media and if you look where most Americans are now getting their news, that’s where they’re getting it. According to Pew 30 percent of Americans now sway that their primary news source is talk radio which is 90 percent dominated by the right.

22 percent sat their primary news source is Fox News, MSNBC or CNBC, all dominated by the right and another 10 percent, Sinclair Network which is the most right wing of all. That’s the largest television network in our country. It’s run by a former pornographer who requires all 75 of his affiliate television stations and this is where Mid-Westerners get their news, red state people get their news, all of them have to take a pledge to not report critically about this president or about the war in Iraq.

Then the rest of us are - the majority of Americans are still getting their news from electronic media and it’s the corporate owned media and they have no ideology except for filling their pocket books and many of them are run by big polluters. All of them are run by giant corporations that have all kinds of deals with the government and are not going to offend public officials.

This all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were public trust assets just like our air and water and that the broadcasters could be licensed to use them but only with the proviso that they use them to promote the public interest and to advance American democracy. They had to inform the public of issues of public import. They had to have the news hours. None of those networks wanted to show the news because it’s expensive, they loose money on it. They had to avoid corporate consolidation. They had to have local control and diversity of control. That was the requirement of the law since 1928.

Today as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant multi-national corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations and 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards and now most of the Internet information services, so you have six guys who are dictating what Americans have as information and what we see as news.

The news departments have become corporate profit centers, they no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interests, their only obligation is to their shareholders and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewer ship. How do you do that? not by reporting the news that we need to hear in to make rational decisions in our democracy but rather by entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip [applause]. So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant and we’re today the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth and this is a real threat to American democracy.

Read The Full Speech Transcript Here

The New McCarthyism
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
The Washington Post
June 28th, 2005

In the 1950s the right wing attacked liberals as being communists. In 2005 Karl Rove has attacked liberals as being therapists. Thus is born a kinder and gentler form of McCarthyism.
Named after the late Sen. Joe McCarthy, who never let the facts get in the way of his lust to charge liberals with sedition, McCarthyism has come to mean “guilt by association.” What gave McCarthyism its power was the fact that the senator from Wisconsin did not invent the danger posed to the United States by Soviet communism. The Soviet Union was a real threat, and there were real communist spies working in America.

What made McCarthy and his allies so insidious was their eagerness to level the “soft on communism” charge against even staunchly anticommunist liberals. One of them was Secretary of State Dean Acheson, an architect of Harry Truman’s tough policy of containing Soviet power. In the 1952 presidential campaign, Richard Nixon pounded Democratic nominee Adlai Stevenson for earning a “PhD from Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.”

The McCarthyites’ real enemies were not communists but the New Deal liberals who had dominated U.S. politics for 20 years. The McCarthy crowd was willing to divide the nation at a time of grave international peril if that’s what it took to beat the liberals.

Rove’s instantly famous speech last week to the New York State Conservative Party should be read in light of this history and not be written off as a cheap, one-time partisan attack. On the contrary, the address by Rove, President Bush’s most important adviser, provides the outlines of a sophisticated strategy aimed at making liberals and Democrats all look soft on terrorism.

Here are the key passages: “Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. In the wake of 9/11, conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban; in the wake of 9/11, liberals believed it was time to submit a petition. . . . Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said: ‘We will defeat our enemies.’ Liberals saw what happened to us and said: ‘We must understand our enemies.’”

Liberals and Democrats were enraged by Rove because virtually every officeholding liberal and Democrat closed ranks behind President Bush on Sept. 11. They endorsed the use of force against the terrorists and, when the time came, strongly backed the war in Afghanistan.

But Rove knows how to play this game. The only evidence he adduces for his therapy charge is a petition in which the current executive director of MoveOn.org called for “moderation and restraint” in the wake of Sept. 11. Rove then slides smoothly from the attack on MoveOn to attacks on Michael Moore and Howard Dean. Finally, Rove tosses in an assault on Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) for his statement that an FBI report on the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, might remind Americans of the practices of Nazi and communist dictatorships.

In the ensuing controversy, Rove’s defenders cleverly sought to pretend that there was nothing partisan about Rove’s speech. “Karl didn’t say ‘the Democratic Party,’ ” insisted Ken Mehlman, the Republican national chairman. “He said ‘liberals.’ ” It must have been purely accidental that one of the “liberals” mentioned was the Democratic national chairman and another was the Senate Democratic whip. It must also have been accidental that both of them, like most other liberals, supported the war in Afghanistan, not therapy. At the time, Durbin called the war “essential.”

On Friday White House spokesman Scott McClellan narrowed the Rove attack even more. McClellan found it “puzzling” that Democrats were “coming to the defense of liberal organizations like MoveOn.org and people like Michael Moore,” when in fact Democrats were coming to their own defense. McClellan also ignored what Mehlman had conceded the day before — and what the text of Rove’s remarks plainly shows: that Rove was attacking liberals generally, not just these two targets.

That’s how guilt by association works. Make a charge and then — once your attack is out there — pretend that your words have been misinterpreted. Split your opponents. Put them on the defensive. Force them to say things like: “No, we’re not soft on terrorism,” or, “I’m not that kind of liberal.” Once this happens, the attacker has already won.

Respectable opinion treats Rove’s speech as just another partisan flap. It’s much more. It’s the reincarnation of a style of politics that turns political opponents into traitors or dupes who are soft on the nation’s enemies. Welcome back to the ’50s.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)