America is in terrible danger. There is a rogue nation that creates and uses weapons of mass-destruction, that flaunts United Nations resolutions at will, and threatens the peace and stability of the world. This outlaw state is arrogant, caring for nothing but its own power and greed. It is willing to turn against its own citizens, to censor, punish and imprison at will. A regime change is desperately needed to bring this country back to sanity.
I speak of the United States under the iron thumb of the Bush Regime. We have met the enemy and he is us.
Mark Christo
A Concerned Citizen
|
|
|
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
George Orwell
"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president... is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
Theodore Roosevelt
"Violence is the last resort of the incompetent."
Isaac Asimov
"Patriotism is the last resort of a scoundrel."
Samuel Johnson
"Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think."
Martin Luthor King Jr.
"'My country right or wrong'" is like saying, 'My mother drunk or sober.'"
G.K. Chesterton
"If you have the right to overthrow or abolish the government, as our Declaration of Independence asserts you do, you have the right to disobey it."
Howard Zinn
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Edmund Burke
"They [the Bush administration] think they're the only power in the world.... One country wants to bully the world."
Nelson Mandela
"Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people
are not intellectually competent. More than anything the
United States needs effective citizens competent to do their
own thinking."
William Mather Lewis
"Democracy dies behind closed doors."
Senior Judge Damon J Keith
"Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it."
P.J. O'Rourke
"I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat."
Will Rogers
|
|
|
|
|
SAVE AMERICA!
|
|
|
Wednesday, November 03, 2004
I've been trying to decide what to do with this blog after the election debacle. We did not bring about the desperately need regime change. Millions of voters decided to maintain a right-wing, intolerant, ideologue wing of the mutated Republican party.
They voted for disdain for individual and civil rights, disregard of women's rights, pillaging and raping of the environment, continued dependence on an outmoded energy policy, outright corporate pandering and corporate control of the government, corruption, greed, intolerant religious ideology and a secretive dictatorial executive branch. They voted to be an arrogant global bully and to practice irresponsible financial schemes that will destroy our childrens' future.
They voted as willfully ignorant, blinkered, fearful sheep.
That is not MY America. That is not the America I was raised to believe in. That is not the America I will stand by and allow them to create without a fight.
I'm not giving up, but I doubt that keeping up this blog is of much practical use. I've never had a large audience here, probably due to the reality that I don't have time to for it and the best I could do was post what others had written. I appreciate those of you who have come here and those who have written to me. Unfortunately, I am mostly preaching to the converted.
What time I have must now be given over to doing something more concrete.
Less blogging, more action.
I encourage all of you to find a group that you can believe in -- whether it's MoveOn or Planned Parenthood or Howard Dean's efforts or the NRDC -- whatever it is, GET INVOLVED.
Less blogging, more action.
I'll see you in the trenches.
Mark Christo
P.S. Okay, one last link for y'all.
6:14 PM
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
VOTE!!! VOTE, VOTE, VOTE!!!
2:29 PM
Monday, November 01, 2004
Political thuggery in vogue
By HOWELL RAINES
If George Bush wins the presidential election, Americans can mark it down as a triumph of thug politics. If John Kerry wins, as I believe he will, that conversely will not mean that thug politics will be finished as the dominant style of modern American presidential campaigns.
What is political thuggery as it has been practiced throughout the 2004 campaign? How does it differ from the slanders of 18th and 19th century campaigns, the strong-arm bossism of 50 years ago in Chicago and New York, or the more recent demagoguery Southern and Western politicians used to incite racial hatred and paranoia about Big Government?
By thug politics, I mean the tireless repetition of misleading "facts" designed to depict an opponent as personally despicable and, in regard to governance, dangerous to the physical and spiritual life of the nation.
Certainly, campaigning of this rough sort has a root system that reaches back to earlier outbreaks of ignorance, nativism and intolerance in American politics. But starting with the Reagan campaign of 1980, thug politics has developed in such a way as to deserve classification as the distinctive style of an era.
Just as the Progressive Era followed the Gilded Age, we can now say that the New Politics birthed in the '60s, which stressed altruism and good government, has been displaced by an intellectual crudeness that was inherent in the modern American conservatism that began slouching toward Washington after the Republican convention in San Francisco in 1964.
Even if Kerry wins, this brutish political era will continue, in part because many Democratic political professionals have become would-be imitators eager to reassert their party's prior title to ruthless, "hardball" politics. More important in a causative sense, however, are deeper sociological factors.
For one, the United States is in the throes of one of its periodic religious "awakenings."
For another, we have seen the emergence of a new quasi-journalism driven by technology and marked by a politically driven shift in the nature of "facts."
Also, the GOP has shown that it knows how to trump economic self-interest and socioeconomic class as prime determinants of party affiliation.
Finally, the "anything-to-win" mentality, while always a feature of hard-fought democratic elections, has been perfected by the Bush family into a monumentally amoral strategic doctrine.
I have no argument with the term "Culture Wars" as a catch-all term for these developments. But constant use of the jargon term implies that we are in the midst of some transient contest between the Wal-Mart Baptists and the Academic Secularists. That inhibits analysis of a trend-setting change of historic importance in the nation.
Let's review some of the points cited above:
* RELIGION: Few cycles are more prominent in colonial and postrevolutionary history than that of frenzied national revivals. But in the past, the contending parties - the Presbyterians, Calvinists, Anglicans and Catholics of colonial times - eventually suppressed their legalistic, rulemaking impulses in favor of securing spiritual space.
But today, the divisions and the tolerance of a new religious monolith, "God's People," as they call themselves, have broken down. With the succession of born-again or ostentatiously religious presidents - Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the younger Bush - a united American laity can reach a goal that eluded them as denominational separatists. That goal is the legislation of social, education, sexual and medical standards that reflect theologically based cultural norms.
* JOURNALISM: Facts may not be entirely dead as shaping forces in American public life, but the vital signs are not good. Students of the press have tended to focus on two villains - corporate ownership of newspaper chains and the speed of the broadcast, cable and digital news cycle. But the journalistic taste buds of the nation are numbed for more complex reasons.
The most dangerous trait of the Internet is not merely its speed, but its creation of demand and credulity for unverified information. Perhaps for the first time since invention of the printing press, a new information technology has become more efficient at spreading disinformation than knowledge.
Propaganda, speculation and rumor once traveled in compartments of the print and broadcast world. Now all move with viral speed through all venues of communication. The decline of critical powers among the generation conditioned by this information environment has been viral, as well.
In another amazing shift, a foreigner, Rupert Murdoch, and his handpicked chairman of Fox News, the campaign strategist Roger Ailes, have become the most important standard setters in the nation's political journalism.
In its most triumphant period, the American press invented the postwar model of journalism that sought to be both fair and analytical and that was admired globally throughout the last half of the 20th century. Fox - and its enablers on the comedy news shows and among neoconservative intellectuals - have destroyed public trust in that traditional model.
Murdoch is open about his goal. He wants the same prize he got in Britain for facilitating Margaret Thatcher's election - a deregulated broadcast environment. Any thought that a second Bush administration or Michael Powell's FCC is going to deny his ambition is delusional.
* THE BUSHES: My generation of political reporters bear some responsibility for this ethically bankrupt dynasty. We helped glorify big-city rogues like Richard Daley and urban icons like Rudy Giuliani as colorful character actors in the drama of democracy.
We treated George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, even Goldwater and Reagan as comic regional curiosities. We did not predict that their operatives - think of Lee Atwater as Exhibit A - would make their DNA the dominant strain in America's political gene pool.
Another reason that America's voters and journalists were lulled into underestimating the Bush threat was that it came from an unexpected source. We expected venality from buccaneers like the Kennedys or lurkers from the fringe like Nixon. Who could have guessed that such a proud, powerful know-nothing as George W. Bush would be a scion of the great Industrial Age fortunes and a graduate of our second oldest university?
Am I overestimating the process of debasement we've seen in 2004? I hope so, but look at the most salient trends of this campaign. Bush campaign surrogates falsely attack Kerry's patriotism and then the president accuses him of "dividing the country" when he defends himself.
Kerry points out Bush's failure to secure Iraqi explosives and Cheney snarls that Kerry is trying to "scare the American people." Thousands of Americans are denied flu vaccine because of bumbling in the Bush Cabinet, and Bush warns that Kerry will destroy our health delivery system. Bush pledges to end feuding in Washington, and the capital is frozen in a partisan gridlock that neither Reagan nor Tip O'Neill could have imagined.
The Bush-Cheney-Rove technique of treating any reasoned response as an opponent's attempt to divide America has proven so effective that momentous issues - the dismantling of federal environmental enforcement, Halliburton's war profiteering, the Vietnam-like disenchantment of professional military officers - are inadequately addressed on the stump or in campaign coverage.
Will a Kerry victory bring the promised end to the much-discussed division among the American electorate? Just last week I heard Sen. John Edwards promise that it would if he and Kerry can do the job. I'm not sure that will happen with the best of wills. For even if the Bush family dynasty gets chopped off at this last, best chance, the underlying dynamics that created this historical moment - religion run amok, informational decay in the mass media and in the appetites of its audience, a campaign environment of insulting irrationality - will still be in place.
Howell Raines is the former executive editor of the New York Times and former political editor of the St. Petersburg Times.
9:56 PM
Get out there and vote for Kerry. Here's another reminder why, from a long-time Republican.
A FORMER REPUBLICAN SENATOR FOR KERRY 'Frightened to death' of Bush
By Marlow W. CookSpecial to The Courier-Journal
I shall cast my vote for John Kerry come Nov 2.
I have been, and will continue to be, a Republican. But when we as a party send the wrong person to the White House, then it is our responsibility to send him home if our nation suffers as a result of his actions. I fall in the category of good conservative thinkers, like George F. Will, for instance, who wrote: "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and having thought, to have second thoughts."
I say, well done George Will, or, even better, from the mouth of the numero uno of conservatives, William F. Buckley Jr.: "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war."
First, let's talk about George Bush's moral standards.
In 2000, to defeat Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — a man who was shot down in Vietnam and imprisoned for over five years — they used Carl Rove's "East Texas special." They started the rumor that he was gay, saying he had spent too much time in the Hanoi Hilton. They said he was crazy. They said his wife was on drugs. Then, to top it off, they spread pictures of his adopted daughter, who was born in Bangladesh and thus dark skinned, to the sons and daughters of the Confederacy in rural South Carolina.
To show he was not just picking on Republicans, he went after Sen. Max Cleland from Georgia, a Democrat seeking re-election. Bush henchmen said he wasn't patriotic because Cleland did not agree 100 percent on how to handle homeland security. They published his picture along with Cuba's Castro, questioning Cleland's patriotism and commitment to America's security. Never mind that his Republican challenger was a Vietnam deferment case and Cleland, who had served in Vietnam, came home in a wheel chair having lost three limbs fighting for his country. Anyone who wants to win an election and control of the legislative body that badly has no moral character at all.
We know his father got him in the Texas Air National Guard so he would not have to go to Vietnam. The religious right can have him with those moral standards. We also have Vice President Dick Cheney, who deferred his way out of Vietnam because, as he says, he "had more important things to do."
I have just turned 78. During my lifetime, we have sent 31,377,741 Americans to war, not including whatever will be the final figures for the Iraq fiasco. Of those, 502,722 died and 928,980 came home without legs, arms or what have you.
Those wars were to defend freedom throughout the free world from communism, dictators and tyrants. Now Americans are the aggressors — we start the wars, we blow up all the infrastructure in those countries, and then turn around and spend tax dollars denying our nation an excellent education system, medical and drug programs, and the list goes on. ...
I hope you all have noticed the Bush administration's style in the campaign so far. All negative, trashing Sen. John Kerry, Sen. John Edwards and Democrats in general. Not once have they said what they have done right, what they have done wrong or what they have not done at all.
Lyndon Johnson said America could have guns and butter at the same time. This administration says you can have guns, butter and no taxes at the same time. God help us if we are not smart enough to know that is wrong, and we live by it to our peril. We in this nation have a serious problem. Its almost worse than terrorism: We are broke. Our government is borrowing a billion dollars a day. They are now borrowing from the government pension program, for apparently they have gotten as much out of the Social Security Trust as it can take. Our House and Senate announce weekly grants for every kind of favorite local programs to save legislative seats, and it's all borrowed money.
If you listened to the President confirming the value of our war with Iraq, you heard him say, "If no weapons of mass destruction were found, at least we know we have stopped his future distribution of same to terrorists." If that is his justification, then, if he is re-elected our next war will be against Iran and at the same time North Korea, for indeed they have weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, which they have readily admitted. Those wars will require a draft of men and women. ...
I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep that secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Those of you who are fiscal conservatives and abhor our staggering debt, tell your conservative friends, "Vote for Kerry," because without Bush to control the Congress, the first thing lawmakers will demand Kerry do is balance the budget.
The wonderful thing about this country is its gift of citizenship, then it's freedom to register as one sees fit. For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction.
If we are indeed the party of Lincoln (I paraphrase his words), a president who deems to have the right to declare war at will without the consent of the Congress is a president who far exceeds his power under our Constitution.
I will take John Kerry for four years to put our country on the right path.
The writer, a Republican formerly of Louisville, was Jefferson County judge from 1962-1968 and U.S. senator from Kentucky from 1968-1975.
6:31 PM
I hope you are all registered and ready to vote.
Here's info you can print out and take with you, if you anticipate challenges or trouble. This is courtesy of truemajority.com.
A QUICK GUIDE TO AVOIDING PROBLEMS AT THE POLLS
Before you go to the polls:
Find your correct polling place. Click here: http://www.mypollingplace.com. They are getting crushed with requests, so if you don't get through right away, try again later or just call your local Board of Elections.
To avoid confusion and save time, study the ballot. Check your local newspaper for a copy.
Find a form of identification to bring to the polls. Unless you are a first-time voter who registered by mail without sending identification, you have the right to vote without providing ID. However, to avoid hassles just bring ID anyway. A government-issued ID is best (such as a driver's license), but you can also bring a utility bill, paycheck stub, phone bill, or similar papers with your name on them. If your ID does not have a signature, bring two forms of identification.
Allow plenty of time to vote, preferably in the morning. There may be lines. Bring something to read. If the line is really long, consider getting a box of donuts or cookies to share to lighten the mood. Someone might be challenging voters just to slow things up in the hope that long lines will scare away voters. If this is happening, let folks in line know so it stiffens their resolve to stay and cast vote.
Learn your voting rights:
Even if you are not on the voter list, federal law gives you the right to a "provisional ballot." Insist on one and vote. A regular ballot is preferable, so you should do whatever you can to get a regular ballot first, like going home and getting a second form of identification or going to the polling place where you are definitely on the voter list. But rather than be turned away, demand a provisional ballot.
You have the right to vote if you are in line when the polls close. Stay in line until you vote.
Find out if your employer will give you time off to vote, if necessary.
At the polls:
If you are confused about ANYTHING or feel you are being harassed, ask the official poll workers to help. Do not rely on fellow citizens for advice about the ballot, how the voting machines work, or why you are not on the rolls. If someone is challenging your right to vote, ask the poll workers to intervene.
If someone harasses you, don't cause a ruckus. Just ignore the harasser, report it to a poll worker, and let the voting process continue. What kinds of things might somebody try? Well, in the past people have insisted on more ID than is required or argued that someone is at the wrong polling place.
If something goes wrong, document it. Write down what happened, when, and descriptions of the people involved, including their names, if you can get them. If you have a camera or camera-phone, take pictures.
Report voting problems to an organization ready to respond to problems at the polls:
Common Cause: Call 1-866-MYVOTE1. This is a hotline you can call to report any voting problems.
1-866-OUR-VOTE. This hotline has been set up by a coalition of nonpartisan groups to deal with the most serious problems on Election Day. They have hundreds of lawyers standing by to immediately respond to the most egregious problems. 1-866-OUR-VOTE is the "911" of voter suppression hotlines. Please don't call unless your problem is serious enough that you have to talk to a lawyer immediately.
Contact the media. If something is going terribly wrong at a polling site and you have reported it to the folks above, you might want to then call local radio, television, and newspaper reporters. Often problems clear up quickly after a reporter arrives.
It's odd that it's come to this. But given how hard Americans have fought for the freedom to pick our government, it ought to take a lot more than these inconveniences and ham-handed attempts by desperate political operatives to dissuade us from casting a ballot. See you at the polls.
---------------------------------------------------------- What's On Your Ballot?
Elected offices are not the only things up for grabs on Nov. 2. This year, 163 statewide measures qualified for the ballot and are helping to frame policy debates for the progressive community, distinguish candidates, increase voter turnout and, of course, reform state law. Essential issues are at stake – from minimum wage increases in Florida and Nevada to medical malpractice caps in Oregon, Wyoming, Florida and Nevada, from renewable energy in Colorado to employer provided health care and stem cell research in California.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Go to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center's Initiative and Referendum 2004 Election Preview for a comprehensive look at this year's initiative landscape. It provides a breakdown of all qualified measures by state, in-depth analysis of major initiative issues and trends, states to watch in this election, and an analysis of how this election compares to past years. And check out BISC's In Your State Page to find out what's on the ballot in your state. Another great resource is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' special report on the fiscal implications of the state-level ballot measures. Also, if you're from Maine or Florida, go to the American Progress Action Fund to take immediate action in these states. VOTING – VOTER SUPPRESSION IN WEST VIRGINIA: In West Virginia, "calls from a cell phone were made to Eastern Panhandle democrats telling them...they wouldn't be able to vote on Election Day." After receiving the calls, "upset citizens called the voter registration office to make sure they were registered to vote [and] indeed they were." The calls were traced back to the "Eastern Panhandle Republican Headquarters." Republican spokesman Mary Diamond said that "The purpose of the calls is to make sure everyone is registered to vote. If they are, then great. That's exactly what we need."
11:12 AM
|
|
| |
|
|
|
LINKS
