Road Trip Junkie

...that anyone actually reads this blog, but in the event you happen upon it, assuming you do because you are also a Progressive, you might find the following blogs of interest. Consider it reading material to tide you over until I get over my next outrage enough to be able to articulate my thoughts and post again. HA!

First, please check out the links at right. BTW, TruthOut is doing its annual fund-raising drive. If you can help them, they are worth every penny.

Now here are some other blogs that will eventually be added to the list at right. Anyone can read HuffPost or Daily Kos (and I usually do), but these each have their own angle that makes them special. IMHO.

911 Families for Truth, aka the 911 Truth Movement - Yes, we're still plugging away. Still too many unanswered questions.

Booman Tribune - Funny and smart - often getting details on the stories you only hear in the DemocracyNOW headlines.

Empire Burlesque, High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium - Chris Floyd's title says it all.

The Wayne Madsen Report - Among the best of the conspiracy trackers. Knows DC inside-out (and because I grew up in a once-powerful DC family, and did a little Hill work myself, I can appreciate the real deal), and doesn't trade in hypothesis, just facts he's collected from reliable sources. His July 7/8 Special Report on the Bush connection to neo-Nazis was right on the money. My family used to have some of those connections too, until my parents wised up, moved the hell away, and started atoning by working for the Civil Rights Movement! (And, yes, I knew GWB back when he was still a nasty schoolyard bully.)

Highly recommended, from a fellow DC-insider. (Well, former insider, I moved away myself when GWB was installed, because I knew bad shit was on the horizon - all the insiders knew it was coming if he was elected - or whatever you call it. Some chose to stay and battle it out inside the Beltway, but I was burned out and disabled, so chose the route of discretion and valor and all that crap. Regardless of where we live, however, we're all pretty pissed that we were right.)

Shakespeare's Sister - My favorite blog summarizing the blogs. And funny as hell. Check out "Caption This Picture." (Where they find this stuff....) Bound to lighten your day. Hey, if it can lighten mine, it can lighten yours. I'm disabled. Nyah.

The Carpetbagger Report - Don't read Howard Kurtz's Media Notes at the Post before you check out Carpetbagger. Chances are the stories and links here will have Howard beat by several lengths.

Barbara's Blog - The tagline tags it, Barbara Ehrenreich comments on working in America. She's almost as funny as Molly Ivins, and she's nailed the economic issues that divide us.

ThinkProgress - Last but not least, the Progessive Wonk blog. If you're a policy wonk like me, you'll appreciate the wonkiness of this blog.

As I find more good ones, I'll be sure to list them. Signing off for now.

P.S. I forgot to mention that today I am listening to RobinElla.

I haven't written for a while because the pace and horror of recent events have left me alternating between rages and rants and utter speechlessness.

But I was finally able to write something as I considered Mr. Bush's very first veto - regarding stem-cell research (!) - coming the same week the Middle East looks like it might turn into WWIII. I wrote the following letter to the editor yesterday. Because the paper in question so rarely publishes my letters, I don't think it's going to be a problem for me to post it on my personal blog:

As I watch and read the controversies surrounding Mr. Bush's first veto, of
Federal funding for stem-cell research, which was done because the president
felt he was crossing a moral line, I keep thinking of the reason the framers
allowed presidents to veto Congressional legislation in the first place, and how
every citizen in this country - including the president - needs a refresher
course in basic Constitutional law.

Presidents enact and execute laws, which is why they are called executives.
Tradition and precedent have prompted us to forget that the framers intended
that they were only allowed to veto legislation they did not believe they had
the resources to enact or execute. At which point, the legislation goes back to
Congress for override, and if Congress feels the issue is important enough, they
make plans to allocate the resources necessary (which is Congress' job), and
override the bill. With resources in place, the president can then do what is
necessary to execute or enact the law.

Signing and Vetoing legislation was intended to be purely procedural. Just as
Members of Congress are to make a best effort to represent the collective will
of their constituents, the president serves those same constituents, who are the
Sovereigns of the nation. In this case, Congress believed Federal Funds were
available in the appropriate executive departments to pay for Federally funded
stem-cell research. Furthermore, the majority believe their constituents want
this research. So it falls to the president to confirm if such resources are
available among the departments of the executive branch. If so, they should be
used according to the Will of the Sovereign People, as expressed in the
legislation, not according to any individual politician's personal morality.

That was my nice way of calling an asshole an asshole. While the procedural matter is important Constitutionally, here's how I really feel about the issue itself:

Mr. Bush worries about the use of balls of 32 and 64 cells in life-saving research. Under the right circumstances, these zygotes could be potential life, but they will not live one way or another because they are slated for destruction before they can be implanted in a mother OR used in research. Because it is impossible for the thousands of these in-vitro zygotes created each year to be implanted, it seems to me that we should consider our definition of "potential for life": I think it can and should mean potential either as an implanted embryo OR as life-saving research for a living breathing human being.

Frankly, if we are so worried about the morality of the use of zygotes, then perhaps we should outlaw in-vitro fertilization. Half of Congress wants to outlaw abortion and anti-abortion advocates think the prevention of implantation caused by the morning-after pill is also abortion. Put that together with the fact that in-vitro inevitably results in the expellation of at least some of the zygotes (and sometimes all of them), depending on the success of the procedure, and that seems like abortion to me. (I'm being sarcastic. I'm pro-choice. I wouldn't have an abortion - and I have had to make that choice - but that's my personal business and choice. It's not my place to stick my fucking nose into other people's business.)

Of course, as was pointed out on so astutely on the Daily Show this week (leaving my mouth agape), by this measurement, among women who are sexually active, half of all their menstrual periods should be outlawed as well, as that is the number of periods in which fertilized eggs are expelled. We just can't get this idea that our bodies know more about what we need than our limited minds do. (The same applies to homosexuality, by the way.) The arrogance of humans knows no bounds: Just because we can think does not make us smart, let alone omniscient.

Mr. Bush, in case you haven't been briefed on this (because lord knows you sure as hell aren't reading it): Children ARE the highest proportion of victims in war. The United States supports the killing of living, breathing children, killed by terrorists and killed in retaliation by the state, then killed in retaliation by terrorists, then killed in retaliation by the state, and so on. (See a pattern here?) In the Middle East, whenever hostilities erupt, Palestinian children are killed and injured by several orders of magnitude more than Israeli children. (And that's not even considering the horrors ongoing in Iraq, caused by our illegal invasion and war of aggression.) If you're so goddamned worried about crossing a moral line, then THAT'S the moral line you should be concerned about. As far as I'm concerned, that you aren't makes you amoral.

(As for me and my comments about Israeli children and Palestinian children, I'm not putting a value on the lives of any particular children - or adults, for that matter. All life is precious and the death of anyone, and any child, is heartbreaking. It's just a matter of statistics: Israeli children are more likely to survive because they have parents who have built bomb shelters. Palestinians live on apartheid reservations and refugee camps and are lucky to afford WATER. Israel also has the benefit of arms provided by U.S. taxpayers that they use illegally for offensive purposes. Defending themselves is a necessary evil, but bombing Gaza and Beirut back to the stone age is another kind of evil.)

Check out

Get a Life

In this 50th anniversary of "Howl," Shakespeare's Sister is giving Ginsberg a run for the money. (Or across the rooftops, I never can keep that straight....)

I can't possibily add anything better, so just read and absorb. I hope it finds kindred spirits.

Every week, sometimes every day, I hear new ways in which the GOP butcher the language to negatively attack their opponents for their own gain. (Just the pure nastiness of it is evil.)

Everytime I hear something new, I will be sure to share it.

On the flip side, the boy king has been doing a good job lately of coming up with some really funny nutso comments, like his comment that he's "the decider." Everyone picked up on that one, but some of the other good ones have been missed.

For example, at one of his "townhall" (read: Bush fan club) events a couple of months ago, he called himself "educator-in-chief". If that wasn't funny enough, it happened to be the same week the "chief's" mother was revealed to give her Katrina contributions to her son Neil's educational software company, funded in part by the United Arab Emirates, no less, of the misguided ports problem of earlier this year.

As I remember more, or as he comes up with more, I'll share. It's always good for a laugh, and we can use as much laughter as possible these days.

Finally, thinking about socialism got me thinking about Latin America. At the risk of sounding like Greg Palast, I will do an entry soon on the demonization of Hugo Chavez as that nasty commie. Just remember this in the meantime. The man has his finger on the wellspout of the most oil in the western hemisphere and he refuses to be a lapdog to the U.S. oil companies. So if you think that's not prime fodder for conspiracy, you didn't learn anything from my last post. (And yes, I personally think Chavez is a bit of a blowhard. But he's no Saddam Hussein - nor a George Bush - and he is actually governing in a way that helps to reduce the divide between rich and poor in his country. Regardless, the Constitution forbids us from intervening with armed forces into the business of other nations. So anytime we demonize, you can bet someone is just trying to make an excuse to steal someone else's resources.)

With the viciousness of the GOP infecting every nook and cranny of our society like a flesh-eating bacterial infection, there is an important issue that every progressive must pummel constantly. It shouldn't have to be a neverending job, but the Karl Roves of the GOP are making it so. So here goes:

Progressives must claim their language and not let the GOP hijack it, demonize it, or act like pots calling kettles black. Examples:

Liberal - We all know this one and we all know it's a canard. Fortunately most Americans are catching on.

Waffling / Flip-flopping - Everytime the GOP accuses legislators or candidates of "flip-flopping," be prepared to counter with the flip-flopping of the GOP. More Liberals and Progressives are doing this and focusing appropriately on the fundamental ideology of Conservatism: Conserving the economy, keeping government size manageable and budgetable, protecting our infrastructure for the benefit of all (per the Constitution), using the Constitution as it was written, and conserving our natural resources. Tax cuts, pre-emptive wars of aggression, no-bid contracting that fails to use the Federal Acquistion Regs, destroying the parts of the government that work very efficiently (e.g, Social Security and Medicare), allowing special interests to write legislation (e.g, Medicare Part D was written by Big Pharma), and having an administration that ignores our Constitution and our environment are the biggest FLIP-FLOPs of all, they are violations of BOTH Conservative and Liberal values.

Socialism/Communism - Communism is a failed political system because in practice it became tyranny. In theory, it is neither bad nor good. The reason we started a Cold War was not Communism per se, but the way in which the extraordinarily brutal dictator Joseph Stalin applied it in the USSR (following in the footsteps of the almost-as-brutal Lenin), while posturing with nuclear weapons. It was a real threat. The Cuban Missile Crisis reminds us just how scary it was.

That said, we don't know if a communally based political system would work democratically, because no one has tried it without creating a top-down dictatorship. (Which is why we went to Vietnam, because we were afraid of the domino effect. As it turns out, the effect has not been as scary as we thought.)

Socialism is the economic program used by Communists, and it also failed in that context because Communism failed. Socialism (created in part by philosopher Karl Marx) is not a dirty word. Nor is it inconsistent with democracy. Most of western Europe have socialist democracies. This is simply the recognition that the natural resources and the common needs of the People must be managed by government (hence, national health care that has bulk negotiating power) for the common good.

The common good - This is not inconsistent with a marketplace, it just recognizes that a fully deregulated marketplace will work for the corporate good, not for the common good. Profit is the market's motive, and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as it does not prevent the People from having access to those things that are necessary to attain the inalienable rights defined in the Declaration: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. So the government must provide for, assist, or protect: Sustainability in food, water, shelter, clothing, a living wage, education, transportation, health care, energy, fair trade (not free trade), and the common defense (NOT offense and not black-budget foreign policy run by the CIA or other wrong-headed or wasteful programs). Furthermore, to ensure the protection of liberty, the Constitution must be defended and upheld, which is why every elected and civil servant and member of the armed forces swears an oath to it.

Market forces and market gaps - Market forces do not automatically make everything fall in line. Market forces are driven by profits. Where profit cannot be easily attained, there exists a market gap. It may come as no shock that most infrastructure, and other features of the kind of economy we seek, like one that creates high value jobs (which are always created by small businesses, not by corporate bureaucratic behemoths) is swiss-cheese holey with market gaps. That's why we have a government to help level the playing field. And, for any of you conservatives out there reading this, I learned this term when I was studying economics from none other than Milton Friedman, a conservative economist just this side of laissez-faire. If MF could understand the importance of using policy to address market gaps, than so should we, regardless of our political inclinations.

Regulation - Regulation is NOT a bad thing. It is necessary to protect the common good. For example, Big Pharma and the Energy Industry were deregulated during the Reagan Administration, and now health care has become virtually unaffordable by some 70 percent of Americans, largely due to the marketing excesses of Big Pharma and its cozy relationship to the FDA. (I favor Medicare for all, but if we can't have that, I'd be pleased to see Big Pharma back in chains. The cost of drugs is a huge slice of the health-care cost pie, and a regulated pharmaceutical industry would help correct a significant piece of the problem.)

And consider the energy problem. We already see how unregulated companies have made anti-trust statutes a joke (Wal-Mart, who holds a monopsony on an entire supply chain from China to the U.S.), and how executives are now at a compensation ratio of 430:1 with their average floor employee. (The obligations of wealth are to remember that it is our economy and our workers that allow one to attain wealth. Therefore the wealthy bear ethical responsibility to ensure that redistribution is reasonable. Rewards for positive performance are fine, but not in the hundreds of millions of dollars when your employees and customers have to choose between a tank of gas or getting groceries.)

We saw what happened to Enron, and yet the oil companies are getting away with the same stupid shit. (Same shit, different year.) When oil supply is somehow curtailed, it affects the the supplier and everyone in the supply chain down to the end user. Suppliers ARE NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE PROFITS DURING PERIODS OF SHORT SUPPLY. When they do, it is illegal and it is called price gouging. Don't you believe for a minute that Congress has settled this matter. Their special interests want them to settle it, but it must be pounded in to them that we will stand for weasel-talk that tries to justify illegal price gouging. Before deregulation, oil companies DID NOT make a profit during periods of scarcity because the government was doing it's job protecting the infrastructure.

Media Consolidation - In the 1970s we had several hundred media companies. Now we have about 50. The result - Major corporations control the message, and since major corporations tend to get what they want from the GOP, that means the GOP controls the message. (The old Quid Pro Quo principle hard at work.) To the extent that we can stop it, we must. Just listen to Clear Channel radio (which WILL make you want to throw up after about ten minutes). Or watch the idiocy on the 24-hour news channels (Fox being a particularly obnoxious example, but none of them are great). Those channels are there to sell advertising, and if they can squeeze in some GOP propaganda at the same time, even better.

Special Interests - These are corporate lobbyists and campaign contributors, and for all intents and purposes, as long as they are allowed to persist in their ugly Abramoff activities, they are making our democracy an oligarghy. With Mr. It-Would-Be-Easier-If-I-Was-Dictator as president.

Money and Speech - Money DOES NOT EQUAL Speech in a democracy. Just like the precedent that made it seem like corporations could be treated like the Sovereign People (see my other blog for more on this), a similar precedent is used to try to pull this canard off. It's convenient for the elite special interests if they think their money equals speech, but in reality, if money equalled speech only those with money could talk, and the First Amendment prohibits that. The Constitution trumps misinterpreted SCOTUS precedents everytime. (As for the corporations as persons thing, that's trumped by Article I.)

Speaking of special interests - There's a term called "framing," that takes a corporate-interest issue and tries to make it sound populist. You have to watch out for these like a hawk. They pop up all the time when votes of perceived importance by the GOP are coming up in the House or Senate. Right now the big issue is Media Consolidation and Net Neutrality. I addressed Media Consolidation, but let's consider Net Neutrality. There's an organization advertising right now that calls itself "Hands off the Internet." This is a special interest that tries to portray itself as "Net Neutrality" because it wants us to support legislation that does not regulate how the internet is used by private corporations. Theoretically, the internet could be privatized (again, we're talking infrastructure, and infrastructure cannot be privatized without regulation), so that end users pay up the wazoo to attain any kind of decent access. They claim that it will still be free because it will provide nominal, low-bandwidth access for those who don't pay.

Real Net Neutrality - Keeps the internet free of corporate interference. Corporations would still act as ISPs, but that would be it. To learn more, and to encourage your Senators to support Net Neutrality, visit Save the Internet.

It probably has a fancy name, but the tactic is grade-school simple. It's called Pot Calling the Kettle Black (PKtKB). Psychologists call it Projection.

PCtKB - Inevitably, when faced with a shortcoming, the GOP will project it back onto the opponent. George Bush, AWOL Draft Dodger becomes John Kerry, Swift Boat Coward. (Unfortunately, Mr. Kerry was trying to be "nice," so he failed to share with voters that Mr. Bush was indeed an AWOL draft dodger, while he earned several medals for heroism on one of the deadliest deployments in Vietnam.) Bush used it on McCain during the 2000 primaries, James Baker used it on Warren Christopher during the 2000 Florida Debacle, and it has been used constantly ever since. There's a school of thought that one should ignore such acts of schoolyard bullying, but when your bullies are wingnuts, that don't fly. The voters must be given the truth - which is readily available in documents for the sharing, provided the individuals involved are willing to have their staff do a bit of research.

And speaking of research, ALL OF US MUST READ THE CONSTITUTION. The boy king likes to be the decider regarding what is Constitutional and what isn't, but that isn't his place and it says so IN THE CONSTITUTION. I doubt seriously that he has even READ the Constitution. It is not hard reading, so make like Nike and JUST DO IT. You will find that every time some in the GOP claims that they're concerned about something being Consitutional, or they made sure it was Constitutional, IT WAS NOT CONSTITUTIONAL. They live behind the Looking Glass where saying it's so makes it so. (Psychologists call this childish magical thinking.)

You boys can say it's so and hope to make it so to your heart's content, but if it does not fit with the facts, I'm not listening, because I know you're trying to pull a fast one. Unfortunately a few too many of us listened to you rather than the weapons inspectors and insider whistleblowers like Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill (who informed us that the administration was obsessed with Iraq from Jan. 21, 2001), and now we're in a mess of a war. A few too many of us listened again to your campaign lies in 2004. I think the majority of us have finally figured out that you live in Wonderland and the rest of us live in the REAL WORLD.

Finally, one of my particular bugbears:

Conspiracy theories - If you don't believe there are conspiracies out there, you are not a proper steward of your country. Any time more than one person in power lies to accomplish a goal without the knowledge of the People, and after comparing notes with another person in power, that is a conspiracy. Cheney and Rummy conspire constantly. Now there are some who think all the conspiracies are interrelated and make one mass conspiracy. I don't subscribe to that view, I think pure ideology and plain ol' greed do a lot of the work some think is conspiracy. Steven Kinzer for example, describes beautifully how greed got us into this routine of interventionist foreign policy in his book Conquest. But if you don't think there are people who have worked in small groups to exploit that interventionist foreign policy for secret gain, you are too naive for words. If you don't think there's a shadow government, you need to get out more. Cheney-Rummy and the rest of the PNAC gang are a perfect example of the kinds of shadows that can run government without our knowledge. These shadows may not take the form of the hellish underground that some describe, but there are groups of people (like the PNAC gang) working secretly (often in the intelligence agencies, where secrecy is King) to use the government to accomplish goals that usually involve greed and economic domination of the world through bad trade policy and privatization of infrastructure. (The IMF and the World Fund have their shadows too, which is why Wolfowitz of PNAC was installed there.) The Plame outing has been revealed as a conspiracy, and there's even been an indictment. And finally, Why do you think the FAR has been tossed out so Halliburton and friends could get no-bid contracts in Iraq?

So when you hear people refer to themselves as conspiracy theorists, don't assume they wear tinfoil. When people attain power and money, they get greedy for more, and they start to set class and race against each other (divide and conquer - the time-honored strategy of white male elites for thousands of years) and that is the soil in which the seeds of conspiracy are planted. Citizens who take responsibility for their country pay attention and do what they can to stop these kinds of conspiracies. We're not kooks.

Our government has many fine attributes but its failing is that our framers could not foresee this problem. Corporations were not then what they are now, and let's face it, the framers themselves were mostly well-off landowners. (Business entrepreneur Ben Franklin was the closest thing they had to a reality check.) So they had no frame of reference to see the potential problems of money affecting those in power. (They did create check and balances, and they did intend for those in power to share it and pass it on, but in practice, these ideals have been hard for the political elite to follow. Once you get power it tends to intoxicate you.) Nor had they been introduced to La Cosa Nostra, which is a perfect example of a very real, ongoing conspiracy.

It's too bad they didn't revisit the story of Julius Caesar. Because, that my friends, is the epitome of conspiracy. Good intentions, perhaps, but Brutus did conspire in secret with his cousin and a few high-placed friends to assassinate Caesar.

As for a real conspiracies today, there are a ton of 'em because this administration lies to us every damn day. Some of us are trying to keep up. But if there's one on which our country depends, it's the 911Truth Movement, started by the families of those who died. If you're not familiar, start with a web search for 911Truth. Or start here:

911Truth.org

This is not an unprecedented event. In 1956, a report released by a German Press Officer pretty much confirmed what the world had suspected for 20 years. The communists that were supposed to have set the 1933 Reichstag fire were actually SS Officers working on orders from the Nazi command who were then shot. But blaming the fire on "communists" (we actually weren't the first to demonize communists) started the ball rolling: The Enabling Act, the coup that made Hitler Chancellor, and the gradual turning of the population into vicious anti-Semites with propaganda.

And it was none other than Prescott Bush himself, he of Union Banking fame (he and Averill Harriman were found to be trading with the Nazis in 1942), who managed to use his S&B pedigree to get out of a conviction for treason (Union Banking was shut down for the duration of the war and never did get back off the ground), and ultimately won a bid for the Senate from Connecticut. He then used his position to help push Project PAPERCLIP, which gave Nazi scientists immunity if they would work on secret projects for this country. Sidney Gottleib of MK-ULTRA fame was a PAPERCLIP man. And Prescott is the grandfather of the boy king.

All of this is documented and easy to find, part of the public domain. So check it out. And once you do, I dare you to tell me there are no conspiracy theories and that those of us who keep track are tinfoil kooks.

And that brings me to my final point about semantics. The GOP will try to make anything good or decent or reasonable about their opposition seem evil, when they themselves are evil for doing so. They have made terms like "liberal," "socialist democracy," and "conspiracy theory" all seem like bad things when they are good things. It's up to us to RE-frame the words back into the definitions that belong to them and to tell the GOP to STOP LYING.

Those who don't (and that would be about half of the Democrats in Congress) are failing their country and should be ashamed of themselves.

I've been so PO'd so much in recent weeks, I couldn't listen to music and write at the same time. Hell, writing has been hard enough, hence the scattershot posts. However, I do have the buds in today, and I'm listening to:

Carey Ott, Lucid Dream (Good folk-rock for those of us who like the Joshs, Josh Ritter and Josh Rouse, or any of their influences going back to Dylan and Cohen.)

Now onto the big story of the day:

Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts

That group would be the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization whose credibility deserves our immediate attention.

Not that many of us are surprised by this. First off, we knew that recruiting standards had gone to hell in a handbasket (hence Stephen "antisocial disorder discharge" Green). But there's a deeper, darker force at work here, as well.

My dad was in Naval Intelligence (worked right at the WH for JFK and LBJ, for better or for worse), and knew (and hated) the Cheney-Rummy-Bush Sr. cabal and the schemes it was cooking up back in the 60s. (Gotta love Project PAPERCLIP and Prescott Bush.) 2001, war on terror, destroying the global economy, detentions, torture, all in the cards. If they got the power, they were rarin' to go.

See, these guys consolidate their secrecy by belonging to little secret clubs. It's not nearly as organized as the modern Illuminati (although that does really exist and anyone familiar with it, including a couple of ex-cult friends of mine, also saw the writing on the wall), but it does have its tentacles in the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, and, of course, S&B. It also has a hellava grapevine and Dad tapped in. After OK City, he became obsessed with these "homegrown" groups, because he thought it would be these groups that would be bankrolled to attack in 2001. (He had been out of the biz for some years by this time, which is a long story for another day.)

If Dad had lived a little longer to see the effect of the Iraqi sanctions, he might've rethought his position. It's not that he didn't know that the oil connection was important (he was also obsessed with our problems with Iran, dating back to the 54 coup), he just thought since Saddam had been contained, these guys would get their henchmen and do their war profiteering elsewhere. (When he died, Osama-baby was still doing real terrorist sh*t overseas, so I don't think Osama figured into his equation: A real terrorist vs. people in power in this country creating terrorism as a pretext.)

Nevertheless, the participation of these groups fits very nicely into the plans the PNAC gang have had in mind for 50 years, long before they had a think tank, let alone any names for it. And the hell of it is that there are a lot of us out here who knew this was all going to happen, from some kind of attack in 2001, lying us into an unnecessary Orwellian perpetual war, destroying the economy, perpetrating all these human rights abuses (which, I'm sorry to say have only just begun if we don't get rid of these guys) and destoying the Constitution.

One my favorite blogs, Shakespeare's Sister, has her usual excellent take on the issue. Her perspective is always worth a read:

A Few Bad Apples

I would diverge from her opinion only in her closing comment:

"The Defense Department isn’t commenting, saying they haven’t yet seen the Southern Poverty Law Center’s report. Let’s hope someone over there gets off his ass and makes it a point to nip this shit in its ugly bud. I’m talking to you, Rummy."

I wouldn't hold my breath on the Cheney-Rummy cabal to do anything about this - they were hoping it would happen. Perhaps even encouraging it.

This is ringing 'round the blogosphere big time, and also hit Democracy Now, which is a good thing, because the only bud-nipping to be done will have to be done by us.

Update 7/8/06

Wayne Madsen is one of the most dedicated researchers on the web, and he has done an amazing Special Report (dated 7/7-8/06) on his homepage that addresses everything I discussed above in detail and with proper research and citations. I encourage you to visit his site if you are interested or concerned about this issue. I have learned a lot from Wayne, and that's saying something considering I'm an intelligence brat.

Hey, what can I say? Dad had to wait 25 years to tell any of us about most of his assignments. Fortunately we heard about his work with JFK's Cuba Rappaproachment policy in 63 before Dad passed on in 98. (Which was a relief because he kept telling us these little tidbits out of context all our lives because he just couldn't resist, but we just thought he was making stuff up. It finally made sense when we heard the whole story.)

It is people like Wayne Madsen and the resources he has provided over the years that allowed me to validate Dad's stories.

I just checked in on one my favorite blogs, "Empire Burlesque," and Chris' post today is also about this event.

His description cannot be ignored. It turned all my outrage into sobs.

Home Free: American Power in Mahmudiyah

Main blog site:

Empire Burlesque

In an update to my "Countdown" post of the other day, I wanted to comment on the latest news regarding the horrific rape, burning and slaying of the family in Mahmoudiya.

Ex-G.I. Charged in Slayings of 4 and Rape in Iraq (AP)

Details Emerge in Alleged Army Rape, Killings (Washington Post)

All the stories referring to a woman being raped fail to mention that it was a 15-YEAR-OLD CHILD! (And this is not the first story I've heard of child rape.)

Apparently our "lowered" recruitment standards are indeed biting us in the butt and putting people at real risk in Iraq. From the AP article: "Steven D. Green, a 21-year-old former Army private first class who was recently discharged because of a ''personality disorder,'' appeared in a federal magistrate's courtroom in Charlotte Monday." The only saving grace in this whole thing is apparently the victim was at least shot before she was burned.

As a torture survivor myself, I have always felt that if one dies as a result of being tortured (including rape), it must be the worst possible death. You probably welcome death. But your last thought in the midst of your horrific pain is that dying has to be better than living with the repercussions of your torture and with the fear of living in a world with animals like those who tortured you.

Actually, I think I just insulted non-human animals. Humans have to be most brutal, vicious animals on the planet. No human or any creature deserves to die in pain and terror.

Can you tell just how sick this all makes me? I hate how it makes our good troops look bad and I hate how Iraqi civilian life is treated by too many soldiers as subhuman and at the disposal of Americans.

If Green is guilty, he is essentially a spree killer who was set loose in a population where soldiers have been conditioned to think they are superior and must oppress the civilians, because that's how soldiers are conditioned. Nevermind that they are supposed to be "liberators," their first job is "control," which requires oppression. A very bad combination indeed. Green was identified as having a problem, but just imagine the number of soldiers who haven't been identified with problems. (And consider that for every one of the problem soldiers, there are probably 50 great men and women doing the best job they can under the circumstances. But the Steven Greens make them all look bad. And that's just mean, when these people are willing to put their lives on the line because we as a nation asked them to.)

More information is emerging on the blogosphere that those photos I commented about in that last post are actually being distributed as porn, and have been since at least 2004.

You know what's really creepy? Everything that has happened - as I've written before - has been predicted by people who know TPTB including people in my own family. And among the predictions would be that the pornification of torture-rape of women and children would be among the tactics used in this so-called "war on terror." Which makes it seem more and more like the "war to terrify." Using fear to control, an age-old tactic of imperialists everywhere.

It makes the necessity to get the troops out fast all the more critical. For their sake, for the sake of the morality of this country, and for the sake of Iraqi and Afghani civilians.

Especially the women and children.

Finally some pundits are saying the same thing I've been saying for five years. The so-called war on terrorism is pure nonsense. After reading an editorial in the Washington Post about how Congress needs to create laws to legalize the so-called war, I really blew my top.

Let There Be Law

It's not that the editorial is completely wrong, it just does what everyone has been doing these past five years, buying into the propaganda that the "war on terror" is the greatest threat we have ever faced. Anyone who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis know that this is pure manure. (Heck, climate change is probably our greatest threat right now, because - like the nuclear threat - it has the potential to destroy us all at some unpredictable time in the next few years.) This is not to minimize the real pain and suffering of those affected by terrorist acts (which are no doubt horrible beyond reckoning), but let's keep our threat assessments in perspective.

In addition to writing to the Post, here's what I wrote to my Congressional Delegation yesterday about this:

"Terrorism is a tactic that has been used by individual humans and small groups for 10,000 or more years to try to attain power either illegitimately or through the desperation of oppression. We cannot fight a conventional war of armed forces against it. Therefore, we have an opportunity to both learn from the parts of the world that suffer terrorism and cope with it constructively and democratically, and to learn that we don't want perpetrate the cycle of violence using armed forces ineffectively. As we see in places like Iraq and Israel, that simply makes a victim of everyone.

"Our framers and other lawmakers of this country and the world, including the creators of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions, have already created a framework from which, even when we faced mutually assured nuclear annihilation with the USSR, nations at risk found successful ways to mitigate terrorism....

"To suggest "there should be a law" ignores these laws, which are failing only because they have not been applied by anyone other than the Supreme Court. We must also remember they are there to protect OUR troops. Every member of Congress who has served will tell you when we abide by laws of humane treatment, our troops are less likely to be kidnapped, tortured and burned to death. Congress must create laws by working with those who can develop a strategy outside the current military box, using unconventional and humane forces and methods. We must combine those efforts with economic justice, because madrassas are far fewer in countries where people are not dying of starvation or being chased by militias or warlords on horseback with machetes....

"It's time to declare the war on terror over and begin the Quest for Peace. So many positive things are possible. And the saddest thing is there are a lot of smart people who could help to make these things happen, if you would only let us help you. But YOU need the political will to empower the nation help you with these goals and the political will to redistribute government wealth [our tax dollars] equitably. [e.g., Cutting DOD in half by ridding it of waste and cronyism. Don't let anyone from K Street darken the doorstep. Stop global poverty. etc. And everyone should be paying attention to Warren Buffet right now. He understands the responsibilities and obligations of wealth in a capitalist democracy.]

"Basically you need the political will to use good old-fashioned COMMON SENSE." At which point, I reminded them of Thomas Paine.

Anyway, a couple of good pieces are out there now where the threat is placed in proper perspective:

The Myth of Terrorism, Part Deux

The New American Cold War

Returning to "Common Sense," Will Pitt has a couple of good commentaries in time for Independence Day:

When I Paint My Masterpiece

This is an excellent assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of our system, dating back to land-owning white men writing our Charters. Don't get me wrong, I respect and study our Charters as much as any Constitutional scholar, and accounting for the historical context, consider them genius. But they have the flaws that exist in anything done by humans, no matter how progressive or intelligent they may be. (And our founders were both.)

I would correct Will on one point. The idea of the Sovereign People (that is, the People are in charge, via a representative Congress, there is no King or Prime Minister, and the executive's duties were limited to prevent monarchy) was "discovered" by Ben Franklin in discussions with the tribes of the Anishnabek Confederation (the Algonquin Peoples) - sometimes called the "Iroquois League" after one of the nations in the confederation. Will mistakenly says that it was a concept never before seen in the world, but was actually quite common among many traditional, indigenous peoples with sophisticated systems of governance. Check Out:

ALGONKIN HISTORY

Will rightly comments, however, that this was the first time the concept had been tried among developed nations. Which is also one of the deficits of our system. It is built on the 18th century patriarchal paradigm of "western civilization," including concerns about mob rule, thereby giving only the elites access to the system. These white male landowners were bound intellectually by Enlightenment thinking, demographics, travel constraints, etc. And for all their genius and relative progressivism, that kind of thinking is very, very different than our thinking and our paradigms today.

Keep in mind also that the founders were mindful of the French, who had started a bloody revolution between the "common people" and the monarchy and that a similar revolution occurred right in the UK only 100 years earlier. So elitist thinking (which was not evil then as it is now, just the way it was) and influences floated right on down through the Civil War, the Reconstruction, the Robber Baron era (when a legally suspect SCOTUS decision essentially claimed corporations have the same rights as individuals, which Will describes at length), and the ultimately to the point where the elite fight tooth and nail to hold that money equals speech.

So explain me this: If money equals speech, does that mean that the Gates and Buffets of the country have multi-billions worth of speech, while the average American only has about 25 grand worth? If so, explain to me how that is democratic.

It isn't. It's a very ugly aspect of fascism. (Speaking of which, there's a good piece on that issue, "The F-Word.")

This is why it is up to progressives and populists to do what our Abolishionist brothers and sisters, our Suffragette sisters, and our Civil Rights brothers and sisters have done before us: Make the Constitution apply to the country as it existed for the current time, not as it was in the 18th century.

The founders did one thing especially well: They created the framework with the full understanding that as society changed, the Constitution would have to be amended to work within the changing paradigms of society. The Constitution is a living document.

And now it's time to get money out of the system and prohibitions on money into the Constitution. I write about this and about the limits of executive power at length on my other blog. (See the links at the right.) (We also need additional provisions for grassroots oversight and procedures for the People to make direct changes when the system isn't working. Again, discussed in my other blog.)

Will also takes on Cheney in "A Moment of Pause."

He lists the crimes of this administration succinctly, then comments drily, "So much of this, in the end, has been about Dick Cheney being annoyed by Watergate." Indeed. I think most of us who knew the players and paid attention to what they were doing - to the extent their secretiveness (a red flag in itself) allowed us - knew that this was the kingmaker's agenda, but it's finally getting a hearing in the wider media, such as the PBS Frontline program, "The Dark Side," about which I think I've written in a recent post. All I know is when Campaign Manager Cheney announced that he had decided that he was the best candidate for VP in 2000, a lot of us knew we were in for trouble. A cold war maniac who started his career with Nixon and floated around in secretive think tanks between Repug administrations was a recipe for disaster. Not to mention his penchant for hiring friends for the good positions. (This administration wouldn't know how to conduct an executive committee job search if a human resources executive specialist slapped them upside the head.) And then, of course, there's the continuing salary from Halliburton....

Would Clinton have gotton away with this sh*t?

At any rate, all of this is good reading if you'd like to remind yourself why we celebrate Independence Day. And while you're at it, go to my other blog and use the links there to get yourself a copy of the Declaration of Independence (part of the Charters of Freedom). When you get to the "Offences" section, read it very carefully and insert "Bush and Cheney" wherever it refers to the King. And then think about whether the offenses listed apply to our country today (hint: they do), and what we need to do if we want to regain the country our forebears fought and died to create. Can we drop the same kind of gauntlet our framers dropped when they asked Jefferson to write the Declaration and distribute it to all the newspapers?

Will our forebears have died in vain, or will we preserve their legacy and make the U.S.A. once again the lighted city on the hill, a hope for all other nations?

It's up to us, we're in charge. We are the Sovereign People and we do not have a king. Those overpaid used-car salesmen on K Street attempt to undermine our authority (which is why they need to be kicked out of Washington), but we are still in charge. We are the bosses, and in November, we'll be making important hiring and firing decisions. Don't squander your right to do this, it's one of the few we still have short of a new revolution. And I don't think any of us want that, because our Constitutional right and tradition of peaceable assembly is too important to us.

Have a good holiday, and consider making it a true Independence Day.

In preparation for Troops Home Fast, I was perusing the Code Pink Website, as I like to do from time-to-time (lots of cool stuff, although the clip art is a little hokey), and I came across this timely page:

Declare Peace for Mother's Day


I also urge readers to download the PDF white paper, "Iraqi Women Under Seige."

You'll also find more information on the site about how the U.S. refuses asylum to Iraqi women who have been left without families due to the occupation and its indiscriminate killing ways. This can be a death sentence for a Muslim woman in a country where Islamist feelings are running higher than ever.

All of this was prompted, not surprisingly, by my horror at this story out yesterday of the troops who allegedly premeditatedly attacked a family, planning for up to a week how to rape a woman and then kill the rest of the family, including a child, and then setting the woman's body on fire and the house on fire. (The reports are conflicting, so it's possibly my info is not exactly correct. But of the rape and setting the woman on fire - that part seems pretty accurate, the Iraqi police found her and found evidence of an accelerant.) Some links:

Troops Facing Murder Probe
Atrocities Against Iraqi Family Alleged

GIs May Have Planned Iraq Rape, Slayings


As I was investigating this horrible but not surprising turn of events, I accidentally happened upon photos of one Iraqi woman being raped, and three American women being raped by soldiers. (No dinner for me tonight.)

The Code Pink Paper details that the rapes are much more frequent than the MSM would have us know, especially the rapes (in the case of these photos GANG rapes) of the women in the photos, who, according to the following story were probably SOLDIERS!

Sexual assault reports in the military jump by 40 percent in 2005


I'm an anthropologist and I study the behaviors that attach themselves to war. Sadly rape is the most common next to combat and non-combat murder. Murders at checkpoints of pregant women in labor, families with children and even a high-level Italian intelligence officer come to mind. And we won't even get into the towns that have been treated like the Nazis treated small Jewish towns in the holocaust, other than the fact that the trenches probably looked about the same in the end.

That said, I cannot imagine the stress of war because I refused to join the military for moral reasons. But I do have every sympathy for the horrors these soldiers face, the IEDs, the daily suicide bombings in populated areas, the RPGs, etc. While it doesn't compare, I did live with the constant fear of death as a victim of domestic violence and I do suffer from PTSD. But you know what? I LEFT my SOB ex, I did not kill him. (I know some women have no choice, that's called self-defense.) He stalked me for a while, but luckily for me (less so for others), the restraining order worked. In other words, in spite of feeling in constant danger of losing my life, I exercised rational, moral choices. What is going through the minds of these kids when they perpetrate these horrors? Everyone comments that recruitment standards are down, but, hey, this went on in Vietnam too, and in every war I've ever studied. So it's not all about setting incipient criminals loose on an innocent civilian population.

It's called war, this is the kind of sick crap war does to some particularly stress-sensitive people, and it's why so many of us fought so hard to stop it before it started.

So I have conflicting feelings about this. One is I would like to metaphorically throttle the chickenhawks who sent our armed forces - most of whom are kids who are already impressionable and lacking in judgment - into this war of choice - and some of these COs who are doing a pisspoor job of commanding their troops. (And by this I am not referring to the many excellent COs and troops doing an excellent job over there.) Granted, the COs aren't getting a lot of helpful direction from Washington, but GODDAMNIT, why are they NOT teaching their soldiers the freakin' UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions?

But at the same time, this committed anti-death-penalty activist actually feels so much rage, I'd like those young men to suffer the same death that poor woman and her family did. Apparently the townspeople made sure that two innocent soldiers of that platoon did. That was tragic in every possible way. Especially that they didn't identify the real killers.

(Give me a day, I'll settle down.)

Meanwhile, Chickenhawk I, he of the five draft deferments, has a ticker that just won't stop ticking.

Cheney's Heart Condition Is Called Stable

Why in God's name does the Universe not do us a favor and let him suffer a nice quiet heart failure in his sleep? (See, even though we're dealing with ultimate evil here, I'm willing to be merciful and hope God is too. But GOD, we need you to be merciful to the REST OF US NOW!)

As I tried to navigate away as quickly as possible from those haunting faces in the pictures of the women being raped (I've avoided as many of these pictures as possible, although I have seen the most publicized ones from Abu Ghraib, of course), I did have one last thought: These soldiers can't be functioning rationally. Because a rational criminal DOES NOT DOCUMENT his crimes of torture and gang rape! This war will go down in history as the war with the best-documented atrocities ever, and unfortunately, the good people trying to do a good job are going to be labelled with that for the rest of their lives. Vietnam all over again. Only this time it's not our ignorance, it's the stupidity and lack of morality of far too many people in Washington and Arlington.

Closing on a positive note: Maureen Dowd apparently used the term I use for GWB ten years ago for Clinton. Ironic, because Clinton was not nearly as paternalistic as GWB. Cheney the kingmaker has made him believe that the best way to lead is to be paternal, to take cawe of all the wittle peoples. So I've been calling him "Daddy-in-Chief" for months now. That's the Zeitgeist for you.

Heck, I might have to finally break down and subscribe to Times Select now so I can read the archives.

Well, I guess that's about enough rage for one week. And to think I expressed rage twice this week, on my "less serious" blog. These are ragin' times, my friends. From talk radio to the idiotic 24-hour MSM to the regular people who have allowed themselves to buy into the acting of the so-called pundits who are only "enraged" to increase ratings, it's just become a mad, mad world. Sad but true. And here I am, supposed to be a "reasonable" progressive, raging like Rush Limbaugh. (I need to remember that analogy, because it's not pretty. It might encourage me to settle down faster in the future.)

I'm feeling even more angry than usual at the current state of affairs in this country, so I'm going to blow off some steam. You're welcome to skip the steam, of course, but you might find some food for thought.

Americans born in the second half of the 20th century are a trying group of people. Americans have always been arrogant SOBs, a quality we inherited from our European conqueror forebears, and we also tend to be very focused inward. Don't bother us with global issues unless it's just one black and white enemy.

All humans are wired to be self-deceptive, and Americans have this quality ironed out to a T. We live in a big country, we (theoretically) have all we need here, so why worry about the rest of the world, right? Except of course if we're told we have a black-and-white enemy that we must attack.

To be fair, this really only applies to about half of all Americans, and even those, once you scratch below their lazy, ignorant surface to explain the big picture, sometimes actually start to get it. The current polls suggest that it took a while but the half of us that saw our country going to hell in a hand basket have grown to almost three-quarters.

Nevertheless, I used to give my fellow Americans the benefit of the doubt. There are a lot of good people in this country. But I've come to accept that there are also a lot of ignorant followers who just blindly follow authority as if they never grew up beyond age three. They chant U-S-A as if there is no other country on earth. Ironically, most of the other countries on earth look at our Charters of Freedom and, until recently, when the current power mongers took it on themselves to start destroying them, saw them as a beacon of hope. We are a nation of immigrants for a reason. Europeans put up with "ugly Americans," because they knew that our arrogance was simply a byproduct of being brought up in the greatest democracy the world has known. And many Americans who traveled often traveled to the homes of their immigrant forebears, which both humbled them and opened their eyes to the bigger world.

So it isn't all their fault. The drive of our economy to create bigger and bigger corporations and institutions, the drive of humans to create bureaucracy (it is a great way to keep one's job), continually cycles us through robber baron eras, and robber barons find it very convenient to have a compliant consumer-driven population. So we are incentivized to watch TV and TV ads, and to watch 24-hour news programs that contain virtually no news. (For a taste of this, one need only watch the periodic segment on The Daily Show called, "Slow News Day.") We are whipped into a frenzy to support sports where the players and owners make more in one season than most of us make in a lifetime. Tracking Hollywood box office every weekend has become a hobby for people, they actually bet on it like it was the stock market.

But the fact remains: We have a choice. We can be like the one-quarter to one-third of Americans who are willing to roll over because they would rather fill their mind with the bubble gum of pop culture and use the excuse that one person can't do anything anyway, so let the Hitlers and Stalins and Nixons and Kissingers and Cheneys and Rumsfelds of the world have their way. (If you think this group is not analogous, you DO need a history lesson) We can immerse ourselves in pop culture, following the daily lives of Paris Hilton, the Olsen twins, and American Idol. We can turn BO betting into a hobby, we can sit in our La-Z-Boys with our chips and soda pop and watch baseball or football all weekend.

OR we can go outside and work in the garden. We can turn on real news programs or actually READ a decent Sunday newspaper. We can read some good fiction and non-fiction books that teach us both facts and literary lessons. We can get on the web and find alternative news so that we can learn what's really happening in the war, and what Constitutional abuses the government has been up to this week. We can talk to our friends about the outrage we feel at how our country has been hijacked. We can march in anti-war protests and we can write to our Congressional delegation.

If you think I'm just full of it, that pop culture is the be-all and end-all, then this blog isn't for you. But if you're too blind or too ignorant or too brainwashed to see how our founder's legacy is being destroyed, then you deserve to be at the wrong end of an economy and Constitution that are being destroyed. The problem is, the rest of us don't. Which means, simply put, the framers did not create this land for you. You may leave.

U-S-A is a PARTICIPATORY Democracy. The citizen sovereigns RUN this country and we have a RESPONSIBILITY to stand up for it when those in power become power drunk and start to drive our country off a cliff. These people in Washington are our SERVANTS. They work for us, they do our bidding to ensure that OUR country is run the way WE want it run. But right now they've made too many of us believe we work for them.

It's time for us to grab the wheel and the keys and stomp on the brakes. IT'S OUR JOB. We do not sit back and wait for them to sober up on their own (they're power drunks, they won't), we do not sit back and ignore it all and hope it will go away (it will, but then so will we, probably dead of starvation due to the depression that is likely to set in due to almost 10 TRILLION dollars of debt), we do not deny and deceive ourselves that things are actually much better than they are. And most of all, we do not allow these paternalistic bastards think they know what's best for us, let alone give them an excuse to act like our daddies.

Their only interest is in themselves and their powerful, wealthy friends. They don't give a flying fart in a doughnut hole for us. They are the daddies that run off with the cute young thing as soon their wives become a little older and worn out from bearing children. They are the daddies force us into therapy because they turned out to be a--holes.

Bush was convicted for DUI in graduate school. He may be a dry drunk now, but he's doing a fine job demonstrating how our country is trapped in a car being driven right off the cliff by a codependent. IT IS OUR JOB to stop this.

Code Pink is sponsoring a Hunger Strike called Troops Home Fast.

Here's a Press Release.

It fittingly begins on July 4. It is a rolling fast that continues through Sept. 21, International Peace Day. Because it is a rolling fast, you can participate as little or as much as you want. You can just fast on July 4, or you can fast all the way through, or something in between. Water or Juice Fasts are recommended.

I have some health issues, so I signed up to fast one day per week, and I'll probably do a juice fast. I do it for medical procedures more often than I'd like, so why not choose to do it this time for a good cause?

When I think about what the troops (and Iraqis) must be going through, me taking a break from eating one measly day per week does not seem like a big deal. As the site says, they've put their bodies on the line. We should show them that we are standing with them by putting our bodies on the line, too, albeit in a much smaller way.

The fast also coincides with the current debate about establishing an exit strategy. Wouldn't it be great if the fast helps encourage Congress to pin down a strategy? Just think about it for a second: Election Year. Dozens of your voters are calling in saying they are fasting until there is an exit strategy. You'd be a pretty sad excuse for a politician if you didn't pay attention to THAT. (Unfortunately we have too many of those.)

If you do participate, and you don't have a sad excuse for a Congressional Delegation, be sure to CALL or FAX to tell them you are fasting. Email is okay if it's not urgent, but if it's something you really want to make sure they know, speak to a staffer or send a Fax marked "URGENT."

And, of course, tell your friends. The more who participate, the greater the support.

Good luck! Feel free to leave comments.