GREEN SEPTEMBER

2007-01-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

2006-10-08T17:52:00.000-07:00

Final

2006-05-31T13:11:00.000-07:00

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This is the final post at Green September.

Our new home is here.

Now tell us how you really feel

2006-05-30T17:45:00.000-07:00

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I guess I'm not the only one who thinks Bush supporters are mentally ill.

Behold a Pale Horse...

2006-05-30T17:36:00.000-07:00

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"This is only the beginning. The message has spread from Damascus to Tehran that the future belongs to freedom, and we will not rest until the promise of liberty reaches every people in every nation."

George W. Bush
May 27, 2006

Bitter Harvest

2006-05-29T22:13:00.000-07:00

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Do you realize that no Iraqi death squads have ever burst into American homes and murdered women and children?

Do you realize that not one Iraqi bomb has ever killed a civilian here in America?

Do you realize that not one American child has ever gone hungry because of Iraq?

Do you realize that no Iraqi tanks or APC's have ever traveled on an American street?

Tell me again how our troops are defending our freedom.

Do you realize that the only reason the military of the United States is so massive is to give it the ability to occupy foreign countries? You think not? Tell me, considering our incredible technology, we couldn't defend our borders against invasion without the Army and Marines and with less than half of the Air Force or Navy. Or for that matter, the nuclear deterrent should suffice against invasion. Just ask Israel.

The massive manpower is for one reason only:

Occupation. Control.

Only occupation does not work and no people who want to determine their own destinies can be controlled by force of arms.

A lesson of history that seems to have to taught again and again.

Don't believe me? Ask an expert on war.

Do you realize that to a large portion of the world's population America is the terrorist?

Do you realize that a man who thinks God speaks to him directly and tells him which countries to invade, is controlling the fate of the world?

Do you realize Peak Oil will, within our lifetimes, radically alter every aspect of our lives?

Do you realize that fact alone guarantees that revolution, peaceful or not, is coming?

Do realize that this is why all of the greedy pigs all over the world are hoarding their fortunes and breaking every rule they can to make more more more because they know that business as usual will be over soon?

Do you realize, America, that light is changing to shadow faster than you can say Haditha?

Do you realize that it's much too late to ask for forgiveness and understanding and that all is left is to reap what we have sown?

And oh, what a bitter harvest it will be.

Memorial Day

2006-05-28T12:18:00.000-07:00

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Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind. War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

-John F. Kennedy

I did something last night I seldom do.

I censored myself here on this blog. I had posted a follow up comment to the ever-persistent Sargeant Stehling. I let fly a lot of frustration. I let the comment stand for a while but I was troubled by it. I'm still really not sure why. I deleted it.

I have a policy concerning the things I write. I never write anything about anyone that I wouldn't say to that person face to face. I don't believe in hiding behind the page. That's why I eventually posted my real name and, as soon as I can get my digital camera back from my ex, I'm posting my picture here so you can put a face to the words. Not having to worry about my family being caught in the crossfire makes me more open as well.

I'm angry. I'm angry that we live in a society where questioning the military or not "supporting our troops" is akin to treason. I'm angry because I hear the old, "I'm against the war, but I support the troops."

What a bold moral stance that is. I hate murder but I support murderers.

When you get past all of the patriotism, politics, and myths surrounding war, you are simply left with frightened young men killing other frightened young men because someone they never met, who does not know their name, thinks it's a good idea.

You then, with malice of forethought, take a gun, or a plane or a bomb and go kill as many young men as you can.

And then you are celebrated for it.

Murder. State sanctioned, made palatable for the masses, cold-blooded murder.

And we are supposed to celebrate.

My favorite expression of brain disconnect is "You can only say those things because soldiers died for your freedom."

Yes, in the Revolutionary War. And that was started because very rich men didn't want to pay their taxes. Freedom for them meant freedom for business to prosper. The stuff about freedom and standing up to tyranny was for the masses doing the actual fighting.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we assisted the Russians in kicking the crap out of the Third Reich.

And I'm glad we stopped the Japanese war machine before it could do to more cities what it did to Nanking. But if you don't think that too was about money, you need to read more history. Saving lives was only a happy by-product of standing up to the Rising Sun.

I'm tired of the culture of war. The culture of murder.

I think violence has a place. Hell, I like competitive violence. When I was much younger, I boxed. And I will still watch a fight now and then. I've been in my share of actual fights. Lost some, won some. And it's always familiar: Anxious fear before, excitement and clarity during, exhausted exhilaration after. Sound like anything else you know? Well, without the fear.

Well, for some of us. Sorry Nemo :)

But violence is part of what we are. It's real. Primal. Channeled into competition where no one gets permanently injured or disfigured, it can a celebration of our old lizard brain part of our humanity.

But war is nothing to celebrate. Murder celebrated is mass insanity.

Happy Memorial Day.

Update: The story of the Haditha massacre is oozing out slowly:

Photographs taken by American military intelligence have provided crucial evidence that up to 24 Iraqis were massacred by marines in Haditha, an insurgent stronghold on the banks of the Euphrates. One portrays an Iraqi mother and young child, kneeling on the floor, as if in prayer. They have been shot dead at close range.
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The killings are emerging as the worst known American atrocity of the Iraq war. At least seven women and three children were among those killed. Witness accounts obtained by The Sunday Times suggest the toll of children may be as high as six. “This one is ugly,” a US military official said.

How, even in your darkest rage, do you....shoot.....children....at close range.

HOW?

It was Jessie Macbeth, on the grassy knoll, with a pipe wrench

2006-05-26T15:13:00.000-07:00

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That title is for all the fellow Clue fans out there.

It's been a fun week on the information frontier. I still have no idea whether or not Jessie Macbeth was a Ranger who served in Iraq.

But something very interesting has happened this week that has convinced me that there is more to this story than overzealous activists.

Fact: The video featuring Macbeth and his claims was posted on Information Clearing House on Sunday, May 21. I'm still working on where they got it, if it was through YouTube or what. It will be interesting to track down to say the least.

Fact: The investigation into the 2005 massacre at Haditha, has been underway for months.
This week it just happened to be noticed by the mainstream media and break very big. Hey, it was on Nightline last night. When something is on Nightline, rest assured it's been covered on the internet for months beforehand.

Fact: Steven A. Stehling shows up here on my blog claiming to be in the military not 24 hours after I post a link to ICH and Macbeth's video. He is shocked, shocked I say about how we lefty bloggers have been taken in by the traitorous Macbeth. "Sargeant Stehling" is later disproved as a fake. Now, I have no illusions about my place in the pecking order of the "blogosphere". Our readers are smart, loyal, and few. We are a nice little family and though our ideas and topics are often incendiary, I don't consider us much of a direct threat to the government. Bush and Rumsfeld don't go to bed at night worried about those kooks at Green September. Our ideas should scare the shit out of them though.
But all of a sudden, we've got our own military propaganda mouthpiece euipped with pretty good knowledge about munitions and what ribbon goes where on which uniform.

Now, the idea that Macbeth is some sort of dis-information plant by desperate military and political hacks is not without it's attraction. But the problem with that is if you're these guys, you know, Them. The ones behind the curtain. Assassinations, staged attacks, this, that, the other. If you're these guys, you release something like that and you wait. You wait for critical mass. You wait for lots of blogs to trumpet it. You wait tfor the MSM to get their slow and stupid paws on it. Then you reveal it to be a hoax. In military parlance you wait for your enemy to enter the killzone before you detonate your claymores. See "Sargeant Stehling", I know military things too.

So the logical conclusion, and the most troubling, is that this guy, Jessie Macbeth, may be the real thing.

May be the real thing.

In this little info-war that seems to have erupted, nothing and no one can be taken at strictly face value. Hell, I've been sleeping with one eye open because I'm no longer sure If I'm trustworthy. It's the eyes. I have shifty eyes.

All kidding aside, this is interesting, but until there can be something like proof either way, that's all it is. An interesting little aside in a big 'ol war of ideas.

Unfortunately while this war of ideas rages, the real one is still killing innocents for no reason.

First Fallujah now Haditha. These are just the crimes we know about. There just happened to be brave souls with cameras about. How many of these little excursions into non-judicial punishment have occured that we aren't seeing?

I could ask Jessie Macbeth.

If I could figure out just who the hell he is.

Update: Well, bless my soul. Someone has posted Jessie's DD214 (standard discharge papers) on the Internet. The right blogs are already all over it. Imagine, the typeface is different on different parts. Shocking!

I don't know if this is real or not. If it was posted by Macbeth, he's a fraud. Even I can see lots of problems with this document.

Let the feeding freny begin:

http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?entry=3955

http://hotair.com/archives/the-blog/2006/05/26/jesse-macbeth-posts-his-discharge-form/

Way too loyal opposition

2006-05-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

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Hayden confirmed as CIA director.

I've highlighted the names I found of interest, including Harry Reid, the fucking Minority Leader, voting to confirm and Specter, a Republican voting no.
The Senate of the United States of America has voted to turn the Central Intelligence Agency over to a man who has been in charge of spying on Americans for years.

What could go wrong ?

Read it and weep.

Akaka (D-HI), Yea, Baucus (D-MT), Yea, Bayh (D-IN), Nay, Biden (D-DE), Yea, Bingaman (D-NM), Yea, Boxer (D-CA), Not Voting, Byrd (D-WV), Yea, Cantwell (D-WA), Nay, Carper (D-DE), Yea, Clinton (D-NY), Nay, Conrad (D-ND), Not Voting, Dayton (D-MN), Nay, Dodd (D-CT), Nay, Dole (R-NC), Not Voting, Dorgan (D-ND), Nay, Durbin (D-IL), Nay, Feingold (D-WI), Nay, Feinstein (D-CA), Yea, Harkin (D-IA), Nay, Inhofe (R-OK), Yea, Inouye (D-HI), Not Voting, Jeffords (I-VT), Yea, Johnson (D-SD), Yea, Kennedy (D-MA), Nay, Kerry (D-MA), Nay, Kohl (D-WI), Yea, Landrieu (D-LA), Yea, Lautenberg (D-NJ), Yea, Leahy (D-VT), Yea, Levin (D-MI), Yea, Lieberman (D-CT), Yea, Lincoln (D-AR), Yea, Menendez (D-NJ), Nay, Mikulski (D-MD), Yea, Murray (D-WA), Yea, Nelson (D-FL), Yea, Nelson (D-NE), Yea, Obama (D-IL), Nay, Pryor (D-AR), Yea, Reed (D-RI), Yea, Reid (D-NV), Yea, Rockefeller (D-WV), Not Voting, Salazar (D-CO), Not Voting, Sarbanes (D-MD), Yea, Schumer (D-NY), Yea, Specter (R-PA), Nay, Stabenow (D-MI), Yea, Thune (R-SD), Not Voting, Wyden (D-OR), Nay

Who Am I ?

2006-05-25T20:29:00.000-07:00

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From Nemo in our comments section. I thought it needed amplifying:

....And it makes one inherently dangerous to those blustering, insanely egotistical power brokers. I have no money -- you cannot take it away; I have no public reputation -- you cannot smear me; I have no political ambitions -- you cannot thwart me; in fact, I have no identity -- you can never defeat me. For whom would you overcome if you even tried? "NO ONE!" I am just a voice of truth that cannot be silenced.-- a nameless, faceless enemy of the tyranny that oppresses us.

Jessie Macbeth

2006-05-22T00:34:00.000-07:00

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Jessie Macbeth, former Army Ranger and now Iraq Veteran Against War is speaking out about his experiences in Iraq.

I have no words.

UPDATE: Pepperspray Productions, the production company that filmed and distributed the interview, seems to be a legitimate non-profit ( virulently non-profit) grass roots, indymedia production company.

The headquarters of Iraq Veterans Against the War only operates on Tuesdays and Thursdays (???) so I'm calling them back tomorrow for a statement and to try and verify that Mr. Macbeth is a former member of the American military and that he is a current member of IVAW. If possible, though a long shot, I'm going to try and see if I can get contact information for him and speak to him myself.

I will be working to get a partial transcript or at least some relevant quotes posted for those not able to access the video. If anyone else wants to beat me to the punch on that one, feel free.

Update: Iraq Veterans Against the War's phone lines are jammed. I guess they are a tad busy today.

Update:

Still many questions. Still taking everything with a "grain of salt".

From both sides.

This from the blog Just Citizens ( justcitizens.blogspot.com) Thanks ML

Today, the Army ran a check on Mr. MacBeth’s credentials. It turns out, not surprisingly to anybody with half a mind, that Mr. MacBeth has NO Army service record. Anywhere. Period. This is a direct quote given to me by Army spokesman John Boyce:

“Initial research by the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg shows no Soldier with the name of Jesse Macbeth having ever been assigned to the Special Forces or the Army Rangers -- which are, in fact, two separate disciplines. This appears to be some sort of hoax. No Soldier by that name at Fort Lewis to our knowledge, in the past, either. Of course, the line about "go into the Army or go to jail" is vintage TV script not heard since the 1960s. There are also numerous wear and appearance issues with the Soldier's uniform -- a mix of foreign uniforms with the sleeves rolled up like a Marine and a badly floppy tan beret worn like a pastry chef. Of course, the allegations of war crimes are vague, as are the awards the Soldier allegedly received.”

Time will tell. This as high stakes as you can get. If, if Mr. Macbeth is telling the truth and his story can be verified, everyone involved in this little dance knows it's the equivalent of The Pentagon Papers and The Nuremberg Tribunals wrapped around a ticking nuclear weapon.

If he is not, then this disgusting hoax seriously damages the search for justice in Iraq.

And on one hand I will be very, very thankful that it was a lie, because whatever philosophical differences I may have with the U.S. military, and they are legion, they don't deserve this monsterous slander. It's enough that war crimes have and are being committed. Fuck, the entire war is a war crime. But this shit does....not...help.

and on the other... dear flaming Jesus help those folks at IVAW , Seattle Indymedia and Pepperspray productions because I don't like to be lied to....

But as I say. We shall see. I'm still a bit curious at the overnight PR blitz by the military and it's defenders.

UPDATE: Now it seems our Mr. Macbeth has a criminal record for assault and check fraud. Also he's not really....drum roll....ONE OF US!!!!

No, it seems he's one of them. A "raghead" to quote one of the astute observers at that site. Note: Anyone who uses the word "raghead" would be quite comfortable using words like "nigger" and "wetback". In other words, racist scum.

Still no magic discharge papers from Macbeth that would put an end to all of this. If he is in fact who he says he is. Because that's really the bottom line. Dig up whatever you want to about him, if, if he actually served in Iraq with the Rangers, that's all I need to know.

ML has been all over this, I wouldn't have been able to follow it so quickly without him. My thanks.

Intelligence and Cruelty

2006-05-21T05:56:00.000-07:00

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(Posted by Again on 5/22/06)

After having tried to answer on different places, I decided to go on top of Green September with this item. I guess it's worth discussion.

Some days ago, I claimed, that true intelligence can't be cruel. I claimed that to imagine suffering, you would try to avoid it because sooner or later it might be you who had to suffer. I really said:

"If you try to imagine how pain feels, I can't believe that common people can do it unto others..."

First, B couldn't believe that. Then JMF told me that his observations of daily life wouldn't bolster that: "I also find little to inversely correlate intelligence with cruelty." On the other side, Robert supported me with his words: "It's as if the floodgates of my emotions have been opened and flowing from me is not a tide of anger or bitter opposition, but hope. Compassion. Understanding. Great sadness at what I see." Robert talks about emotions, but emotions are part of our information processing system (a very important part). Robert tells you what the ancient people thought about "ratio", the ability to understand: the core of this ability is warmth. That's why the ancient philosophies are often so hard to understand for us, because they respected power as defender of justice, strength as defender of independence, and ratio as a basically "warm, heartful" ability to understand the "motherly" reality and the humans around us. But that's just an aside.

To B I replied, that the "great imagination" of the cruelest people she had known wasn't surely "great" enough to make them imagine that they themselves could be the victims of pain. They simply think they are too strong forever to need help against cruelty.

Yesterday I found a link, supporting my argument: the ads of Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) which are aimed at the American masses to convince them that Global Warming is not a danger, but something "useful".

We call it Life

(Interestingly, the link "Find out more about CEI's work on global warming." doesn't work)

Actually it is so brutally stupid, that for educated people those ads looks like "sailing close to the wind of brainwashing of people"

I guess there are many "intelligent" people working at CEI, with high IQ's and salaries, knowing exactly how to manipulate the stupid masses. But do you really think that those "high intelligent" people are intelligent enough to understand that Global Warming will not only kill the poor, the others far away, that Global Warming will reach each and every point and person on this (formerly beautiful, blue) Earth - even themselves?

Can you call suicide based on greed "intelligence"?

So the main question seems to be: What is intelligence? Do I employ an atypically specialized understanding of intelligence - or am I just more precise? And consequently, as the majority, am I only following Mark Twain's advice: "Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect"?

So first "enable the interface" of communication by precise definitions of terms: Intelligence is the whole system of information processing. The whole system of detecting, evaluating, storing and retrieving information - considering that, every cruelty bases on intelligence, that's perfectly right. But considering that, each plant is intelligent, each fly and fish, because they also do information processing using the knowledge stored in the engine of their cells and their DNA

And - just as an aside - on that level, brute force, war and violence are usual strategies of those "intelligences" - mothers eat their husbands and children eat their mothers (spider), tribes make slaves (ants). Because brute force is a very "easy and direct" way to get what you want. But force is just a "differential" way, a simple step-by-step forwarding of action without knowing the direction where it will lead to. You can change your situation for the special moment according to your wishes, but you can't foresee where all the energy of your used force will spread and how and when it will come back to you - you change the moment, but you don't know what will come back to you the day after: sowing the wind without considering the storm.

"Force is all-conquering, but its victories are short-lived." - Abraham Lincoln

The passive information processing system of those low-level intelligence uses a simply strategy to survive the lack of ability to foresee the consequences: masses. It creates masses of individuals, so that the lethal mistakes which inevitably results from low intelligence doesn't kill the whole species.

And it works fine. Because intelligence is, as everything in physics of conservation of energy and momentum, a question of "earn and burn": The gain/cost function of intelligence tells you, that you have to invest something to develop more intelligence and that this investment has to be awarded by better decisions, which can be easily experienced by the success of your decisions.

Success.

The next important term. Actually the real important term.

Because the first goal of any intelligence (information processing system) is success, not high intelligence. That's the reason why flies exist until today, despite the fact, that human intelligence is high enough to fly to the moon, while they only can fly to the next pile of shit.

Since success is not only a question of intelligence, but also of the environment, there really exist environments where passive information processing, faster and more specialized, works better than intelligence - where stupidity wins.

In stable environments, passive information processing systems are often more successful than active systems, because the former are faster, more specialized, while on the other hand in quickly changing environments, active information processing, more flexible, able to handle new situations, is more successful.

Actually, as B and JMF had observed, there are often situations when the slow but flexible active information processing, able to develop "high intelligence" on an individual level, is beaten by the fast passive information processing type "don't think, just act":

Don't Call Me Clever
"a limited intellect is usually beneficial; and creativity is often the last resort for losers."

So how can it be, that you, B and JMF, talk about very successful people, being cruel while behaving according to sophisticated plans?

Even that's not what I call "true intelligence". True intelligence is the highest developed ability to process enough information to foresee not just the next step, not just the next day or week or year:

Apes can plan ahead

I talk about the last progress of development: only to be found in humans - the ability to foresee the next decades.

And the next link to support the difference between those degrees of high intelligence:

Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees
"Human beings routinely help others to achieve their goals, even when the helper receives no immediate benefit and the person helped is a stranger. Such altruistic behaviors (toward non-kin) are extremely rare evolutionarily."

But to be honest - not even the modern theories of Evolutionary Anthropology could convince me, many years ago, that the "self-evidence" of the almighty power of the law of the strongest (we all believe so uncritically in) is just...

a cultural lie.

Why?

Because the first cultures of humankind were egalitarian. Not primitive, but egalitarian and able to develop Stonehenge and most of the inventions, we so often think to be invented in the last centuries. And because egalitarian cultures support free communication, they support science.

Science supports change, creates environments needing more and more intelligence, soon needing more intelligence than the average IQ 100 offers. Therefore the reaction of humankind was to regress. Everytime civilization starts to conquer the stars, dark ages follow.

Because progress means change, most people try to avoid it - preferring the stability of dark ages to the unsecure flexibility of freedom of thoughts.

Problem is, that won't work one more time - humankind has reached a point where it changed the whole Earth, not just the environment of a city as in former times. Humankind changed everything on our wonderful blue planet in a speed never imagined before.

As in the birthtime of humankind, climate will change so rapidly, that only "the weapon of the losers" is able to protect a species.

As it has done 5 million years ago, when the smallest, weakest hominid species had survived - the one using tools and developing a social consciousness to protect the group: Together we succeed where one alone must fail.

Just a last word to my claim, that common people can't stand the suffering of other humans - which seems to be, as B rightly stated, pure nonsense when you consider the cruelty of the Nazi-Regime...

But there is this little condition I talked about: Those people were allowed to look away. They could escape the suffering.

As the American people did with the suffering of the Vietnamese.

Until they had to look at the picture of a crying little girl.

Then they stopped the war.

Razor

2006-05-20T17:29:00.000-07:00

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For Ken O'Keefe. Brother, you were so right.

You never know where you will wind up when you begin an adventure. When you step out of all that you know and begin anew.

No long ago, I posted Razor here at Green September. I wrote about how I was simplifying my life in voluntary and involuntary ways. I sensed a change in myself and wanted to share my thoughts with the readers here. I had assumed that time and circumstances were conspiring to make me a harder person. Angrier. Focused. Sharp like a razor.

I am surprised to find this is not true. It's as if the floodgates of my emotions have been opened and flowing from me is not a tide of anger or bitter opposition, but hope. Compassion. Understanding. Great sadness at what I see.

Is this the razor?

I've always held in contempt the "give peace a chance" sort of liberals who refuse to fight their enemies. And it's been my experience that turning the other cheek will simply get you struck yet again.

But the slowly dawning idea is: So?

What if you are struck again? What if you are lied to, beaten, imprisoned and killed?

Will returning that evil make it all better? Or will an example of unfearing dedication to principles of peace and cooperation even unto shame, seeming defeat, and death teach a more powerful lesson to those that hate you so deeply.

I'm not talking about not standing up and defending those that cannot defend themselves. I'm not talking about mindless pacifism. Harm the weak or the innocent within the reach of my arm and the lesson will be swift, painful, and permanent.

But to return attacks upon my own self for speaking my conscience with attacks on those who simply don't know any better or more importantly don't care, seems a waste of life's hard-won lessons.

For whatever reason, I was given a great opportunity or made the opportunity myself, however you wish to look at it, when I un-programmed myself from the lifetime of lies and saw the world in it's true and savage reality.

I have learned the lesson. As have many of you. Perhaps it's time to teach the lesson to others with truth and hope and not with hands raised for fighting.

These are, of course, not new or revolutionary ideas. Great leaders of the past have used the principles of non-violence to accomplish what couldn't have been done in decades of armed conflict. Their names are rightfully whispered with awe. I live in the heart of where one of the greatest non-violent struggles in history happened. I've stood in the place where MLK was martyred. I've walked the streets and spoken to those wistful souls who marched beside him. You know when they are thinking of him. Their eyes go far away in a life-affirming thousand yard stare. The opposite of the bitter glint in the eyes of those that have killed their fellows on the fields of battle.

The truth of it is this. This fight against the insane nationalism and the unleashed war machines of America cannot be accomplished by the way of the gun. Just as the struggle in Palestine will not be won by bombs and children with stones in their hands and hatred in their eyes. Just as I have to learn to let go of my own stubborn pride and my need for "payback" whatever the hell that is, so too do the members of the anti-war movement here and the soldiers in the struggles abroad have to learn to let go of the anger and stand armed only with the knowledge that this is the only way to bring peace, even unto death.

Imagine if you will, with perseverance and time, we raise an army to march on Washington. Our guns and our bombs meet their much more powerful guns and bombs in an orgy of blood that the entire world sees. Blaze of glory and all that. Right there we justify all that they think about us. We only have hatred. We are literally no different than they are, with their hatred and willingness to kill for what they believe.

Or

We, thousands march on Washington. No weapons. No violence in our minds and hearts. We occupy buildings, streets, parks and refuse to leave until America withdraws it's troops from Iraq. We are arrested, gassed, beaten and put in large cages. The city, if there are enough of us, is shut down. The courts overwhelmed with thousands of cases of disorderly conduct, if in fact they give us trials. We are in jail.

But the whole world is watching.

More people show up. More buildings and streets occupied. Some of the jailed are released and go right the hell back out to lie down in the intersections, for this is what we have sworn ourselves to until they jail us permanently, kill us, or we win. Imagine tens of thousands of political prisoners. Their families and peace organizations from here in America and all over the world clamoring, tying up switchboards. Imagine students and activists from all across the globe converging on Washington for what has become the largest peaceful resistance in history.

And the whole world is watching.

Imagine a thousand campfires on the Washington mall. Imagine the capital of the United States under peaceful siege until our demands are met. Imagine the panic of the Bush administration when they realize that this won't go away.

These are big dreams. Big plans. But they begin right there in the human heart.

To do this simply requires will. The will to walk away from your life until the struggle is won. Jobs, careers, education would all have to be put on hold for perhaps months. You would have to be willing to be marked with a criminal record for life for repeated acts of civil disobedience.

Are you willing? All across the Internet I keep hearing "We must do something, these atrocities cannot continue."

Here is the way of peace. Here is a way to fight the powerful in front of the whole world. If you have the courage. It's time to put up or shut up.

This is the Second American Revolution, if only we have the guts to fight it with our hands not raised in anger, but lowered in peace.

I'm posting this in various places around the web. I'm a man with limited means with a blog. All I have is my willingness to go, to leave behind what little I have for a chance to change the future. Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, George Clooney, George Soros, Code Pink, Amnesty International and anyone else with the means to make this happen, get me a small amount of funding and I'll get you an army.

Robert Keef
May 20, 2006

2006-05-20T09:17:00.000-07:00

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Sedition

In law, acts or words tending to upset the authority of a government. The scope of the offense was broad in early common law, which even permitted prosecution for a remark insulting to the king. Although there have been several statutes in the United States forbidding seditious utterances and writings, the protection guaranteed to speech and press by the First Amendment to the Constitution has made them difficult to enforce except during periods of great national stress. The Sedition Act of 1798 generated so much opposition (see Alien and Sedition Acts) that similar statutes were not enacted until the 20th cent. During World War I the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) punished speeches and writings that interfered with the war effort or caused contempt for the government. Vaguely worded and broadly interpreted, they resulted in over 2,000 prosecutions, mostly against radicals and the radical press. The Smith Act of 1940, restricted in scope to the advocacy of violence against the government, was invoked only infrequently during World War II, though it was later used successfully to prosecute Communist party leaders, as in Dennis v. United States (1951). The libel decision of Sullivan v. New York Times (1964), by granting special protection to criticism of public officials, largely eliminated what remained of the crime of sedition in the United States.

Treason

In law, treason is the crime of disloyalty to one's nation or state. A person who betrays the nation of their citizenship and/or reneges on an oath of loyalty and in some way willfully cooperates with an enemy, is considered to be a traitor. Oran's Dictionary of the Law (1983) defines treason as: "...[a]...citizen's actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation]." In many nations, it is also often considered treason to attempt or conspire to overthrow the government, even if no foreign country is aided or involved by such an endeavour.

When the government no longer obeys the law. When innocent bystanders are imprisoned and tortured. When international treaties are ignored. When citizens are spied upon, harassed, and imprisoned for simply disagreeing with these crimes. When an entire nation refuses to see the cowardly immorality of it's fear and ignorance-driven policies, people of conscience have no choice but to defy the outlaw regime. When those in authority consider themselves above the law, there is no law.

The criminal Bush administration must be removed.

If this is treason, if this is sedition, so be it.

Non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.

-Mohandas K. Ghandi

Do you make any overseas calls?

2006-05-19T17:09:00.000-07:00

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Well, I had an incredibly Orwellian moment today.

BellSouth, with whom I have kept my phone service because Qwest doesn't cover my area, called me up.

They just wanted to do a check of the services I had signed up for. I've had my account for less than a month and have yet to receive my first bill, so I figured this was all just SOP.

Yes, I have a phone, yes I have DSL through BellSouth because the fine people at Comcast want to charge twice what BellSouth charges for Internet service, and yes I'm happy with the DSL Extreme even though I didn't order it but I'm now spoiled by being able to download tons of lesbian porn in the blink of an eye, so I must have it. Damn you BellSouth.

Then Debbie, who had a suspiciously heavy Indian accent for a "Debbie", asked oh so innocently, "Do you make overseas calls?"

"What the hell..." I thought to myself. Then a very cold feeling slid into my chest and sat there stealing the sunny May warmth from the room.

Debbie probably didn't know if I made overseas calls.

But Debbie's bosses knew. The NSA knew. General Michael Hayden, who reminds me of Toht, the sadistic Nazi from Raiders of the Lost Ark, knows if I make overseas calls.

Now I don't for one minute think that these folks know who the hell I am. Just a number among millions. But if I ever start making phone calls to acquaintances in Europe or the Middle East.....

I felt paranoid enough exchanging E-mails with a couple of students and faculty members at Beir Zeit University a while back. Oh yes, I've got a file somewhere. I'm sure of that.

But Debbie was waiting and the cold was spreading through me.

I have no doubt I would have received the same rote disclaimer that everyone else is receiving from the phone companies. "We at Dumbassicom respect your privacy and are safeguarding it while cooperating with the government's efforts to maintain security blah blah blah blabbidy fucking blah."

"No Debbie, I don't make overseas calls." I said.

"OK, thank you very much, and thank you for choosing BellSouth."

Don't mention it Debbie. The terror was all mine.

UPDATE: While running spell check before posting, everytime the checker ran across the word "BellSouth" it wanted to substitute "bullshit". It really just doesn't get any better than that.

The First Duty

2006-05-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

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The first duty of prisoners of war is to resist their captors.

It is the "War Against Terror". It follows that the prisoners taken in the conflict are POW's. It doesn't matter what sort of legal dodge you want to try such as holding your POW's away from American soil, or simply keeping them secret, both of which the cowardly and dishonorable Bush administration has done so as to have the appearance of legality.

War Against Terror.

Prisoners of war.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Prisoners wielding improvised weapons attacked military guards trying to save a detainee pretending to commit suicide at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the base commander said Friday. Six prisoners were injured. U.S. guards were lured Thursday evening into a dorm-like room at a minimum-security wing of the detention center by a detainee pretending to prepare to hang himself, said Navy Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr.

I hope they continue to resist. I hope they continue to make life as miserable as they possibly can for the cowards holding them.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/guantanamo_detainees

Ungrateful

2006-05-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

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Why are those damned Iraqis so ungrateful? Don't they know we're doing this for them?

Move Along

2006-05-19T00:19:00.000-07:00

_____________________________

Move Along

The All-American Rejects

Go ahead as you waste your days with thinking
When you fall everyone stands
Another day and you've had your fill of sinking
With the life held in your
Hands are shaking cold
These hands are meant to hold

Speak to me, when all you got to keep is strong
Move along, move along like I know you do
And even when your hope is gone
Move along, move along just to make it through
Move along
Move along

So a day when you've lost yourself completely
Could be a night when your life ends
Such a heart that will lead you to deceiving
All the pain held in your
Hands are shaking cold
Your hands are mine to hold

Speak to me, when all you got to keep is strong
Move along, move along like I know you do
And even when your hope is gone
Move along, move along just to make it through
Move along
(Go on, go on, go on, go on)

When everything is wrong, we move along
(Go on, go on, go on, go on)
When everything is wrong, we move along
Along, along, along

When all you got to keep is strong
Move along, move along like I know you do
And even when your hope is gone
Move along, move along just to make it through

(Go on, go on, go on, go on)
Right back what is wrong
We move along

B

2006-05-18T22:36:00.000-07:00

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B writes :

Robert, I guess I was the only one to read between the lines and frankly, I'm worried about you.

Again
and yes, that's the reason, why i say, that truly intelligent people can't be cruel - simply because intelligence needs imagination (simulation of different scenarios) and is able to understand how dangerous life can be...

I have to disagree with you. For once I think you're very wrong. Some of the most intelligent people I know are also some of the cruelest and yes, they have great imaginations which makes their cruelty even more deadly.

if you try to imagine how pain feels, i can't believe that common people can do it unto others...

What????? I've been rendered speechless at this point.

As to the rest, I don't give a flying fuck what happens in the US, who was warned, who's listening, any of it. I feel sorry for those of you who have no choice but to live there. I'm staying as far away from politics as I can because they're bullshit and nothing read can be believed, regardless of the source. That's my mindset these days. I may piss some of you off, but tough titty, ya know? I've had it.

With that, I take my leave and not of my senses which are just fine, thank you.

I'm fine B. I know that the tone and themes of that post can be taken many ways. Frankly that was one of the emotionally difficult things I've ever written, and I get your concern. I'm just using my own pain to try and get into the heads of people who have no hope and whose pain is more than I can ever understand. Dear God, I hope so anyway.

We lost Human because he didn't like the anti-Christian, anti-religious tone and couldn't stomach the idea of violence. I still miss him.

B, your path is your own and frankly a part of me wishes I could walk away too. Arguing politics is often a fools game, and I can be the biggest fool of all. I like to pretend I might have a noble reason for writing what I do but there are really only two reasons. There's an old 80's song with the line "you live for the fight when it's all that you've got." In a lot of ways my tilting at windmills is all that I have. That and the second reason for what I do. My dear Marcus. The transformation I made from right-wing nationalist to whatever I am now was sparked by the pictures of gunned down Palestinian children. Now instead of just shooting them, the "Chosen People" with our help, are starving them as well. I've since studied Bosnia, Rwanda, and learned far more about Nazi atrocities than are healthy for my psyche. And those are to name a few.

And the weak and helpless are always the victims. Always the children.

Not my son. Not while I have breath.

Either America will crumble under the weight of her own violent self-righteousness, or the combined powers of new alliances will wage war far beyond what anyone has known before. But the status quo cannot be maintained.

Or there is the unprecedented third option.

I think about what would have happened if, as an eighteen-year-old, I had access to the Internet. What if some guy with a blog had pointed out, in a way that I could understand and care about, the truth of the world around me. The lies of patriotism and war. The oppression I was party to by not taking a stand. The true history of the American Republic.

What if?

Could one person, his or her eyes opened, or a handful of people from around the world, told the truth for the first time, make a difference? If my mind can change, any mind can change. And that is not just a hollow aphorism, it's true.

There are many voices on the right and left going silent on the net.

Soon it will only be the ones who just can't let it go. The dangerous true believers on both sides. Am I fooling myself, that one person's ideas can make that great an impact?

Lech Walesa. Rosa Parks. Nelson Mandella.

People of great action, whose deeds I can never aspire to. It seems my weapon is to be words.

Thomas Paine, the rebel for the cause. Sequoya, who translated the words of my ancestors. John Lennon who's Imagine still inspires hope. Martin Luther whose words shook heaven and earth.

Maybe the fight was all they had.

In my small living room hangs a poster of one of the greatest moments ever captured on film. The nameless, faceless hero of Tiananmen Square. I look at it every day.

One man.

One human being.

One light in the dark.

B, your wisdom and experience can never be replaced. A great part of me goes with you. We have laughed and mourned together and we have seen the world aflame. I will miss you.

Go in peace, my dear sister.

The General's Pissed

2006-05-18T21:53:00.000-07:00

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I've seen Jesus' General meet some of the most outrageous right-wing propositions with his tongue firmly in cheek but this time he lets fly on the bastards.

With good reason

How Does It Feel To Die Alone In the Dark?

2006-05-17T18:07:00.000-07:00

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How does it feel to die alone in the dark?

Chained. Beaten. Starved then force-fed.

Thinking of your children, how old are they now?

Not even a picture of them to ease your passing,

How does it feel to die alone in the dark?

How does it feel to be surrounded in your last days and muffled hours

by people who hate you because they're told to and for no reason other.

Do you hallucinate? Your mother's kind face as she cleanses your wounds,

your father's strong hands hold you as he tells you it's going to be ok. You try to be strong

and not weep in front of your father. He smiles as his tears mingle with yours.

My sweet wife, I did nothing wrong. I hope someday you can mourn at my grave.

Will my family know when I have gone?

How does it feel to die alone in the dark?

Will there ever be justice for me? Or will I simply disappear?

Will my memory fade away as my life fades from me now?

Taken, my precious life, the one gift that can never be given back to me.

Taken by the good and the righteous, to defend something I never threatened.

And as I feel the life falling from me, I see my children, their hands outstretched.....

I smile through the tears, oh my babies, I've missed you so....

I see my family there, and beyond as light fills the room ......

How does it feel to die alone in the dark?

Oh yes! God forbid someone be upset!

2006-05-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

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I took the entire write-up from IMDB

The don't seem to allow permalinks in the news section, so thanks IMBD.

Poster for Movie About Guantánamo Prison Banned

Although the image pales in comparison with those published in the press and shown on TV of Americans torturing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a poster for a semi-documentary film about the Guantánamo prison in Cuba has been rejected by the Motion Picture Assn. of America. The poster, for the award-winning The Road to Guantánamo , showed a man hanging by his wrists with a burlap sack over his head. In an interview with today's (Wednesday) Washington Post, Howard Cohen, co-president of distributor Roadside Attractions, said he was told that a poster depicting torture was not appropriate for children to see. Gayle Osterberg, a spokesperson for the MPAA, further explained: "If it's a poster that's hanging in a theater, anyone who walks into that theater, regardless of what movie they've come to see, will be exposed to it." However, Cohen observed that some posters for horror movies were far more disturbing. "This is a film with a serious purpose, and this is the subject of the film itself, and the marketing materials were appropriate to the subject," he told the Post.The film is now due to open on June 23 with a poster showing only shackled hands and arms.

Statement

2006-05-16T23:43:00.000-07:00

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Now that we're at least getting some new people to come around and insult us here at Green September, I thought I might take some time to at least tell new folks what I mean when I talk about things like "truth" and "justice". My friends here have their own opinions and I'm sure they wouldn't mind sharing their ideas. Mine are often derided as being out of touch and utopian. But two things keep me going:

If you're gonna dream, dream big.

Better to light a candle than simply curse the dark.

1. The first order of business should be the immediate withdrawl of every member of the American armed forces in the Middle East, the closure of every base and the removal of every piece of equipment, and the immediate withdrawl of every naval vessel from the Persian Gulf.
Now of course this would place precious oil fields out of our influence or control. This is as it should be. Within hours of our withdrawl, the Saudi royal family would be forced to flee into exile. We would deal fairly with who ever winds up in charge of the region, including whatever government is evntually in charge of Iraq, which would no doubt be the Iranian government.
But the oil revenue would go to the people it belongs to. The people of the Middle East. Whether or not the oil revenue would be distributed fairly or not, is none of our damned business. Let the people who own the oil decide that. If America can't mind it's own business, well, how does twenty dollar a gallon gas grab you?
2. Cut off foreign aid to the country of Israel until such time as they pull back to pre-1967 borders, recognize a sovereign Palestinian state governed by the Palestinian Authority, and pay substantial reparations for the 50 years of occupation of Palestine. I believe that without the unconditional support of the United States, Israel would be much more coopertive in negotiations with her neighbors. If not, payback's a bitch.
3. The impeachment and removal from office of President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney for crimes too numerous to mention. Followed by the arrest of Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condalisa Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Colin Powell . They will be transferred to the International Crimnal Court and tried for crimes against humanity, violation of the charter of the United Nations, and violation of Articles of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
And don't try telling me Americans aren't under the jurisdiction of the court. Since the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, the United States has been a rogue nation and in direct violation of international law.
4. An independant, international investigation into the events of September 11, 2001.
5. The closure of every American military base not in the continental United States.
6 The immediate cessation of intelligence operations in the country of Venezuela. Without American interference, let's see what a socialist state can accomplish. We might learn a powerful lesson.

These are just a few of the things I would consider justice. They are an incredible challenge. They could take decades or even generations to accomplish. Or, if there was an unprecedented awakening of the American conscience, it could be accomplished much more quickly. Great chaos brings great opportunity, and believe me when I tell you, on our current path great chaos is guaranteed. It's already here in large portions of the world, and only our weapons and our willingness to commit salughter on an unrivaled scale have maintained the status quo this long.

Nothing last forever, and all empires eventually collapse.

Showering

2006-05-16T22:45:00.000-07:00

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I swear this had me laughing out loud....

How Women and Men shower differently!

How to Shower Like a Woman...........

Take off clothing and place it in sectioned laundry
hamper according to lights and darks.

Walk to bathroom wearing long dressing gown.
If you see husband along the way, cover up any
exposed areas.

Look at your womanly physique in the mirror -
make mental note to do more sit-ups/leg-lifts, etc.

Get in the shower. Use face cloth, arm cloth,
leg cloth, long loofah, wide loofah and pumice stone.

Wash your hair once with cucumber and sage
shampoo with 43 added vitamins.

Wash your hair again to make sure it's clean.
Condition your hair with grapefruit mint conditioner
enhanced.

Wash your face with crushed apricot facial
scrub for 10 minutes until red.

Wash entire rest of body with ginger nut and
jaffa cake body wash.

Rinse conditioner off hair.

Shave armpits and legs.

Turn off shower.

Squeegee off all wet surfaces in shower.

Spray mold spots with Tilex.

Get out of shower.

Dry with towel the size of a small country.

Wipe up any water that got on the floor.

Wrap hair in super absorbent towel.

Check entire body for zits, tweeze hairs.

Return to bedroom wearing long dressing gown
and towel on head.

If you see husband along the way, cover up
any exposed areas.

How to Shower Like a Man............

Take off clothes while sitting on the edge of
the bed and leave them in a pile.

Walk naked to the bathroom.

If you see wife along the way, shake wiener
at her making the 'woo-woo' sound.

Look at your manly physique in the mirror.

Admire the size of your wiener and scratch
your behind.

Get in the shower.

Wash your face.

Wash your armpits.

Blow your nose in your hands and let the
water rinse them off.

Fart and laugh at how loud it sounds in the
shower.

Spend majority of time washing privates and
surrounding area.

Wash your butt, leaving those coarse butt
hairs stuck on the soap.

Wash your hair.

Make a Shampoo Mohawk.

Pee.

Rinse off and get out of shower.

Partially dry off.

Fail to notice water on floor because curtain
was hanging out of tub the whole time.

Admire wiener size in mirror again.

Leave shower curtain open, wet mat on floor,
light and fan on.

Return to bedroom with towel around waist.

If you pass wife, pull off towel, shake
wiener at her and make the 'woo-woo' sound again.

Throw wet towel on bed.

War Crimes

2006-05-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

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From Wikinews

Saddam Hussein's trial resumes, ex-Iraqi President formally charged

The trial of Saddam Hussein resumed Monday in Baghdad where the former Iraqi President is now officially charged with murder, with torturing women and children, and with razing farmland and authorizing the illegal arrests of 399 people in the 1980's.

And when they find out who was bankrolling Saddam, and supplying him with weapons to do all of these things, those people are going to be in very hot water.....

Oh.

Never mind.

Patriot Games

2006-05-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

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I'm a big fan of the Smirking Chimp. It compiles wonderful stories from around the internet and there is always something of interest there.

But today I stopped by and found someone I admire insulted. Which is fine. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Michele Goldberg originally wrote her article for Yahoo News, a news gathering source I also happen to like.

Her opening paragraph:

Early last year, much of the American right worked itself into an ecstasy of outrage after discovering a vile three-year-old essay by Ward Churchill, an obscure ethnic studies professor at the University of Colorado. Titled, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Churchill's diatribe referred to the victims of the World Trade Center attacks as "little Eichmanns," who were "too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight...into the starved and rotting flesh of infants."

For the sake of clarity, here is Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.

I happen to think Ward Churchill is one of the bravest Americans alive today. In the past, when the controversy first broke, I questioned the timing of his writing. At the time, it seemed to me that the day of such horror might not be the best moment for such accusations.

I was wrong. I've since re-thought my position. What's the use of having a mind if you can't change it sometimes.

While the rest of us were stunned into silence by the spectacle of 9/11, Ward Churchill saw through the bullshit. Clarity of thought that will someday, in a more enlightened time, be celebrated.

I've also since had time to watch and listen to Churchill. Make no mistake, tact is not the man's strong suit. He can be brash, seemingly arrogant, unkempt and uncouth.

And I admire the hell out of him.

I watched on C-Span late, late one night as he demolished David Horowitz in a debate. Churchill was poised, concise and infinitely logical in his arguments. Horowitz came across like Woody Allen on a meth binge. His arguments were often simply attacks against academia and sounded both tired and rehearsed. Score one for us traitors to the Reich.

Some People Push Back is a white-hot, no-holds-barred, unvarnished indictment of America and it's foreign policies. Though there is much there that should raise the ire of "patriotic Americans", The main outrage came from the "little Eichmanns" quote.

Do I think the victims of the World Trade Center attacks were "little Eichmanns"?

Yes I do.

But here is where I must tell you that I think all Americans, myself included at the time, were responsible for the murderous policies of our government and therefore part of a terrorist regime. We were all legitimate targets for anyone fighting the oppression in the Middle East.

I was a "little Eichmann". Worse, I was one of the American Empire's Sturmtruppen. A true believer in the way of the gun.

In fact, in that I am still an American citizen, still enjoying the 'fruits of liberty" and cheap oil that millions of Middle Eastern children have died for over the years, I am still part of the goddammed problem.

But I'm working on it. I'm trying in too small ways to make a difference. I hope to have the courage to make larger contributions. I'm trying to have the courage of my convictions and lose the mantle of hypocrisy I wear. I hope to atone for my ignorance and indifference.

Most Americans don't.

Of course, this entire post assumes that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were planned and carried out exclusively by nineteen men of Middle Eastern descent.

I don't believe that for one second.

No, I don't believe Flight 11 and Flight 175 were holograms or radio controlled with technology developed at Area 51. Nor do I believe that Dick Cheney coordinated the attack from a control room in World Trade Center 7 while feasting on the hearts of Iraqi children or any other such nonsense.

But the official story is so wrong that anyone with eyes can see it. I believe the true version of what happened has Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Mossad fingerprints all over it.

And if you can't see it, if you close your eyes and refuse to see it, you too are, to quote a great American, a "little Eichmann".

Why They Spy On You

2006-05-14T02:21:00.000-07:00

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This is the first of what I hope to be many posts from Again. His understanding of how information impacts our lives and how it can be used, and unfortunately abused, is awe-inspiring. His own blog, About Information and the Human Mind, is in the links section of this blog.-Robert

Did you read JMF's comment on " Just something I had to get off my chest"? About the massive Databases of the NSA?

You know why they do it - they want to control you - but do you know how it works?

It doesn't work with prayers - the born-again Mr. Bush, listening to the voice of God to go to war, kill people and destroy their future...

The same believer doesn't trust the voice if it's about his own Americans. God is not reliable enough.

Math is.

The keyword is "scale-free networks". You only have to measure "distances" between "nodes" and the time needed, than you can control the whole network.

And you can detect the "highly interconnected nodes", the important ones, the backbone of the network. If you control those nodes, you control the network

"We find that, for an intentional attack, little knowledge of the well-connected sites is sufficient to strongly reduce p(c)" with "the critical fraction p(c) of nodes that must be removed for disintegrating the network" Stability and topology of scale-free networks under attack and defense strategies.

Mathematical methods to help people to prevent the spread of pandemics...

Works the same way to prevent revolutionary ideas.

And the magic number?

25%

Only 25% of the people in a society belong to "the critical fraction p(c) that must be removed for disintegrating the network" - or must be protected to protect it.

As long as Mr. Bush is supported by those 25%, he will rule America - and as long as he is able to prevent "the other 25%" who strongly believing in freedom and justice, the "epidemic" ideas will not spread and will not be able to change the world.

And as long as people don't understand how it works, that "they" simply need "distances and periods" - of phone calls, of money transactions, of journeys...

To detect those critical 25% - who don't understand what's going on and how to protect themselves.

That's why they spy on you - secretly.

President Gore

2006-05-13T21:42:00.000-07:00

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I got home from work and remembered it was Saturday Night Live's season finale. I don't watch a lot of SNL anymore but it's always fun to catch the season ender. They do pull out all the stops and often get away with things they normally wouldn't.

Now, I still have yet to get cable hooked up at my place and I doubt that I will at all. I get respectable reception of ABC so I catch Nightline sometimes. CBS is clear as a bell which is good because I'm a night owl and I happen to like Dave at least until the guests come out. For my money, however, Craig Ferguson is the funniest man on television. If you haven't caught the insane Scotsman's show at 12:35 EST you are missing out. No one can go off on a tangent like Ferguson. Unscripted sheer genius. He does rants Dennis Miller wishes he could do.

I do have a point to all of this, really.

My reception of NBC is a disaster. A fuzzy, blurry mess. So When Darryl Hammond kicked off SNL's finale as President Al Gore, I sat down to watch.

"Damn", I thought to myself squinting through the fuzz, "Hammond is always spot on with his impressions but he's really nailed Gore this time."

A light slowly dawned.

This was the man himself. Al Gore seated in the Oval Office. Or at least a damn good facsimile of the Oval Office.

Gore was a pro. Reviewing the past six peaceful years of an imaginary Democratic presidency, it was every bit as biting and wonderful as Colbert's performance a couple of weeks ago. I won't even try to do it justice, but I know Crooks and Liars will have it up any time now and I will link the hell out of it.

President Gore.

Dear God, that sounds good right now.

UPDATE : Here tis

We Must Understand

2006-05-12T15:21:00.000-07:00

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To me, one of the most important books of the past century is Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. It is a shattering account of the journalist's journey through the some of the most violent conflicts of the 20th century, and even more it is is a glimpse inside the heart and soul of war itself. Hedges pulls no punches in his critique of civilization's fascination and inexorable attraction to war and why it does give many, far too many, a reason to live.

I believe this book is so important because if we cannot understand the problem then it is difficult if not impossible to begin to make the changes necessary to stop our headlong rush towards our own doom.

Enough of my blathering. Let Chris Hedges impart his hard-won wisdom:

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with it's destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixer. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.

I'm not so blind or unaware of my own motivations towards the very same end. The opposition to war can be just as meaningful and yes, intoxicating. I have found myself of late paying far more attention to BushCo as a way of avoiding the pains of my own circumstance. Truth can cut both ways.

Back to Hedges:

The eruption of conflict instantly reduces the headache and trivia of daily life. The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation. War, in times of malaise and desperation, is a potent distraction.
..........................
War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.
.......................................
Patriotism provides the blessing. Soldiers want at least the consolation of knowing that they risk being blown up by land mines for the greater glory, for a New World. Dissension, questioning of purpose, the exposure of war crimes carried out by those fighting on our behalf are dangerous to such beliefs. Dissidents who challenge the goodness of our cause, who question the gods of war, who pull back the curtains to expose the lie are usually silenced or ignored.

So when someone asks you why. Why is the history of our country and most other countries written in blood? Why do we need to sacrifice and scar entire generations and bankrupt ourselves literally and figuratively?

Because it gives us meaning. Because it makes us feel needed and real and powerful.

Because deep down, we don't know any other way to live.

Ugly. Isn't it? The true and unvarnished nature of man at the dawn of a new millennium.

Will this be another thousand years of blood? Another thousand years of an eye for an eye?

"In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

Are we kings? We who see past this charade of war, who no longer buy the lie?

No we are not. For to see ourselves in a holy role and a holy cause makes us as blind as those we seek to stop or change. We are simply people. Humans who feel the kinship of other humans. All other humans. And we cannot, will not, be turned from seeking another way. Is it a better way?
Let someone of purer heart and clearer vision decide that.

But I swear my blood, my hopes, my dreams and my future that it will be a different way.

To this end, I am opening Green September to a wider audience. I am inviting more people to read and participate here. My friends, you are some of the wisest and knowledgeable voices on the internet. More people should hear what you have to say. I have, in the past, kept GS insulated from the outside so as to avoid trolls and other prying eyes. I have purposely avoided linking to Green September and have not posted in other discussions as it's webmaster. Well enough of that. I am listing this site in various blog-search sites and I have posted a link in MySpace in the hopes of bringing more people who seek a way for change. I know this will inevitably bring conflicting views and just plain conflict here but it is a small price to pay for exposure of our message. I also intend to invite various old-timers here to guest blog so as to bring more news and views here. I know most of you have your own blogs and your own voice on the internet, you do not need me to give you a voice. But I hope you will join with me in making this more than a sounding board, more than just information, more than just news.
Help me make this the voice of our revolution.

2006-05-12T13:05:00.000-07:00

There was an embarrassed
silence among the White House
press corps as President Bush
wandered from tree to tree until
he found Marine One.

Palestine

2006-05-11T22:23:00.000-07:00

________________________________________

Oh, Palestine.

How we have wronged thee.

Germans

2006-05-11T18:58:00.000-07:00

_____________________________________

My favorite Bush quote, "I know how hard it is to put food on your families", has been eclipsed.

In an interview with something called Bild (help me out here Again) Bush had this to say:

I’ve come to realize that the nature of the German people are such that war is very abhorrent, that Germany is a country now that is -- no matter where they sit on the political spectrum, Germans are -- just don’t like war. And I can understand that. There’s a generation of people who had their lives torn about because of a terrible war.

Well, hoooly shit! Them Germans just don't like war! Bunch of pansies! Don't they know it makes the grass grow? They've sure come along way from the days when they bombed Pearl Harbor!

Fucking Germans.

I....need.....a....drink.

Thought Crime

2006-05-11T16:24:00.000-07:00

_______________________________________

I always felt that there was one hell of a lot of things wrong with the charges against Zacarias Moussaoui. I simply couldn't nail it down. It reminded me of Charles Manson. How he's always referred to as "mass murderer Charles Manson" when in fact he murdered no one at the Tate or LaBianca homes. Manson was convicted, rightly so, of conspiracy to commit murder. He picked the targets, ordered the murders, and was present at the LaBianca crime scene. Charlie deserves to be in prison, but he's not a mass murderer. He is a conspirator. Susan Atkins, Tex Watson and Leslie Van Houten are mass murderers.

Whoever was responsible for flying the planes into the buildings on September 11th is responsible for mass murder. Moussaoui wasn't there. He was already in jail. Was he one of the so-called maybe "20th hijackers"? Or is he an angry man with a great deal of mental problems? History shows that sort of person makes a perfect patsy.

Ted Rall brings it on home:

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0511-31.htm

We Mournful Few

2006-05-11T13:51:00.000-07:00

____________________________

We're different. It's just that simple. We mournful few are different.

Despite the wonders of modern pharmacology and technology that allow humans to jam their senses and emotions with culturally approved nonsense, we see clearly and we mourn.

I have an obsession about being fooled. I am constantly on guard against being lied to and believing the lies. It no doubt stems from all of the years I spent believing the lies and all the years of my humanity I lost to them. I realize I obsess. But the difference between paranoia and awareness blurs in a society that owes it's entire existence to carefully crafted bullshit. I used to be ashamed of my obsession. Now I recognize it for what it is: A weapon in the battle for truth and justice. And yes, I still believe there is truth and justice in our world. If only you have the courage to find it.

In that, we are different. Comfortable lies no longer lull us to sleep. For some of you hearty souls, the lies never worked in the first place. You didn't have to wake up and use your painful eyes for the first time. You saw through the lies from the beginning and I envy you. You have mourned far longer than I.

For most of my life I accepted what I was told. I simply didn't know any better. Because it was all about me. Me. Mine.

It was not about Us. It was not about everybody. I didn't feel pain at the reports of mutilated children. I didn't cringe in shame at what my government was doing. Because it didn't affect Me.
Their problems weren't my problems. What business was it of mine how many Iraqis or Palestinians were robbed of their lives and homes? I'm an American and therefore above such things.

But now I know. The Palestinian child gunned down in the dust of Rafah takes a piece of my soul. The labor leader in South America, tortured by thugs hired by the Coca-Cola company to squash fair labor practices, wounds a part of me. Because I am them and they are me.
As we sit and stare at the box in our homes that gives us meaning and drama and heroes to cheer for, pieces of us are being stolen.

We mournful few. We see it all.

We can't look away. We can't pretend it all doesn't exist. Call it fate, karma, or even God. For whatever reason, in this time and in this place, we cannot look away.

Because goddammit all, once you have seen and felt the pain, you cannot unsee or unfeel, and humanity is yours. Your responsibility. Your burden. Your great hope.

Messiah complex? No. It's one of those awful, true cliches: I can't save the world, but we can.

Every one of us. We mournful few. We hurt for our planet and our people.

We are rushing headlong into destruction and the louder the sound of revolution becomes, the louder the majority of the "civilized" world turns up the volumes on their distractions.

But no distraction drowns out the pain of our people. Our sweet fellowship of humans, so horribly torn asunder by the toxicity of our greed, fear, and dogma.

We have no choice but to try and put right what is so wrong. We have nowhere to run and no way to hide.

We mournful few.

Just something I had to get off my chest

2006-05-10T23:54:00.000-07:00

________________________________

Mary Cheney has a book out. No, I don't give a fuck either.
She's all over the media though.

Know what's not all over the media?

This is not all over the media. I haven't forgotten you lying, spying motherfuckers in the NSA. I haven't forgotten what that abortion of a president is doing while the media whores sleep.

By the way, according to David Letterman, the title of Mary Cheney's book: I Like Bush.

UPDATE: (In my best Gilda Radner) Never mind.....

2006-05-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

"I will send my apprentice, Darth Gay."

Anyone who says"Yeah, but it's a dry heat" gets smacked in the head

2006-05-07T16:32:00.000-07:00

_______________________________

Our friend Again has a Link-A-Palooza about global warming.

Check it out:

http://powerofinformation.blogspot.com/2006/05/rush-for-darwin-award.html

Jihad, present and future

2006-05-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

______________________________

He who controls the spice, controls the universe.

-Dune

Iran’s strategy will focus on one basic principle: Not one drop. “Not one drop” means that Iran will plan to disrupt or destroy American oil installations, pipelines, platforms and shipping wherever and whenever it can; a global resource war directed at US interests.

Iran will mobilize according to traditional military doctrine by attempting to “destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war”; severing America’s oil life-line wherever it may be.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12952.htm

Razor

2006-05-06T09:13:00.000-07:00

_________________________________

I sat in the small garishly decorated conference room and listened to tons of legalese and realtorese as we finalized the sale of our house. Once again it was brought home to me just how badly I fit in to our modern society. I don't care about interest rates and mortgages, credit histories and closing costs. Is this what we've become? I sat in the midst of this modern ritual and felt alone and aloof.

Each day I am away from the domesticated life and the civilized subdivision that was my home, I feel myself changing. My new apartment is a spartan one with little in the way of what you might call style. It's perfect.

I feel myself changing. Leaving behind all that is unnecessary. I keep the love for my son in a safe corner of what's left of my heart and it is really the only thing of value I have left. And this is a good thing.

I want to have little to lose. I want to grow strong here huddled in the dark with my thoughts. No drugs. No drinking. I want my mind clear. Like an invisible razor that cuts you before you even know it's there.

I know from the past that solitude can twist your mind as quickly and effectively as any torture or other pain. You get caught up in your own thoughts and there is no feedback from others to tell you that you're losing reality.

But what I once thought was reality is no longer the comfortable little world I lived alone in before. My eyes have opened and I have looked and seen the real world. The world of bombs and guns and conquest. A world that was always there before but safely hidden behind false histories and convenient denials that I was too blind and stupid to see past.

I live here in what is an increasingly dangerous empire. We live on cheap oil and we are willing to kill anyone in the name of freedom and patriotism to get it. Anyone who believes otherwise is part of the big lie. Unfortunately it's just that simple.

So what to do? I ponder as I sit in my window and watch the traffic go by. This is a beast that cannot be killed. Would that it were so easy. No, I see only two choices. Either there will be a violent revolution the likes of which the world has never seen, or, and this is the long shot, we will learn from our mistakes. History is not on the side of enlightenment, but there is still hope. Our corrupt and cowardly politicians, their bellies and pockets full of things taken away from others, must be sent packing. The only problem is that the corrupt politician has become such a part of our culture most people only shake their heads and laugh and change the channel when confronted with their disgusting behavior. What can you do? Right?

Anger can cloud your thinking worse than any drug so I'm trying to avoid an excess of that. It's hard not to be angry at the slaughter but if anything is going to be achieved without half of our population wiping out the other half, we are going to have to work together. And experience has taught me that most humans would rather kill and die than compromise.

There must be a way. I'm trying desperately to find it.

Because I don't believe this is who we are. I don't believe we were meant to sit in nice, safe, suburbs and let the rest of the world burn around us. I don't believe we made it to this point in human evolution to bitch about the price of gas while children are being murdered for corporate profits. We weren't meant to be afraid. To live in fear. Treated with respect, the Earth provides a bounty for all her children. Yet greed and twisted ideology have cast us out of our paradise.

I sit alone, sharpening the razor that is my mind. Trying to decide when, where, and how to cut.

Outside the traffic flows by. The sound of a world that cannot last.

Native Son

2006-04-30T09:51:00.000-07:00

__________________________________

Native Son

By Bryan Adams

I've seen many moons through these wrinkled eyes
The years have made me old but they've made me wise
Now the white man lives where our rivers run

For now better days have passed
We walk the streets of broken glass
Our people vanished as snow before the summer sun
Like dogs we were driven from this place
Such injustice, time will not erase
All these changes cannot be undone

When you feel the anger inside of you
Hold your head high - let your aim be true
Though your heart beats like a drum
My native son

Once there was a time my little one
Before the wagons - before the soldiers' guns
When this land was ours as far as the eagle flies

No white flag - no broken truce
With few words one can speak the truth - I don't hear it
Time won't heal it now

With each new day that comes to pass
Will the great spirit free us all at last?
He said we were the chosen ones

For all we had there's nothin' left
We won’t forgive - we can't forget
You know that your day will come
My native son

With each new day that comes to pass
Will the great spirit free us all at last?
What has happened can never be undone

When I was young - not yet a man
The sun rose and set upon our land
We were the chosen ones
My native son

This song has been on my mind these past few days. As usual I can never say with much certainty why things get stuck in the confused jungle that is my mind. Is it the news of over 100,000 Iraqis displaced by another white administration? Or the African-American diaspora that has taken place in New Orleans? Or perhaps the continuing struggle for justice and survival in occupied Palestine? Ya Phalesteen, I have not forgotten you.

As my own life begins a new chapter here in America, I cannot forget the mothers and fathers watching their children cry as they are ripped from their homes and how bitter and helpless they must feel. My own life is a simple one and I have little means to help them. I can only continue to remember. Continue to write. Continue to hope. And continue to look for ways to help justice come for all those taken from their native soil and scattered to the wind.

Speaking truth to power, and then some

2006-04-30T09:09:00.000-07:00

___________________________________________

I haven't seen it yet, I've only read this transcipt. But it looks to me like Stephen Colbert knocked one not just out of the park, but out of the atmosphere. He was the featured speaker at last nights's White House Correspondent's Dinner. Judging from the outright venom on display in the conservative blogs, Colbert nailed it. Here is a transcript. Crooks and Liars says they will have the complete video available sometime today and C-Span is re-running it but I don't have a time. Along with Al Gore's speech from a couple of months ago, Colbert's routine, though a comedic performance, is one of the finest indictments of the current administration I've ever seen.

Thanks to The Democratic Daily for the transcript.

Here with a special edition of the Colbert report, Stephen Colbert.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Before I begin, I’ve been asked to make an announcement. Whoever parked 14 black bullet proof S.U.V.’S out front, could you please move them. They are blocking in 14 other black bulletproof S.U.V.’S and they need to get out.

Wow, wow, what an honor. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner. To just sit here, at the same table with my hero, George W. Bush, to be this close to the man. I feel like I’m dreaming. Somebody pinch me. You know what, I’m a pretty sound sleeper, that may not be enough. Somebody shoot me in the face. Is he really not here tonight? The one guy who could have helped. By the way, before I get started, if anybody needs anything at their tables, speak slowly and clearly on into your table numbers and somebody from the N.S.A. will be right over with a cocktail. Mcsmith , ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Mr. President and first lady, my name is Stephen Colbert and it’s my privilege tonight to celebrate our president. He’s no so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainbacks on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the fact niece that. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that’s not true. That’s but you looked it up in a book.

Next time look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert report, I speak straight from the gut, ok? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the no fact zone. Fox News, I own the copyright on that term. I’m a simple man with a simple mind, with a simple set of beliefs that I live by. Number one, I believe in America. I believe it exists. My gut tells me I live there. I feel that it extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and I strongly believe it has 50 states. And I cannot wait to see how “the Washington Post” spins that one tomorrow. I believe in democracy. I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out in plastic for three cents a unit. In fact, ambassador, welcome, your great country makes our happy meals possible. I said it’s a celebration. I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.

I believe in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. I believe it is possible — I saw this guy do it once in Cirque du Soleil. It was magical. And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be it Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe our infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.

Ladies and gentlemen, I believe it’s yogurt. But I refuse to believe it’s not butter. Most of all I believe in this president. Now, I know there’s some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

So, Mr. President, pay no attention to the people that say the glass is half full. 32% means the glass — it’s important to set up your jokes properly, sir. Sir pay no attention to the people who say the glass is half empty, because 32% means it’s 2/3 empty. There’s still some liquid in that glass is my point, but I wouldn’t drink it.

The last third is usually backwash. Folks, my point is that I don’t believe this is a low point in this presidency. I believe it is just a lull, before a comeback. I mean, it’s like the movie “Rocky.” The president is Rocky and Apollo Creed is everything else in the world. It’s the 10th round. He’s bloodied, his corner man, Mick, who in this case would be the Vice President, and he’s yelling cut me, dick, cut me, and every time he falls she say stay down! Does he stay down? No. Like Rocky he gets back up and in the end he — actually loses in the first movie. Ok. It doesn’t matter. The point is the heart-warming story of a man who was repeatedly punched in the face. So don’t pay attention to the approval ratings that say 68% of Americans disapprove of the job this man is doing. I ask you this, does that not also logically mean that 68% approve of the job he’s not doing? Think about it. I haven’t.

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world. Now, there may be an energy crisis. This president has a very forward-thinking energy policy. Why do you think he’s down on the ranch cutting that brush all the time? He’s trying to create an alternative energy source. By 2008 we will have a mesquite powered car. And I just like the guy. He’s a good joe. Obviously loves his wife, calls her his better half. And polls show America agrees. She’s a true lady and a wonderful woman. But I just have one beef, ma’am. I’m sorry, but this reading initiative. I’ve never been a fan of books. I don’t trust them. They’re all fact, no heart. I mean, they’re elitist telling us what is or isn’t true, what did or didn’t happen. What’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914. If I want to say it was built in 1941, that’s my right as an American. I’m with the president, let history decide what did or did not happen. The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady.

You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday, that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change, this man’s beliefs never will. And as excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story, the President’s side and the Vice President’s side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on N.S.A. wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason, they’re superdepressing.

And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good over tax cuts, W.M.D. intelligence, the affect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew. But, listen, let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works. The President makes decisions, he’s the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know, fiction.

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.

Now, it’s not all bad guys out there. Some heroes, Buckley, Kim Schieffer. By the way, Mr. President, thank you for agreeing to be to my show. I was just as shocked as everyone here is I promise you. How is Tuesday for you? I’ve got Frank Rich, but we can bump him. And I mean bump him. I know a guy. Say the word.

See who we’ve got here tonight. General Mowsly, Air Force Chief of Staff. General Peter Pace. They still support Rumsfeld. You guys aren’t retired yet, right? Right, they still support Rumsfeld. Look, by the way, I’ve got a theory about how to handle these retired generals causing all this trouble, don’t let them retire. C’mon, we’ve got a stop loss program, let’s use it on these guys. If you’re strong enough to go on one of those pundit shows, you can stand on a bank of computers and order men into battle. C’mon. Jesse Jackson is here. I had him on the show. Very interesting and challenging interview. You can ask him anything, but he’s going to say what he wants at the pace that he wants.

It’s like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.

Justice Scalia’s here. May I be the first to say welcome, sir. You look fantastic. How are you?

John McCain is here. John McCain John McCain. What a maverick. Somebody find out what fork he used on his salad, because I guarantee you wasn’t a salad fork. He could have used a spoon. There’s no predicting him. So wonderful to see you coming back into the republican fold. I have a summerhouse in South Carolina, look me up when you go to speak at Bob Jones University. So glad you’ve seen the light. Mayor Nagin is here from New Orleans, the chocolate city. Yeah, give it up. Mayor Nagin, I would like to welcome you to Washington, D.C., The chocolate city with a marshmallow center. And a graham cracker crust of corruption. It’s a mallomar is what I’m describing, a seasonal cookie.

Joe Wilson is here, the most famous husband since Desi Arnez. And of course he brought along his lovely wife Valerie Plame. Oh, my god! Oh, what have I said. I am sorry, Mr. President, I meant to say he brought along his lovely wife, Joe Wilson’s wife. Pat Fitzgerald is not here tonight? Dodged a bullet.

And we can’t forget man of the hour, new Press Secretary, Tony Snow. Secret service name, Snow Job. What a hero, took the second toughest job in government, next to, of course, the ambassador to Iraq. Got some big shoes to fill, Tony. Scott McClellan could say nothing like nobody else. McClellan, eager to retire. Really felt like he needed to spend more time with Andrew Card’s children. Mr. President, I wish you hadn’t made the decision to quickly, sir. I was vying for the job. I think I would have made a fabulous press secretary. I have nothing but contempt for these people. I know how to handle these clowns. In fact, sir, I brought along an audition tape and with your indulgence, I’d like to at least give it a shot. So, ladies and gentlemen, my press conference.

A video presentation of a mock press conference follows.

And reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Enjoy that metaphor, because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is.

Those are two of my favorites.

Stephen Colbert. In the lion's den armed only with his wit.

He is a bold American patriot, and I salute him.

While in New York you definitely want to see The Extraordinary Rendition

2006-04-28T17:31:00.000-07:00

What you see here is what Freedom Tower is going to look like when completed. Construction began yesterday and it's projected to be finished in 2011. The popular name is Freedom Tower, but the official designation, which really creeps me out, is World Trade Center Tower One.

Let that one sink in a moment.

How would you like to rent space in World Trade Center Tower One?

Or "Honey! I have great news! I landed that job with the so-and-so investment firm!"

"That's great, dear! Where will you be working?"

"World Trade Center Tower One"

It just seems like it's tempting fate a bit. WTC 1 will always, always be tied to that terrible day in September. I know absolutely nothing about how such things are handled. Does any building that sits there get that designation?

And Freedom Tower. Don't get me fucking started on that stupidity. We should choose a name that conveys all of the glory and grandeur of the War on Terror. How about Burned To Death In Fallujah Tower?

Or Weapons of Mass Destruction Tower.

Nope, too wordy.

Extraordinary Rendition Tower has a nice ring to it.

AHA!

The Abu Ghraib.

Freedom to say what the government likes

2006-04-26T17:12:00.000-07:00

Someone sent me this pic of Wenyi Wang after
she dared speak out here in America. She is, of course,
the heroic woman who interrupted Bush and Hu's
love-fest last week. This picture speaks far more than a
thousand words.

Oh God! It's just so wrong!

2006-04-24T12:01:00.000-07:00

_______________________________________

A single small room is not a studio apartment, dammit

2006-04-23T09:24:00.000-07:00

_____________________________________

My great apologies for the light to non-existant blogging.

I truly don't intend to let our little playground to whither and die, it's just that things are still, and for the foreseeable future, crazy hectic in my life. I'll try to at least keep a few open threads so we don't wind up stepping all over our topics. You guys feel free to start your own topics or discussions here. My place is yours and all that.

We've sold the house and we close on May 5. Got just enough to basically break even after evrybody gets paid off, so at least there's that.

I'm apartment hunting and that's just oh so fun.

Getting to spend plenty of time with my highly mobile and entirely fearless little man. I swear they put rocket fuel in his peas. Yes, he's decided the sun rises and sets in green peas. A small awwww story. I went to see him at his grandmother's yesterday before I went to work. The local PBS was playing one of his favorites, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and as the opening credits start to roll, he climbs down out of my lap, toddles over to his toy box and rummages through it madly until he finds his stuffed Clifford and then rushes back to climb up into my lap where he contentedly sockets his thumb in his mouth and snuggles up to me to watch the show.

They may say that there's no such thing as magic, but I believe simple moments like that qualify.

Everybody take care and keep in touch.

Oh so civilized

2006-04-14T12:20:00.001-07:00

___________________________________

Today, I just happened to have CNN on in the background. They were discussing the Moussaoui trial and testimony.

The pretty, perky anchor was chatting with a reporter who had been in the courtroom during Moussaoui's testimony.

These well-scrubbed and well-educated ladies were expressing their horror at the testimony, focusing particularly on the lack of remorse.

To sum it up, neither of these oh so civilized "reporters" could fathom how and why the defendant could feel no remorse at the violence and death that occurred on September 11.

Putting aside that there still has been no full and credible account of what happened that day besides, of course, the "official" government account which has holes large enough to fly a large passenger jet through, these women and their ilk just amaze me.

They do not understand violence. They do not understand that their country is an empire that flexes it's muscles and entire cities disappear. Ask the survivors of Fallujah whether they are shocked by the violence of 9/11.

Ask the millions of nameless parents who watched their children die in Iraq under U.S. sanctions during the 1990's. "Collateral damage" is what they're called here in America. When Timothy Mcveigh used those words to describe the children and civilians killed in th Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, Americans were shocked and outraged. How could he be so callous and unfeeling?

Ask the innocent being tortured in nameless prisons, all for "national security". Ask them, if they ever do return home, how they will feel about the next attack America suffers.

Ask the survivors of families buried under the rubble of American bombs in Afghanistan.

Ask the children who watched their parents gunned down at a checkpoint in Tal Afar. Remember the little girl covered in her parents' blood? I do.

But that's the tip of the iceberg. Ask generations of Palestinians. "Never again" apparently only counts if you are one of "the chosen".

Generations. It still boggles my mind. It's a wonder there haven't been dozens of September 11-style attacks.

Now, the world waits and watches. Will we use nuclear weapons against Iran? All bets are off as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.

The question is, if in fact the United States uses nuclear weapons against a nation that has never attacked us, killing millions in the process, what will we do about it?

America is already, according to international law, a rogue nation for it's invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation. It will already be generations until the concrete and karmic debts of this war are paid. What lies in store if we go nuclear?

A hypothetical:

You are a citizen of an empire. That empire has shown that it is willing to destroy entire nations with it's weapons of mass destruction. First hundreds of thousand and then millions of innocents are killed while the military-industrial-information complex thrives. The rich and powerful control the government and only approved methods (read-useless) of dissent are allowed.

In this hypothetical scenario, what do you do?

What can you do?

What are you willing to do?

Judas is just alright with me

2006-04-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

_________________________________

My quick take on the newly un-earthed Gospel of Judas:

I was having dinner with a group of friends at one friend's house. In the background, the evening news was discussing the Gospel of Judas (Google it, you lazy gits) . This began a discussion about the new Gospel and the Bible in general. Now some of my friends are Christians and in such situations, unless asked a direct question, I usually remain silent on my contempt for religion and my love for all things evil (just kidding....... or am I?) . It's just easier and makes for a more comfortable environment if I'm not questioning the emotional maturity or IQ of the believers in the room, which is where that conversation inevitably leads when you boil it down.

However, one brave soul asked what I thought about the "new" Gospel. Uncomfortable silence descended as I weighed my response carefully. For the most part, everyone present knew what high esteem I held the Scriptures, and I'm sure there were visions of profanity, blasphemy, and me with a Powerpoint presentation proving how historically fucked the whole thing is.

However, in a moment that convinces me that I may yet have a future in politics, I thought carefully and weighed my words.

"I believe that the Gospel of Judas is every bit as authentic as all of the other Gospels", I said with an innocent smile.

My hosts, sincere Christians, looked surprised and relieved.

Then they thought about what I had just said.

Then they looked angry.

I simply smiled and continued eating.

Gospel of Judas, my ass.

Need breathing room

2006-04-08T15:35:00.000-07:00

________________________________

This post is a spacer so that my damn Mars pictures will display correctly.

Red Planet

2006-04-08T15:20:00.000-07:00

These are images of Mars from the new Hugh Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera. A lot of things seem very ugly these days. It's good to remember hope and beauty.

No shame, no regrets

2006-04-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

___________________________________

The War Crimes Confession of Condi Rice

Written by Chris Floyd

Tuesday, 04 April 2006
The incomparable Robert Parry puts Condi Rice clearly in the frame for war crimes after her extraordinary confessions during her trip to the UK last week -- confessions that have been entirely ignored by the US press. While there was a brief flurry over her casual remark about "thousands of tactical mistakes" in Iraq, no one but Parry caught her admission -- nay, her boast -- that the Bush Regime's policy in Iraq was an open, deliberate, carefully considered violation of the Nuremberg-based laws against aggressive war: principles articulated most forcefully by America's own representative to that international tribunal, and which were later incorporated into the UN Charter.

As Parry notes, Rice confessed that the Bush Administration launched an unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq to effect a unilateral "regime change" for political and ideological purposes -- the same crime for which the Hitler Administration was justly condemned at Nuremberg. This action was and is illegal under the Nuremberg principles, the UN Charter and United States law.

The implications of all this are unavoidable. Americans are now living under a criminal regime, a rogue junta that no longer feels the need to disguise its criminality. Hence Rice's confession; hence Bush's confession about illegal wiretapping of American citizens; hence the Administration's bold protestations in open court that the president cannot be bound by any act of Congress or judicial ruling in carrying out his "inherent" powers as Commander-in-Chief; hence the Supreme Court's craven kowtowing to this presidential dictatorship in its ruling yesterday in the Padilla case, when the Justices simply refused to address the issue of Padilla's years-long "indefinite detention without any formal charges or, for 20 months, any contact with the outside world.

But worse than all this is the sickening, despairing fact that the American Establishment -- Democrats and Republicans, media barons and financial chieftains, military officers and academic leaders, the courts and Congress -- all have countenanced and embraced this open tyranny. There are simply no institutional forces with any power willing to stand up against the dictatorship. Nor have the American people moved in sufficient mass to present a credible challenge to the enemies of liberty.

These are in many ways the darkest days in American history. Even in the Civil War, there was no real question that the Republic itself would survive -- even if in a reduced territory, had the slaveholding aristocracy that drove the Southern succession triumphed in the war. But now it seems that the Republic is well and truly dead, in every state of the Union, from sea to shining sea.

Excerpts from Parry's story are below.

[Excerpt]: On March 31 in remarks to a group of British foreign policy experts, Rice justified the U.S.-led invasion by saying that otherwise Iraqi President Saddam Hussein “wasn’t going anywhere” and “you were not going to have a different Middle East with Saddam Hussein at the center of it.” [Washington Post, April 1, 2006]

Rice’s comments in Blackburn, England, followed similar remarks during a March 26 interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in which she defended the invasion of Iraq as necessary for the eradication of the “old Middle East” where a supposed culture of hatred indirectly contributed to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

“If you really believe that the only thing that happened on 9/11 was people flew airplanes into buildings, I think you have a very narrow view of what we faced on 9/11,” Rice said. “We faced the outcome of an ideology of hatred throughout the Middle East that had to be dealt with. Saddam Hussein was a part of that old Middle East. The new Iraq will be a part of the new Middle East, and we will all be safer.”

But this doctrine – that the Bush administration has the right to invade other nations for reasons as vague as social engineering – represents a repudiation of the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations Charter’s ban on aggressive war, both formulated largely by American leaders six decades ago.

Outlawing aggressive wars was at the center of the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II, a conflagration that began in 1939 when Germany’s Adolf Hitler trumped up an excuse to attack neighboring Poland. Before World War II ended six years later, more than 60 million people were dead.U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who represented the United States at Nuremberg, made clear that the role of Hitler’s henchmen in launching the aggressive war against Poland was sufficient to justify their executions – and that the principle would apply to all nations in the future.

“Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions,” Jackson said. “Let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose, it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment,” Jackson said.

With the strong support of the United States, this Nuremberg principle was then incorporated into the U.N. Charter, which bars military attacks unless in self-defense or unless authorized by the U.N. Security Council. [end excerpt]

Link to original: http://www.chris-floyd.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=582&Itemid=1

Well, dammit

2006-04-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

_____________________________________

Despite my best efforts. Green September has found it's way into a search engine's database.

We don't exist as far as Technorati is concerned, I didn't list GS with Blogger's directory, and I sure as hell didn't ask Yahoo's web crawler to register the site, yet there it is. Type in "Green September" and we are number one on Yahoo's search.

I'm not really sure why it troubles me, yet it does. I mean, we aren't breaking any laws and in the very near future I don't plan on breaking any laws.......

Still....

Troubling.

We have had this forum where we can speak freely for about 6 months and I have quite enjoyed it. Until now, if you weren't a part of Green September or know someone who was, finding this site was quite difficult and simply stumbling over it was damn near impossible.

It may be time to pull up stakes and travel to a new URL.

I know, I know, it's a pain in the ass and I'm probably being paranoid.....

I will notify all of you well in advance if I decide to do anything of the sort, but I do want to know what you think. Different URL? Leave Blogger altogether like I threaten to do at least once a week? If you know a good way to cloak a blog or website, please, by all means, let me know.

Wild Anal Rage

2006-04-07T17:00:00.000-07:00

______________________________

I had to list these anagrams from B. They were just too good.

Ann Coulter - O Cunt, Learn!

Ronald wilson Reagan - Son Ron Wild Anal Rage

Ronald Wilson Reagan - Insane Anglo Warlord

Is that your Homeland Security badge in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

2006-04-06T10:18:00.000-07:00

_____________________________________

Jesus' General has a roundup of those wild and crazy guys in our government who like to have sex with children.

The graphic he has up suggests that there may be more than meets the eye at Homeland Security.

It's fortunate for the rest of us and our children that most online predators are apparently idiots. I mean how many times do you hear of these guys being busted using their credit cards with their names and addresses to view or purchase forbidden material online? Also, you would think these guys would get wise to the whole large, sweaty cop-pretending to be a young girl or boy-sting operation. Now, I don't make it my business to pick up youngsters online and I know about all of those things that cops do. Don't you think if you were looking at long stretches of prison time and life-long stigma as a registered sex offender, you would learn what the cops were up to as far as trying to capture you?

He's got a purty mouth

2006-04-01T18:54:00.000-08:00

Alabama, a state that ranks 52nd in the nation in literacy, wants to ban abortions.

Even in cases of incest.

The words "Baby boom" come to mind.

Beware. Blood-hungry giants

2006-04-01T17:42:00.000-08:00

_____________________________________

I stole this from Elenchus at the comments section over at The Smirking Chimp. It was too good to pass up.

What fun! Just to add to the general merriment, here are a few anagrams made up entirely of the letters of statements containing the "President's" name:

President George Walker Bush - Ruthless breed - wanker - ego pig

Bush Administration - This bandit is our man!

President George Bush - Oh - desert purge begins.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair - Beware. Blood-hungry giants.

President George Bush - He gestured! Big person!

Bush administration - Duh...I ain't bin smart.

George Walker Bush, President of the United States of America - Damn! Result is garbage - takes pretender to White House office.

George W. Bush - He grew bogus

Try it - see what fun you can have. Try Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh too!

Lawyer! I don't need no steenking lawyer!

2006-04-01T11:46:00.001-08:00

__________________________________

Arbitration went well. I can now see my son. When I picked him up for the first time in a week it was like life flowed into me again and a black and white world suddenly had vibrant color.

I'm living in our house until it sells. I didn't realize how empty and silent a house can feel. I head to my little world in the basement and play my video games at full volume and it chases the creepiness away.

I'm happier now. Not overjoyed by what I went through, but better. No one ever wins in a situation like this so there isn't a sense of victory at getting most of what I wanted. Just a feeling of relief. In ninety days it will be official and we will be divorced.

Feels strange.

Insanity Abounds

2006-03-31T15:02:00.000-08:00

_______________________________

Seen on a sign outside a Baptist church:

The cross reveals the heart of God

Yep. Bloody, painful execution does indeed reveal the heart of the Christian God.

Overheard on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition :

A woman who lost her home during hurricane Katrina had a new home built by the crew from the show using materials donated from various businesses. After the crew worked around the clock for weeks building the house, the first words out of the woman's mouth: "Thank you Jesus!"

Some days it's better to just hibernate and hope the Rapture takes these fools soon.

Who Is the Most Dangerous Person in the World?

2006-03-26T12:44:00.000-08:00

______________________________________

prick your finger it is done
the moon has now eclipsed the sun
the angel has spread its wings
the time has come for bitter things

Marilyn Manson

My experience with the legal system is bringing home a fundamental truth to me.

It's one thing to know that the system is fucked, it's quite a different thing to experience it.

In shopping for a lawyer this week I made quite a discovery. None of these slimeballs would even discuss my case without at least a $250 consulting fee.

Two hundred and fifty dollars just to chat. And these are the ambulance chasers. I don't even want to know what the big boys charge to have a sit down.

One nice lawyer lady, a specialist in divorce, who was recommended by a friend because of her reputation as "a piranah" wanted $225 to consult and charged $5000 as a retainer.

I think of this and it reminds me of politicians running for office. To run for anything more than a schoolboard membership here in America you have to be a millionaire and be willing to spend big and sell yourself to the lobbyists as well.

So our legal and political systems here in America are now off limits to anyone without a great deal of money.

Yes I knew that already. But sitting in your son's empty bedroom holding his favorite stuffed animal because it smells like him, and being powerless to fight those that are keeping him from you tends to sharpen the senses and bring it home, so to speak.

We the people no longer own our country.

The rich, the connected, the inheritors, they run the country. They have the best access to the courts and the law makers.

We simply sit as it all goes on around us. We have the illusion of influence but it only goes so far.

Step out of line, say or do the "wrong" thing or express the unpopular idea and see how long your illusion of control and freedom lasts.

Green September, our time draws near.

Demon Seeds, Flowers Of Fire - Continued

2006-03-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

_____________________________________

Once again the most important stories from Iraq are receiving little or no attention in the U.S. media.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-524-2103695-524,00.html

Long time readers will remember my recollections of the brutal experiences as a Marine recruit some 17 years ago. Sadly, with all of the hopping from template to template and name changes, I did not archive my original posts.

To make a long story short, America's "fighting men and women" are brutalized in psychotic hazing rituals in most basic training for the United States Military. I can only speak for the dehumanizing treatment I received at Parris Island, but it was enough to show me that when you treat human beings like animals, they will learn to act and respond like animals.

You know what? Scratch that. It gives animals a bad name.

These atrocities in Iraq surprise me not at all. They are, most likely, only the tip of the iceberg.

I'm Using Them Now

2006-03-25T13:59:00.000-08:00

________________________________

Did you know that it's legal for a woman in Tennessee to file a restraining order against her husband to keep him from seeing their child?

Without any probable cause, without any proof of threats and/or intimidation?

Without there being any threats and/or intimidation?

Without any misconduct at all on the part of the husband?

Did you know that members of my soon-to-be ex-wife's family are friends with the District Attorney?

I didn't know that.

I do now.

For obvious legal reasons I will say no more on this and just end this post with one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite films. Though short, it always struck me as haunting and filled with several different meanings. It's been running through my mind these last few days:

Neo: Why do my eyes hurt?

Morpheus: You've never used them before.

Press Conference

2006-03-21T13:46:00.000-08:00

For the 83rd time during his presidency, Bush
asks God to please smite Helen Thomas

Chaos and the Dancing Star

2006-03-18T11:40:00.000-08:00

_____________________________

I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.

Nietzsche

I feel as if I'm mourning the death of a good and dear friend. The word "separation" is one of the more apt descriptions I've ever run across. You are literally separating the one intermingled person that you have become back into two people. It is an almost physical pain.

All that you have dreamed and hoped and feared and won and lost.

All gone. To one day vanish in a flurry of legalese administered by people that do not know you.
They do not know how happy you once were, and how you believed that in the end, love could conquer all. They don't know you cry when you think of an empty apartment. They don't know how every smile or attempted word from your son you miss is like a knife straight though to the softest part of your heart.

I'm having to grow calluses in parts of my soul I didn't want them, just to get by. I'm afraid of how cold I might become.

I truly believe the fate of my marriage was sealed four years ago when I began to wake up from my long mental slumber and look honestly at the world around me. Over the past four years the man my wife married has died slowly to be replaced by someone she never bargained for. I knew she was afraid of the changes in me. The hatred and rejection of religion in all of it's forms, a radical and often revolutionary political view, and the questioning of everything from the origin of morality to the quantum shift in the types of books, television, and films I found entertaining. It was just a matter of time.

I would never be able to live happily in suburbia with well-groomed lawns and vinyl siding. If it ever was me, it certainly isn't anymore. My wife can be extraordinarily money-oriented and I couldn't really care less. It's always been a point of contention between us and add it to the personal changes I've gone through it's become a deadly poison to our relationship. There is still a great deal of kid in me when it comes to living in the "real world" and I happen to like that aspect of me. She tells me she wants a nice, and I quote, "normal" life and I just don't know what exactly that is.

I'm happiest in the midst of chaos and confusion. I'm messy, disorganized, and impulsive. I am a long way from normal in my dreams and pursuits. I think she is angry that I cannot conform to her ideal of what I "should be". I'm tired of trying. I'm a free and independent human being and I will choose my own path. And so here we are.

We still share the same house. We've put it on the market and neither of us really have the ways or means to leave until we sell it. So we circle each other uncertainly. The only safe ground for conversation is Marcus. Both of us seem to want to stay on at least civil terms for his sake, and for that I'm glad. We've both reached the conclusion that divorce is all but inevitable at this point. I will have as much access to Marcus as I like and that is good. I would have been more than content to have Marcus live with me, but I believe he will be better off living with his mother. As long as I can see him when I wish and have him stay with me part of the time, I am content with the situation. It all sounds so easy and sensible. We shall see how it works out in real life.

You may question why I'm revealing so much that is personal here. Because I consider the people here friends. Each and every one of you here is special to me and I wanted to keep everyone informed. I don't intend to turn this blog into a confessional or emotional sounding board. I simply wanted my friends to know where things stood with me.

Thank you again for all of the kind wishes you have sent to me. I will never forget your kindness and encouragement in these trying times.

2006-03-16T19:59:00.000-08:00

Sorry for any inconvenience. Blogger has been down
off and on all day. I'm too tired to even call anyone
names this time.

Bunch of useless motherfuckers.......

Famine

2006-03-15T22:36:00.000-08:00

___________________________________

The food shortages in Niger had been raging for several months before media attention prompted a huge public and governmental response. Several countries in Africa are currently experiencing food shortages similar to this. Around eight million people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa due to severe drought, crop failure and depletions of livestock, while around 12 million people in southern Africa need emergency food aid.

The causes are complex: poverty, gender inequality, lack of education and poor child care practices, compounded by drought or flooding, conflict and HIV/AIDS. What is clear is that the food shortages are a potential disaster for millions of children.

Here is a link to Unicef.

Anything you can give will help.

Update: That is a link to the UK site. Here is one you can use to donate from the US.

Our thought are with you

2006-03-15T17:38:00.000-08:00

_____________________________________

Our dear friend Brenda, or B as she is known here, lost her mother suddenly this week. Her blog doesn't have a comments section so consider this comments section dedicated to words of comfort for Brenda and her family.

Blood For Blood

2006-03-12T12:14:00.000-08:00

__________________________________

Hurricane Katrina continues to be the greatest disaster in American history (excluding, of course, the entire Bush presidency) and the rest of the nation seems to have forgotten.

Just a couple of weeks ago people actually partied on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras while large portions of New Orleans and Mississippi still look like something out of a post-apocalyptic nightmare.

Everyone that is interviewed who lost property, family, or friends in the filthy waters back in September are livid and demanding help from anyone who will listen.

But their faces are few and far between in the American media. Their voices are drowned out by trivia and noise and there seems to be nothing to do and no one to do it when it comes to helping thousands still be victimized by official stupidity.

Every time I see a story sandwiched between Oscar dress coverage and sports scores,I wonder how I would react if I was in these people's shoes. I've stated before that the only thing that has kept me from extremely effective and extremely violent opposition to the criminals in charge of our country is the loss of my personal freedom that would eventually follow. I don't want to live in a cage and I don't want to die right now, so I remain peaceful.

For now.

But how would I feel if I was standing in the ruins of my home which the insurance I've been paying for religiously for years now refuses to cover, having lost members of my family because the government sat on their asses and let them die?

How much would I feel like I had to lose? How long before I decided if life as I knew it was over , then someone was sure as hell was going to pay for the negligence that led to this shitty mess?

How long until some angry men or women, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers decide to make it blood for blood?

Check this out:

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0311-21.htm

Bush and the rest of the ruling class should be very nervous. The Congress and Senate, FEMA and every other alphabet organizations from the NSA to the IRS should be taking notice of the growing rage of all of who aren't part of the elite. We are the ones who have built this nation into what it is. We work hard and are honest. We are what America should be. And finally, the thought that should make the our pampered and cowardly "leaders" wake in a cold sweat at night, we are the ones you trained in deadly arts, sent to fight, then forgot about. Our government sits on a powderkeg and the sparks are swirling in a growing wind.

I'm saying it now and I'm deadly serious. An incredible change must take place in the months and years to come, one that will change the cloyingly corrupt business as usual.

Or else, one day soon:

Blood for blood.

PS,

To the NSA, FBI, DOD, Secret Service or anyone else looking in:

Do your jobs and STOP THESE CRIMINALS, or else we will.

This may sound like a threat against the current administration and the government of the United States.

You're goddamned right.

It is.

Well, that seems fair

2006-03-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

_____________________________________________

I understand there's
an empty cell in the
Hague.

Hmmmm....

So Milosevic is dead

"Finally, we have some reason to smile. God is fair," said Hajra Catic, who heads an association of women that lost their loved ones in the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims in the eastern Srebrenica enclave by Serb troops.

Tens of thousands of innocent people murdered in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and Milosevic dies peacefully in his cell.

Oh yes, God is fair.

2006-03-07T12:24:00.000-08:00

Click for larger pic.

Stumped

2006-03-07T00:50:00.000-08:00

__________________________________

It's sad how funny I found this headline.

Pissed Off

2006-03-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

_____________________________

And here I thought I was way too numb for anything to get through enough to make me angry. It took a self-righteous member of the fucking American Taliban to do it, but at least it proves I'm still capable of giving a damn.

Check out this arrogant, thoughtless piece of shit:

http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2006_03_01_echidneofthesnakes_archive.html#114150875025460087

A warm welcome

2006-03-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

President Bush receives the usual warm welcome he always
gets when he travels abroad. Seeing how body language and
facial expressions don't always cross the language barrier,
I can't really tell what the nice ladies in the picture at the top
are thinking, but my guess would be: "Bite me!"

I swear I looked for an hour at pictures of protests in India
trying to spot Barnita doing something horrifying to an effigy
of Bush. No such luck.

Just 'cause it soothes my soul

2006-03-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

_____________________________________

Fallen Angel

by Robbie Robertson

Are you out there
Can you hear me
Can you see me in the dark

I don't believe it's all for nothing
It's not just written in the sand
Sometimes I thought you felt too much
And you crossed into the shadowland

And the river was overflowing
And the sky was fiery red
You gotta play the hand that's dealt ya
That's what the old man always said

Fallen Angel
Casts a shadow up against the sun
If my eyes could see
The spirit of the chosen one

In my dream the pipes were playing
In my dream I lost a friend
Come down Gabriel and blow your horn
'Cause some day we will meet again

Fallen Angel
Casts a shadow up against the sun
If my eyes could see
The spirit of the chosen one

All the tears
All the rage
All the blues in the night
If my eyes could see
You kneeling in the silver light

Fallin', fallin', fallin' down
Fallin', fallin' down
Fallin', fallin', fallin' down
Fallin', fallin' down

Fallen Angel
Casts a shadow up against the sun
If my eyes could see
The spirit of the chosen one

All the tears
All the rage
All the blues in the night
If my eyes could see
You kneeling in the silver light

If you're out there can you touch me
Can you see me I don't know
If you're out there can you reach me
Lay a flower in the snow

The Dick Heard 'Round the World

2006-02-24T14:55:00.000-08:00

__________________________

I'm very late in weighing in on Cheney's shooting incident. At the time it happened all I really heard and cared to hear was that the Vice-President had shot someone. I wasn't in the mood to pursue the matter any further and I just figured Scooter Libby had gone to that great bureaucracy in the sky and I just sunk back into my self-pitying funk.

With the odd exception of Paul Begala, I haven't heard anyone from the left who knew a great deal about hunting and the rules that govern doing it safely. Of course my first thought was,"Paul Begala hunts?" Then it occurred to me that I'm a walking, talking case study of someone who can be raised in the testoterone-soaked gun and hunting culture of the South and the West and not turn out like say, Dick Cheney.

But Jesus Christ, Paul Begala?

Anyway, all that aside, I'm not going to rehash all the stuff you already know. I'm going to talk, from a former hunters standpoint, about what a fucking idiot Dick Cheney is.

First thing: Dick Cheney and his band of merry men weren't hunting. They were out shooting mostly tame, raised for the purpose of being shot, birds. In my mind this is no different from deciding to take your gun and mow down all the family pets in your neighborhood. And they didn't even have the decency to walk to where the tame birds were.

The had to drive.

They had to drive SUV's.

Is there anything that sums up the pampered wanna-be macho swagger of this administration than that? I have no doubt in the caravan of courage that was this little hunting trip that there was a White House photographer ready to snap a picture of Cheney shooting trained birds.

Why do I keep picturing Uncle Jimbo from South Park drunkenly yelling"They're coming right for us"?

I don't hunt anymore. I feel absolutely no need to show my dominance over nature by gunning down animals for fun. I feel only scorn for people who hunt for sport. If you don't eat it, don't kill it. I have known, and still know, people who hunt for food. Many times when I was growing up a freezer full of deer meat helped my parents stretch their incomes to make it through to payday. If today, I found it difficult to feed my family, I would hunt to do so. I won't lie and say a part of me wouldn't enjoy it either. It's just that when it comes to dealing out life and death, I believe it should be a matter of life and death.

Growing up here in the South I have hunted just about everything that swam, flew, and ran through the Tennessee mountains and valleys. I really enjoyed squirrel and rabbit hunting. Believe it or not it was a challenge. You had a split second to identify your target, make sure no dogs or fellow hunters were downrange (hear that Dick?), aim quickly, and fire. It took practice and skill and we ate everything we killed. When we fished, if we weren't planning on eating the Stripe or Bass we caught, we threw them back to fight another day. I hunted deer on several occasions but I'm glad to say I've never killed one of the beautiful creatures, not for lack of trying, I assure you. I was just never quiet or stealthy enough. Besides, sitting in the woods at four a.m. in twenty degree weather, being absolutely still for hours on end, never appealed to me.
Hunting rabbits and squirrel, you tried to make noise in order to flush them. Shooting them once you did was the challenge.

I'm glad I never killed deer myself but I've been up close and personal on dozens of occasions when fellow hunters have. It's brutal and in no way something I would even want to be around today.I may someday teach my son to safely handle firearms, but I don't plan on introducing him to hunting. Age has brought empathy, and I don't like to watch any creature die violently. However I do admire the skill it takes, especially the guys I know that hunt deer with bows. Yes, for those who don't know, here in the modern age of assault rifles and twenty power scopes, some hunters prefer to do it the old-fashioned way, using bows and arrows. Even though these powerful compound bows carry the knock-down power of modern rifles, it still takes incredible skill to shoot something fifty yards away with one. Hell, I've known people that have hunted huge and dangerous Kodiak brown bears in Alaska with bows. Miss one of those and you may just find which part of the food chain you really belong to.

I said all of that to say this: There are hunters, who have a deep respect for nature and use what they kill for themselves and their families.

And there are men like Dick Cheney who like to murder small animals for sport.

One of the first and most important lessons you learn to do in firearms training is never, ever fire your weapon when you aren't sure of your target. And one of the first rules of hunting is always know where the members of your party are before you fire. Cheney violated both rules.

If you want to live a long life with all of the limbs you were born with, you never drink while handling firearms and you never hunt with a bunch of idiots who are drinking. The Vice-President's "I had a beer at lunch" is one of the stupidest things to ever come out of Cheney's mouth.

Anyone who has ever watched some drunk driver at a traffic stop on Cops knows that there are rules to lying about alcohol consumption.

"I had a beer" means "I had three".

"I had a couple" means " I drank a sixpack".

"Yes, I've been drinking" means "I'm shitfaced, Ossifer, go fuck yourself"

Add to this the fact that a man who has had something like eighty four heart attacks as Deadeye Dick has, is surely on a shitload of blood pressure and blood thinning medications and shouldn't be drinking any alcohol at lunch, dinner, or anywhere else. Much less around loaded (no pun intended) firearms.

Of course Harry "The Target" Whittington seems to be fine with being shot in the head and heart by a man who couldn't even bother to go to hospital to check on him, so I suppose this too will go away.It will be lost in the storm of slime and corruption that is the trademark of the increasingly lawless Bush administration.

So the Vice-President of the United States who, by his own admission, was drinking while handling loaded firearms and shot a member of his hunting party. Then they failed to inform the media for almost a full day. Then the Secret Service turned away police officers who tried to investigate.

Thank God he didn't do something really horrible, like have consensual sex with a woman.

That would have really riled up the puritan sensibilities of America's Republicans.

Then it would have been impeachment time for sure.

Yeah right.

I always viewed Cheney as a shrewd politician and certainly an intelligent man and he no doubt is when it comes to life in the ivory towers of Washington.

But out in the real world, like his mental midget boss, Dick Cheney is arrogant and careless. It explains how this administration can keep doing the arrogant and careless things they keep doing on the world stage. Bush and Cheney are both just a couple of drunks stumbling around with really big loaded guns.

It's just a matter of time until they hurt someone else.

Presidentin Is Hard

2006-02-24T13:45:00.000-08:00

_______________________________

"Look, you people need to understand, Presidentin is hard! "
"And I'm havin' to do it with half the brain of a normal moron!"
"I thought when they said Dubai they meant "Yes, we want to buy
your ports"
"Presidintin is hard".

Human and Proud

2006-02-23T11:42:00.000-08:00

__________________

This post is for Suheir, for teaching me the great Lesson.

Hello dear friends of Green September.

If you can imagine being give a huge dose of speed then being thrown into an industrial-sized blender all while having the worst migraine headache of your life, you get the picture of what things have been like for yours truly these past weeks.

As of eight minutes ago I still had a pulse and was drawing breath, so at least there is that.

All of your kind words of support have meant more than I could ever try to say. Thank you.

The truth is that I'm a bit overwhelmed about trying to catch up. Where do I start? Cheney's itchy trigger finger? Cindy Sheehan's disgraceful treatment at the State of the Onion party?
Mosques blowing up?

Or how about the fact that thus far a President who has broken the law by spying on American citizens hasn't even been questioned by anyone in a position to do anything about it?

How about selling our ports her in America to the country that allegedly attacked us on September 11?

I admit it. I'm overwhelmed. Scandal fatigue. Post Traumatic Outrage Disorder or something. I truly don't know what to say to a lot of the shit that's going on other than : Told you so.

I'm too tired to laugh gleefully when Republicans like my own Congressman Zach Wamp react with shock, shock I say, when speaking on local radio about the Saudi ports deal. What! Bush and the White House incredibly incompetent or just down right uncaring about homeland security?!!!! Shocked!!!!

I can't laugh because I know that all of this is costing our future. Yours and mine. The money, energy, and human beings being squandered by this administration cannot be kept track of. Even if we had accurate information of what these people have done, you still could not keep pace with the tally of daily atrocities being committed.

Perhaps I sound a bit defeatist. Not really. I'm just being realistic. I know that if giant aliens from the planet Gleebfar (fuck you spell checker, let's see you find a close match for that) came down and kidnapped the entire Bush administration. we would still be generations in paying for their horrid policies.

But I still believe. I still believe that one person can make a difference. I still believe that the future can be bright.

It will be bright wherever I call home. I will teach my child that there is goodness, hope, and nobility in the human spirit and I will attempt to demonstrate this in my actions. I want my son to know the truth about humans. We can be violent, bloody barbarians while at the same time looking at the stars and dreaming. We are light and we are the shadow cast by light. Nietzsche and Gandhi were both right. We are an ugly/beautiful race that is simply finding it's way.
Some disagreed with a post a while back when I included Bush, Cheney and the Neo-Cons as part of the great Us. Now more than ever we need to remember that the opposition are indeed human beings with fears an foibles just like us. Because if we simply say these men are monsters or worse, obstacles to be removed on the way to Utopia, we fall into the Abyss of inhumanity that we fight so hard against. It's very simple, the only way to keep our humanity in the world that is and that is to come, is to do just that: keep our humanity. Love more, for those that do not love. Hate injustice more for those that do not. Live loud! Fight and fuck and be angry and compassionate! Be exactly what and who you are and be it like a beacon in darkness a thousand fathoms deep.

It's all we can do right now. Remember hope. Cling to each other, and know that dawn follows night.

All New!!!!!!!!!

2006-02-23T09:02:00.000-08:00

_____________

If you're reading this, and you still care, please know that I will be adding new posts this evening and thank you for sticking around.

What It Means To Be A Republican

2006-02-19T12:42:00.000-08:00

_____________________________

Published on Sunday, February 19, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
What It Means To Be A Republican
by Larry Beinhart

The vice president shoots you in the heart and in the face. Then you apologize for all the trouble it’s caused him. That’s what it means to be a Republican.

Despite almost hysterical warnings the president stays asleep at the wheel. He does nothing about terrorism and 9/11 happens. He responds by running away to Nebraska. Three days later he makes a supposedly impromptu speech with a bull horn on the rubble of the World Trade Center. He is universally cheered as a hero. That’s what it means to be a Republican. The president puts together false claims to go to war with the wrong country. His party universally supports him. That’s what it means to be a Republican.

The administration mismanages the war in Iraq so that it creates chaos, a breeding ground for terrorists and political opportunities for Islamic fundamentalists. Along the way, the reasons for going to war are exposed as false. The president runs on national security as his main issue. He is re-elected. That’s what it means to be a Republican.

The president cheerfully gives away the surplus to the richest people in the country. Then he runs up record debts, just to throw more money their way. He claims it has helped America’s economy. People act like they believe him. That’s what it means to be a Republican.

The administration continues it’s magnificent tradition of going to sleep when it is warned of disaster. It does nothing when Katrina is coming. It continues its record of doing nothing when disaster arrives. As New Orleans was lost, just as when the World Trade Center was lost, the president got as far away as possible. But he can’t be blamed for what nature did. That’s what it means to be a Republican.

The president orders wiretaps without warrants, a straightforward violation of the constitution. When the Attorney General is called to testify, the head of the Judiciary Committee insists that his testimony not be under oath. The head of the intelligence committee suggests that the law be changed, now, to make it legal after the fact. That’s what it means to be a Republican.

Alberto Gonzales helped come up with the program that rejected the Geneva Conventions, that permits torture, that says that the president is above the law and that “I was only following orders” should be a defense against a charge of war crimes. Ah, if only the Nazi war criminals who were hung at Nuremberg had Gonzales there to defend them. The president nominates Gonzales to be his new Attorney General. He is confirmed with little debate and no outrage. That’s what it means to be a Republican.

This needs to be understood.

What it implies is that Republicans can’t be dealt with as if reason and facts will sway them. Because it wont. It’s hard for reality based people, regular Democrats and Liberals to understand that.

What it let’s us know is that reality based people, Democrats, Liberals, real Conservatives, old-fashioned Republicans and non-profit Christians have to take more vigorous and rigorous stands. Or reality and real American values and the American landscape will disappear, not just temporarily, but forever.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0219-20.htm

Dead Eye Dick

2006-02-15T05:10:00.000-08:00

___________________________________

Open thread for all things Dick.

One goddamned day at a time

2006-02-13T23:56:00.000-08:00

Sorry I've been away

Personal problems have taken me out of the Game.

My wife and I are separating.

I will continue with Green September.

Please keep me in your thoughts.

I've crawled back out of the bag of weed, and I feel much better

2006-02-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

___________________________________

OK, so the worst thing that could happen, as far as Bush's power grab, has happened. Alito, who will no doubt support any expansion of the "Terminal Executive" or whatever the hell the Neo-Cons are calling it these days, was confirmed. All but 25 members of the "opposition" party had the courage to even attempt to fight back. I sent so many E-mails Sunday to various Senators, I lost track. I may have asked Bill Frist for his support, I'm not sure.

I was slightly disappointed by the outcome.

So. Things suck.

What do you, my friends, think will come next?

2006-01-31T12:16:00.000-08:00

The United States Of America

1776-2006

Rest In Peace

2006-01-31T00:37:00.000-08:00

72-25

In This Time, In this Place

2006-01-29T08:42:00.000-08:00

_________________________________

Now life devalues day by day
As friends and neighbors turn away
And there's a change that, even with regret, cannot be undone
Now frontiers shift like desert sands
While nations wash their bloodied hands
Of loyalty, of history, in shades of grey

Pink Floyd -A Great Day For Freedom

This week should tell the tale. I don't believe the Democrats have a chance in hell of blocking Alito's confirmation, however if they refuse to even attempt a filibuster, we may as well forget our hopes for a return to any sort of democracy.

I believe this is the high-water mark for America. For years now we have watched the slow erosion of our civil liberties and the destruction of democracy. If the Democrats refuse to fight on this issue which is so important, then we will indeed by a one party nation.

We've had so many turning points, so many chances to stop our headlong rush into the brutal horror that is fascism.

And now we have our final chance for the opposition party to stand up.

Impeachment won't matter. Investigations won't matter. This is where the Democrats show whether they have any say left in our government. The epidemic of lawlessness and corruption must be fought right here and right now.

Because if not now, as far as legal and peaceful opposition goes, there is no when.

This is the moment on which history turns. This will be the moment when we people of good conscience find out if we have any political leaders left.

This is either the beginning of our long fight back, or the end of our Republic as we know it.

Sound familiar?

2006-01-27T17:52:00.000-08:00

_________________

"To say 'unchecked power' basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject, I am doing what you expect me to do, and at the same time, safeguarding the civil liberties of the country. As president and commander in chief I have the constitutional responsibility and the constitutional authority to protect our country."

George W. Bush
December 19, 2005

"If anyone reproaches me and asked why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this : In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people."

Adolf Hitler July 13, 1934

Cowards

2006-01-27T13:37:00.000-08:00

___________________

So our "invincible" military can't defend itself against underfunded amateurs with toy remote controls and old Russian rifles, they decide that this might work:

The U.S. Army in Iraq has at least twice seized and jailed the wives of suspected insurgents in hopes of "leveraging" their husbands into surrender, U.S. military documents show.

In one case, a secretive task force locked up the young mother of a nursing baby, a U.S. intelligence officer reported. In the case of a second detainee, one American colonel suggested to another that they catch her husband by tacking a note to the family's door telling him "to come get his wife."

The issue of female detentions in Iraq has taken on a higher profile since kidnappers seized American journalist Jill Carroll on Jan. 7 and threatened to kill her unless all Iraqi women detainees are freed.
......

During the pre-operation brief it was recommended by TF personnel that if the wife were present, she be detained and held in order to leverage the primary target's surrender," wrote the 14-year veteran officer.

He said he objected, but when they raided the house the team leader, a senior sergeant, seized her anyway.

"The 28-year-old woman had three young children at the house, one being as young as six months and still nursing," the intelligence officer wrote. She was held for two days and was released after he complained, he said.

By all means, let's support our bullying, murdering, cowardly troops.

Can't link to the story from the AP, my computer at work only uses Internet Explorer and it will not create links for blogger. I would post the URL but it's about 12 miles long. If anyone has a link that works please put it in comments.

Senator Boxer (sigh)

2006-01-26T18:16:00.000-08:00

_______________________

Got an e-mail from Barbara Boxer's PAC about Alito.

I can't stand the sight of Democrats these days but I still have a special place in my heart for little Barbara.

Dear Robert,

We thought you may be interested in reading the text of a speech that Senator Boxer delivered yesterday, laying out her opposition to the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Today, I am announcing my opposition to the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court of the United States.

According to Article II of the Constitution, justices of the Supreme Court may not be appointed by the president without the advice and consent of the United States Senate. So it is our solemn duty to consider each nomination carefully, keeping in mind the interests of the American people. And this nomination is particularly crucial because the stakes have rarely been so high.

First, consider the context in which this nomination comes before us. The seat that Judge Alito has been nominated for is now held by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who came to the Court in 1981.

For years, Justice O'Connor has provided the tie-breaking vote and a commonsense voice of reason in some of the most important cases to come before the Court, including a woman's right to choose, civil rights, and freedom of religion.

Second, consider the tumultuous political climate in our nation. President Bush understood that in 2000 when he promised to govern from the center, and be "a uniter, not a divider." Sadly, this nomination shows that he has forgotten that promise because it is notnfrom the center and it is not uniting the nation.

The right thing to do would have been to give us a justice in the mold of Justice O'Connor, and that is what the president should have done.

Let me be clear: I do not deny Judge Alito's judicial qualifications. He has been a government lawyer and judge for more than 20 years and the American Bar Association rated him well qualified. He is an intelligent and capable person. His family should be proud of him and all Americans should be proud that the American dream was there for the Alito family.

But after reviewing the hearing record and the record of his statements, writings and rulings over the past 24 years, I am convinced that Judge Alito is the wrong person for this job.

I am deeply concerned about how Justice Alito will impact the ability of other families to live the American dream -- to be assured of privacy in their homes and their personal lives, to be secure in their neighborhoods, to have fair treatment in the workplace, and to have confidence that the power of the executive branch will be checked.

As I reviewed Judge Alito's record, I asked whether he will vote to preserve fundamental American liberties and values --

Will Justice Alito vote to uphold Congress' constitutional power to pass laws to protect Americans' health, safety, and welfare? Judge Alito's record says NO.

In the 1996 Rybar case, Judge Alito voted to strike down the federal ban on the transfer or possession of machine guns because he believed it exceeded Congress' power under the Commerce Clause. His Third Circuit colleagues sharply criticized his dissent and said that it ran counter to "a basic tenet of the constitutional separation of powers." And Judge Alito's extremist view has been rejected by six other circuit courts and the Supreme Court. Judge Alito stood alone and failed to protect our families.

In a case concerning worker protection, Judge Alito was again in the minority when he said that federal mine health and safety standards did not apply to a coal processing site. He tried to explain it as just a "technical issue of interpretation." I fear for the safety of our workers if Judge Alito's narrow, technical reading of the law should ever prevail.

Will Justice Alito vote to protect the right to privacy, especially a woman's reproductive freedom? Judge Alito's record says NO.

We have all heard about Judge Alito's 1985 job application, in which he wrote that the constitution does not protect the right of a woman to choose. He was given the chance to disavow that position during the hearings -- and he refused to do so. He had the chance to say, as Judge Roberts did, that Roe v. Wade is settled law, and he refused.

He had the chance to explain his dissent in the Casey decision, in which he argued that the Pennsylvania spousal notification requirement was not an undue burden on a woman seeking an abortion because it would affect only a small number of women, but he refused to back away from his position. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, found the provision to be unconstitutional, and Justice O'Connor, co-writing for the Court, criticized the faulty analysis supported by Judge Alito, saying that "the analysis does not end with the one percent of women" affected... "it begins there."

To my mind, Judge Alito's ominous statements and narrow-minded reasoning clearly signal a hostility to women's rights, and portend a move back toward the dark days when abortion was illegal in many states, and many women died as a result. In the 21st century, it is astounding that a Supreme Court nominee would not view Roe v. Wade as settled law when its fundamental principle -- a woman's right to choose -- has been reaffirmed many times since it was decided.

Will Justice Alito vote to protect Americans from unconstitutional searches? Judge Alito's record says NO.

In Doe v. Groody in 2004, he said a police strip search of a 10-year-old girl was lawful, even though their search warrant didn't name her. Judge Alito said that even if the warrant did not actually authorize the search of the girl, "a reasonable police officer could certainly have read the warrant as doing so..." This casual attitude toward one of our most basic constitutional guarantees -- the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches -- is almost shocking. As Judge Alito's own Third Circuit Court said regarding warrants, "a particular description is the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment." We certainly do not need Supreme Court justices who do not understand this fundamental constitutional protection.

Will Justice Alito vote to let citizens stop companies from polluting their communities? Judge Alito's record says NO.

In the Magnesium Elektron case, Judge Alito voted to make it harder for citizens to sue for toxic emissions that violate the Clean Water Act. Fortunately, in another case several years later, the Supreme Court rejected the Third Circuit and Alito's narrow reading of the law. Judge Alito doesn't seem to care about a landmark environmental law.

Will Justice Alito vote to let working women and men have their day in court against employers who discriminate against them? Judge Alito's record says NO.

In 1997, in the Bray case, Judge Alito was the only judge on the Third Circuit to say that a hotel employee claiming racial discrimination could not take her case to a jury.

In the Sheridan case, a female employee sued for discrimination, alleging that after she complained about incidents of sexual harassment, she was demoted and marginalized to the point that she was forced to quit. By a vote of 10 to 1, the Third Circuit found for the plaintiff.

Guess who was the one? Only Judge Alito thought the employee should have to show that discrimination was the "determinative cause" of the employer's action. Using his standard would make it almost impossible for a woman claiming discrimination in the workplace to get to trial.

Finally, will Justice Alito be independent from the executive branch that appointed him, and be a vote against power grabs by the president? Judge Alito's record says NO.

As a lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department, he authored a memo suggesting a new way for the president to encroach on Congress' lawmaking powers. He said that when the president signs a law, he should make a statement about the law, giving it his own interpretation, whether it was consistent with what Congress had written or not. He wrote that this would "get in the last word on questions of interpretation" of the law. In the hearings, Judge Alito refused to back away from this memo.

When asked whether he believed the president could invade another country, in the absence of an imminent threat, without first getting the approval of the American people, of Congress, Judge Alito refused to rule it out.

When asked if the president had the power to authorize someone to engage in torture, Alito refused to answer.

The Administration is now asserting vast powers, including spying on American citizens without seeking warrants -- in clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act -- violating international treaties, and ignoring laws that ban torture. We need justices who will put a check on such overreaching by the executive, not rubberstamp it. Judge Alito's record and his answers at the hearings raise very serious doubts about his commitment to being a strong check on an 'imperial president.'

In addition to these substantive matters, I remain concerned about Judge Alito's answers regarding his membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton and his failure to recuse himself from the Vanguard case, which he had promised to do.

During the hearings, we all felt great compassion for Mrs. Alito when she became emotional in reaction to the tough questions her husband faced in the Judiciary Committee. Everyone in politics knows how hard it is for families when a loved one is asked tough questions. It is part of a difficult process, and whoever said politics is not for the faint of heart was right.

Emotions have run high during this process. That's understandable. But I wish the press have focused more on the tears of those who will be affected if Judge Alito becomes Justice Alito and his out-of-the mainstream views prevail.

I worry about the tears of a worker who, having failed to get a promotion because of discrimination, is denied the opportunity to pursue her claim in court.

I worry about the tears of a mentally ill woman who is forced by law to tell her husband that she wants to terminate her pregnancy and is afraid that he will leave her or stop supporting her.

I worry about the tears of a young girl who is strip searched in her own home by police who have no valid warrant.

I worry about the tears of a mentally retarded man, who has been brutally assaulted in his workplace, when his claim of workplace harassment is dismissed by the court simply because his lawyer failed to file a well written brief on his behalf.

These are real cases in which Judge Alito has spoken.

Fortunately, he did not prevail in these cases. But if he goes to the Supreme Court, he will have a much more powerful voice -- a radical voice that will replace a voice of moderation and balance.

Perhaps the most important statement Judge Alito made during the entire hearing process was when he told the Judiciary Committee that he expects to be the same kind of justice on the Supreme Court as he has been a judge on the Circuit Court.

That is precisely the problem. As a judge, Samuel Alito seemed to approach his cases with an analytical coldness that reflected no concern for the human consequences of his reasoning.

Listen to what he said about a case involving an African-American man convicted of murder by an all white jury in a courtroom where the prosecutors had eliminated all African-American jurors in many previous murder trials as well.

Judge Alito dismissed this evidence of racial bias and said that the jury makeup was no more relevant than the fact that left-handers have won five of the last six presidential elections. When asked about this analogy during the hearings, he said it "went to the issue of statistics... (which) is a branch of mathematics, and there are ways to analyze statistics so that you draw sound conclusions from them..."

That response would have been appropriate for a college math professor, but it is deeply troubling from a potential Supreme Court justice.

As the great jurist and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in 1881, "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience... The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics."

What Holmes meant is that the law is a living thing, that those who interpret it must do so with wisdom and humanity, and with an understanding of the consequences of their judgments for the lives of the people they affect.

It is with deep regret that I conclude that Judge Alito's judicial philosophy lacks this wisdom, humanity and moderation. He is simply too far out of the mainstream in his thinking. His opinions demonstrate neither the independence of mind nor the depth of heart that I believe we need in our Supreme Court justices, particularly at this crucial time in our nation's history.

That is why I will oppose this nomination.

Meet the new boss......

2006-01-26T17:47:00.000-08:00

_______________________

Hamas wins.

Good. Fuck Fatah.

They've had their chance. Hamas surely can't do any worse.

The Israelis wanted the moderates to win so it could be business as usual in the Occupied Territories. When innocent children are gunned down by the IDF, there is lots of hand wringing and finger pointing on the part of the Palestinian "leadership". Maybe leaders with itchy trigger fingers and nothing to lose will make the Zionist bastards think twice.

Bring me the head of Big Bird

2006-01-26T17:25:00.000-08:00

___________________

Marcus really likes Sesame Street.

I mean really likes it. A lot.

Yesterday I found myself visualizing driving a stake through Count Von Count's chest while he screamed " That's one! One wooden stake!"

Someone help me.

You're fucked, eh

2006-01-24T12:48:00.000-08:00

Just bend over, Canada. It's easier if if you just relax and don't struggle

No Quarter

2006-01-22T16:04:00.000-08:00

________________________

Murder. Torture and murder. That's what any "insurgent" or "terrorist" who surrenders to American forces can expect.

A jury found that CWO Lewis E. Welshofer Jr. didn't murder Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush when he tortured him to death in November of 2003. Instead they convicted him of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty.

Here is what is now considered negligent homicide:

.... stuff Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush into the sleeping bag, bind him with an electrical cord, straddle his chest and occasionally cover his mouth.

An autopsy showed that the General died of "heart failure".

This is after the tender mercies of the CIA handlers:

Welshofer had interrogated the general several times, once slapping him in the chest, before the interviews turned markedly more violent, according to witnesses at the trial. Iraqi nationals apparently in the employ of the CIA entered the interrogation room Nov. 24 and beat Mowhoush for 30 minutes with rubber hoses and insulation.

The next day, Welshofer's team took Mowhoush to the prison roof and pinned him down while the lead interrogator poured water on his face, according to multiple witnesses. Welshofer and another interrogator also repeatedly hit the general's elbows.

A 57 year-old Major General that SURRENDERED.

This guy was allegedly a Saddam confidant so I've no doubt he was no innocent, but Jesus Christ, this guy was a POW.

So here is a lesson for the present and future members of the Resistance fighting the American Empire:

Don't surrender to the Americans. They will torture and perhaps murder you.

Fight to the death.

The "R" Word

2006-01-22T08:24:00.000-08:00

___________________

In an excerpt from Paul Craig Roberts' Fooled Again, a word I keep hearing whispered these days:

"Miller directs our attention to Bush's high-handed treatment of dissenters. If electronic voting machines programmed by private Republican firms remain in our future, dissent will become pointless unless it boils over into revolution. Power-mad Republicans need to consider the result when democracy loses its legitimacy and only the rich have anything to lose."

Also, I recommend you visit a blog called The Autonomist. I'm not linking to it because I don't want any of us traced back here. I like our nice, quiet place here and don't want lots of neo-con trolls about. Use a search engine or it's blogspot.com address to find it. If you scroll down you will find an incredibly nasty rant about a new SDS that's attempting to organize. Sounds like the author is more afraid than anything else. He should be. The radical left getting it's shit together and realizing how little we have to lose by resisting is something that should give all of these little brownshirts nightmares.

More about the "R" word. Like all of you, I see our world and the various and terrible forms of injustice that are mostly the rule, and I want change. Revolution. Any sane person would. That's us, the lefties, the dreamers who have seen enough blood and anger and it drove us all sane.

I always thought the idea of peaceful, and if I'm going to be brutally honest, violent revolution was a romantic notion.

Not anymore. Not with the situation staring us in the face. I know such change is terrifying and often bloody and now that such fanciful thoughts have met cold reality, I'm scared to death. Oh I know I'm a very little fish in an enormous pond, and there are a thousand so-called "traitors" that would have to be extraordinarily rendered before I get a knock on my door, but for the first time since all of this started, I am truly afraid.

I'm not running, I'm not leaving my country. I will not cast my family into the role of refugees. Not while there may still be hope, not while we still can resist. My first thought after hearing about the seizure of search engine records was to get out of blogging. This is an arrow pointing directly at my family and I. However, after soul searching and a verbal asskicking from my wife, ( "That defeats the whole purpose of what you've been doing") I will continue to broadcast here until we either win and the criminals running our government are stopped, or they take me away.

Until then, careful what you link to. Progressive blogs and news sites are fine, but try to avoid direct links to right-wing blogs or sites. I don't want to have to only allow registered members to post comments. Send folks you trust here if you like, but let's be careful about who gets invited to play.

Keep Green September quietly off of the radar. I the future we may have to pass along information or news that's being censored. We may not have safe ways of communicating and we will need a place to gather for more than discussion and debate.

Patriots

2006-01-21T08:33:00.000-08:00

_______________________

Dave Lindorff at This Can't Be Happening gives us a roll call of those still brave enough to dissent:

In a legislature full of gutless cowards and corporate bootlickers, that handfull of people of courage who genuinely care that the White House is sucking the life out of the Constitution like a bloated leech should be held up to public acclaim.

So here they are:

On House Resolution 635, calling for formation of a Select Committee, the co-sponsors are Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Shiela Jackson Lee (D-TX), Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA).

On H.R. 636, calling for censure of President Bush, the co-sponsors are Rep. Waters, Rep. Woollsey, Rep. Rangel, and Rep. Lofgren.

On H.R. 637, calling for censure of Cheney, the same four co-sponsors of H.R. 636 are joined by Rep. Jackson Lee.

Link:http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/2006.01.01_arch.html#1137165750006

They will have to pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands

2006-01-19T17:37:00.000-08:00

____________________

Bastard fascist rat assholes are after everybody's Google search records to help stop naughty pictures on the Web.

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/bush-justice-dept-demands-google-give.html

Ok, now they're really starting to piss me off.

Update: Thank you to various commenters for the links.

"Google has opposed the request. Yahoo and AOL have acknowledged complying, saying that they went along with the government's request but did not turn over personally identifiable information. At the time this was written, Microsoft was refusing to say anything, but the ACLU has confirmed that the company did comply."

Goddammit!

Yahoo News Bitch Slaps Scott McClellan

2006-01-17T12:31:00.000-08:00

__________________________________

This is what the President's dancing monkey, Scott McClellan, had to say about Al Gore's speech yesterday as reported by Yahoo News:

"If Al Gore is going to be the voice of the Democrats on national security matters, we welcome it," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in a swipe at the Democrat, who lost the 2000 election to Bush. McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants. "I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds," McClellan said of Gore.

Smarmy, smug, and slimy, right?

But in the next paragraph, the writer for Yahoo catches poor Scotty with his pants down:

But at the time that of the Ames search in 1993 and when Gorelick testified a year later, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required warrants for electronic surveillance for intelligence purposes, but did not cover physical searches. The law was changed to cover physical searches in 1995 under legislation that Clinton supported and signed.

Here's a link to the story.

There's blood in the water folks and oh it smells so good!

Iran

2006-01-17T09:49:00.000-08:00

____________________________

Waiting

Watching

The storm spirals and turns.War drums in the night
My fearful heartbeat

Bombs, fear, and god

the sweetbitter cocktail for a thirst older than our words

Desert winds, hot with the chants
hate and fear and god and sex and all those things
that make death a necessary visitor

I sit in the belly of the Great Satan

Waiting

Watching

I'm fearful and hating too

No chants No bombs

Quiet, with only our great plastic need

Afraid. I want to be old someday.

No occupation this time. No checkpoints. No Green Zone.

only fire from above

As the faces of the innocent and guilty

melt together

For freedom

New Favorite Picture

2006-01-17T08:45:00.000-08:00

Why yes, that is Tiananmen Square and yes, that is two women kissing.

Live free or die.

Nothing to see here, move along

2006-01-17T03:51:00.000-08:00

_________________________

Just for the fun of it I channel surfed between the three major networks evening news yesterday. Not one mention of Al Gore's speech on any of the big three.

Big surprise, I know.

The good news is that it's all over the web. I've been reading some of the right-wing blogs and they are just pitiful in their attempts to attack the content of Gore's speech.

I'm very excited and relieved. Fuck the Main Stream Media. Fuck Fox News and fuck CNN.

It doesn't matter. It's out there. It's been said. The President broke the law and now must pay the price. Period.

Analysis doesn't matter, coverage doesn't matter. It's enough that the words have been spoken. The brain dead that watched the Golden Globes rather than watch C-Span broadcast one of the best political speeches in our country's history aren't paying attention anyway. These are the folks that won't notice anything amiss until their house is bulldozed to make way for the internment camps.

I'm relieved because it's not just us freaky bloggers sounding the alarm anymore.

More on all of this later. Sleepy. Bed now.

Speak it, brother

2006-01-16T14:50:00.000-08:00

________________________________

What follows, my friends, is no less than history in the making. This is no blogger in his basement saying these truths, it is no partisan talking head. These words are spoken by a former Vice-President and if law truly held sway, the legally elected President of the United States. He pulls no punches and makes a speech that reverberates with both hope for the Republic and scorn for those who would destroy her.

When this tale is told in the history books, this speech will be remembered with honor.

Full text of Al Gore's speech today:

Congressman Barr and I have disagreed many times over the years, but we have joined together today with thousands of our fellow citizens-Democrats and Republicans alike-to express our shared concern that America's Constitution is in grave danger.

In spite of our differences over ideology and politics, we are in strong agreement that the American values we hold most dear have been placed at serious risk by the unprecedented claims of the Administration to a truly breathtaking expansion of executive power.

As we begin this new year, the Executive Branch of our government has been caught eavesdropping on huge numbers of American citizens and has brazenly declared that it has the unilateral right to continue without regard to the established law enacted by Congress to prevent such abuses.

It is imperative that respect for the rule of law be restored.

So, many of us have come here to Constitution Hall to sound an alarm and call upon our fellow citizens to put aside partisan differences and join with us in demanding that our Constitution be defended and preserved.

It is appropriate that we make this appeal on the day our nation has set aside to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who challenged America to breathe new life into our oldest values by extending its promise to all our people.

On this particular Martin Luther King Day, it is especially important to recall that for the last several years of his life, Dr. King was illegally wiretapped-one of hundreds of thousands of Americans whose private communications were intercepted by the U.S. government during this period.

The FBI privately called King the "most dangerous and effective negro leader in the country" and vowed to "take him off his pedestal." The government even attempted to destroy his marriage and blackmail him into committing suicide.

This campaign continued until Dr. King's murder. The discovery that the FBI conducted a long-running and extensive campaign of secret electronic surveillance designed to infiltrate the inner workings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and to learn the most intimate details of Dr. King's life, helped to convince Congress to enact restrictions on wiretapping.

The result was the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted expressly to ensure that foreign intelligence surveillance would be presented to an impartial judge to verify that there is a sufficient cause for the surveillance. I voted for that law during my first term in Congress and for almost thirty years the system has proven a workable and valued means of according a level of protection for private citizens, while permitting foreign surveillance to continue.

Yet, just one month ago, Americans awoke to the shocking news that in spite of this long settled law, the Executive Branch has been secretly spying on large numbers of Americans for the last four years and eavesdropping on "large volumes of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other Internet traffic inside the United States." The New York Times reported that the President decided to launch this massive eavesdropping program "without search warrants or any new laws that would permit such domestic intelligence collection."

During the period when this eavesdropping was still secret, the President went out of his way to reassure the American people on more than one occasion that, of course, judicial permission is required for any government spying on American citizens and that, of course, these constitutional safeguards were still in place.

But surprisingly, the President's soothing statements turned out to be false. Moreover, as soon as this massive domestic spying program was uncovered by the press, the President not only confirmed that the story was true, but also declared that he has no intention of bringing these wholesale invasions of privacy to an end.

At present, we still have much to learn about the NSA's domestic surveillance. What we do know about this pervasive wiretapping virtually compels the conclusion that the President of the United States has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently.

A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution - our system of checks and balances - was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."

An executive who arrogates to himself the power to ignore the legitimate legislative directives of the Congress or to act free of the check of the judiciary becomes the central threat that the Founders sought to nullify in the Constitution - an all-powerful executive too reminiscent of the King from whom they had broken free. In the words of James Madison, "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet, "On Common Sense" ignited the American Revolution, succinctly described America's alternative. Here, he said, we intended to make certain that "the law is king."

Vigilant adherence to the rule of law strengthens our democracy and strengthens America. It ensures that those who govern us operate within our constitutional structure, which means that our democratic institutions play their indispensable role in shaping policy and determining the direction of our nation. It means that the people of this nation ultimately determine its course and not executive officials operating in secret without constraint.

The rule of law makes us stronger by ensuring that decisions will be tested, studied, reviewed and examined through the processes of government that are designed to improve policy. And the knowledge that they will be reviewed prevents over-reaching and checks the accretion of power.

A commitment to openness, truthfulness and accountability also helps our country avoid many serious mistakes. Recently, for example, we learned from recently classified declassified documents that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the tragic Vietnam war, was actually based on false information. We now know that the decision by Congress to authorize the Iraq War, 38 years later, was also based on false information. America would have been better off knowing the truth and avoiding both of these colossal mistakes in our history. Following the rule of law makes us safer, not more vulnerable.

The President and I agree on one thing. The threat from terrorism is all too real. There is simply no question that we continue to face new challenges in the wake of the attack on September 11th and that we must be ever-vigilant in protecting our citizens from harm.

Where we disagree is that we have to break the law or sacrifice our system of government to protect Americans from terrorism. In fact, doing so makes us weaker and more vulnerable.

Once violated, the rule of law is in danger. Unless stopped, lawlessness grows. The greater the power of the executive grows, the more difficult it becomes for the other branches to perform their constitutional roles. As the executive acts outside its constitutionally prescribed role and is able to control access to information that would expose its actions, it becomes increasingly difficult for the other branches to police it. Once that ability is lost, democracy itself is threatened and we become a government of men and not laws.

The President's men have minced words about America's laws. The Attorney General openly conceded that the "kind of surveillance" we now know they have been conducting requires a court order unless authorized by statute. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act self-evidently does not authorize what the NSA has been doing, and no one inside or outside the Administration claims that it does. Incredibly, the Administration claims instead that the surveillance was implicitly authorized when Congress voted to use force against those who attacked us on September 11th.

This argument just does not hold any water. Without getting into the legal intricacies, it faces a number of embarrassing facts. First, another admission by the Attorney General: he concedes that the Administration knew that the NSA project was prohibited by existing law and that they consulted with some members of Congress about changing the statute. Gonzalez says that they were told this probably would not be possible. So how can they now argue that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force somehow implicitly authorized it all along? Second, when the Authorization was being debated, the Administration did in fact seek to have language inserted in it that would have authorized them to use military force domestically - and the Congress did not agree. Senator Ted Stevens and Representative Jim McGovern, among others, made statements during the Authorization debate clearly restating that that Authorization did not operate domestically.

When President Bush failed to convince Congress to give him all the power he wanted when they passed the AUMF, he secretly assumed that power anyway, as if congressional authorization was a useless bother. But as Justice Frankfurter once wrote: "To find authority so explicitly withheld is not merely to disregard in a particular instance the clear will of Congress. It is to disrespect the whole legislative process and the constitutional division of authority between President and Congress."

This is precisely the "disrespect" for the law that the Supreme Court struck down in the steel seizure case.

It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution. And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties.

For example, the President has also declared that he has a heretofore unrecognized inherent power to seize and imprison any American citizen that he alone determines to be a threat to our nation, and that, notwithstanding his American citizenship, the person imprisoned has no right to talk with a lawyer-even to argue that the President or his appointees have made a mistake and imprisoned the wrong person.

The President claims that he can imprison American citizens indefinitely for the rest of their lives without an arrest warrant, without notifying them about what charges have been filed against them, and without informing their families that they have been imprisoned.

At the same time, the Executive Branch has claimed a previously unrecognized authority to mistreat prisoners in its custody in ways that plainly constitute torture in a pattern that has now been documented in U.S. facilities located in several countries around the world.

Over 100 of these captives have reportedly died while being tortured by Executive Branch interrogators and many more have been broken and humiliated. In the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, investigators who documented the pattern of torture estimated that more than 90 percent of the victims were innocent of any charges.

This shameful exercise of power overturns a set of principles that our nation has observed since General Washington first enunciated them during our Revolutionary War and has been observed by every president since then - until now. These practices violate the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention Against Torture, not to mention our own laws against torture.

The President has also claimed that he has the authority to kidnap individuals in foreign countries and deliver them for imprisonment and interrogation on our behalf by autocratic regimes in nations that are infamous for the cruelty of their techniques for torture.

Some of our traditional allies have been shocked by these new practices on the part of our nation. The British Ambassador to Uzbekistan - one of those nations with the worst reputations for torture in its prisons - registered a complaint to his home office about the senselessness and cruelty of the new U.S. practice: "This material is useless - we are selling our souls for dross. It is in fact positively harmful."

Can it be true that any president really has such powers under our Constitution? If the answer is "yes" then under the theory by which these acts are committed, are there any acts that can on their face be prohibited? If the President has the inherent authority to eavesdrop, imprison citizens on his own declaration, kidnap and torture, then what can't he do?

The Dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh, said after analyzing the Executive Branch's claims of these previously unrecognized powers: "If the President has commander-in-chief power to commit torture, he has the power to commit genocide, to sanction slavery, to promote apartheid, to license summary execution."

The fact that our normal safeguards have thus far failed to contain this unprecedented expansion of executive power is deeply troubling. This failure is due in part to the fact that the Executive Branch has followed a determined strategy of obfuscating, delaying, withholding information, appearing to yield but then refusing to do so and dissembling in order to frustrate the efforts of the legislative and judicial branches to restore our constitutional balance.

For example, after appearing to support legislation sponsored by John McCain to stop the continuation of torture, the President declared in the act of signing the bill that he reserved the right not to comply with it.

Similarly, the Executive Branch claimed that it could unilaterally imprison American citizens without giving them access to review by any tribunal. The Supreme Court disagreed, but the President engaged in legal maneuvers designed to prevent the Court from providing meaningful content to the rights of its citizens.

A conservative jurist on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Executive Branch's handling of one such case seemed to involve the sudden abandonment of principle "at substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts."

As a result of its unprecedented claim of new unilateral power, the Executive Branch has now put our constitutional design at grave risk. The stakes for America's representative democracy are far higher than has been generally recognized.

These claims must be rejected and a healthy balance of power restored to our Republic. Otherwise, the fundamental nature of our democracy may well undergo a radical transformation.

For more than two centuries, America's freedoms have been preserved in part by our founders' wise decision to separate the aggregate power of our government into three co-equal branches, each of which serves to check and balance the power of the other two.

On more than a few occasions, the dynamic interaction among all three branches has resulted in collisions and temporary impasses that create what are invariably labeled "constitutional crises." These crises have often been dangerous and uncertain times for our Republic. But in each such case so far, we have found a resolution of the crisis by renewing our common agreement to live under the rule of law.

The principle alternative to democracy throughout history has been the consolidation of virtually all state power in the hands of a single strongman or small group who together exercise that power without the informed consent of the governed.

It was in revolt against just such a regime, after all, that America was founded. When Lincoln declared at the time of our greatest crisis that the ultimate question being decided in the Civil War was "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure," he was not only saving our union but also was recognizing the fact that democracies are rare in history. And when they fail, as did Athens and the Roman Republic upon whose designs our founders drew heavily, what emerges in their place is another strongman regime.

There have of course been other periods of American history when the Executive Branch claimed new powers that were later seen as excessive and mistaken. Our second president, John Adams, passed the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts and sought to silence and imprison critics and political opponents.

When his successor, Thomas Jefferson, eliminated the abuses he said: "[The essential principles of our Government] form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation... [S]hould we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads to peace, liberty and safety."

Our greatest President, Abraham Lincoln, suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. Some of the worst abuses prior to those of the current administration were committed by President Wilson during and after WWI with the notorious Red Scare and Palmer Raids. The internment of Japanese Americans during WWII marked a low point for the respect of individual rights at the hands of the executive. And, during the Vietnam War, the notorious COINTELPRO program was part and parcel of the abuses experienced by Dr. King and thousands of others.

But in each of these cases, when the conflict and turmoil subsided, the country recovered its equilibrium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recurring cycle of excess and regret.

There are reasons for concern this time around that conditions may be changing and that the cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been witnessing the slow and steady accumulation of presidential power. In a global environment of nuclear weapons and cold war tensions, Congress and the American people accepted ever enlarging spheres of presidential initiative to conduct intelligence and counter intelligence activities and to allocate our military forces on the global stage. When military force has been used as an instrument of foreign policy or in response to humanitarian demands, it has almost always been as the result of presidential initiative and leadership. As Justice Frankfurter wrote in the Steel Seizure Case, "The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority."

A second reason to believe we may be experiencing something new is that we are told by the Administration that the war footing upon which he has tried to place the country is going to "last for the rest of our lives." So we are told that the conditions of national threat that have been used by other Presidents to justify arrogations of power will persist in near perpetuity.

Third, we need to be aware of the advances in eavesdropping and surveillance technologies with their capacity to sweep up and analyze enormous quantities of information and to mine it for intelligence. This adds significant vulnerability to the privacy and freedom of enormous numbers of innocent people at the same time as the potential power of those technologies. These techologies have the potential for shifting the balance of power between the apparatus of the state and the freedom of the individual in ways both subtle and profound.

Don't misunderstand me: the threat of additional terror strikes is all too real and their concerted efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction does create a real imperative to exercise the powers of the Executive Branch with swiftness and agility. Moreover, there is in fact an inherent power that is conferred by the Constitution to the President to take unilateral action to protect the nation from a sudden and immediate threat, but it is simply not possible to precisely define in legalistic terms exactly when that power is appropriate and when it is not.

But the existence of that inherent power cannot be used to justify a gross and excessive power grab lasting for years that produces a serious imbalance in the relationship between the executive and the other two branches of government.

There is a final reason to worry that we may be experiencing something more than just another cycle of overreach and regret. This Administration has come to power in the thrall of a legal theory that aims to convince us that this excessive concentration of presidential authority is exactly what our Constitution intended.

This legal theory, which its proponents call the theory of the unitary executive but which is more accurately described as the unilateral executive, threatens to expand the president's powers until the contours of the constitution that the Framers actually gave us become obliterated beyond all recognition. Under this theory, the President's authority when acting as Commander-in-Chief or when making foreign policy cannot be reviewed by the judiciary or checked by Congress. President Bush has pushed the implications of this idea to its maximum by continually stressing his role as Commander-in-Chief, invoking it has frequently as he can, conflating it with his other roles, domestic and foreign. When added to the idea that we have entered a perpetual state of war, the implications of this theory stretch quite literally as far into the future as we can imagine.

This effort to rework America's carefully balanced constitutional design into a lopsided structure dominated by an all powerful Executive Branch with a subservient Congress and judiciary is-ironically-accompanied by an effort by the same administration to rework America's foreign policy from one that is based primarily on U.S. moral authority into one that is based on a misguided and self-defeating effort to establish dominance in the world.

The common denominator seems to be based on an instinct to intimidate and control.

This same pattern has characterized the effort to silence dissenting views within the Executive Branch, to censor information that may be inconsistent with its stated ideological goals, and to demand conformity from all Executive Branch employees.

For example, CIA analysts who strongly disagreed with the White House assertion that Osama bin Laden was linked to Saddam Hussein found themselves under pressure at work and became fearful of losing promotions and salary increases.

Ironically, that is exactly what happened to FBI officials in the 1960s who disagreed with J. Edgar Hoover's view that Dr. King was closely connected to Communists. The head of the FBI's domestic intelligence division said that his effort to tell the truth about King's innocence of the charge resulted in he and his colleagues becoming isolated and pressured. "It was evident that we had to change our ways or we would all be out on the street.... The men and I discussed how to get out of trouble. To be in trouble with Mr. Hoover was a serious matter. These men were trying to buy homes, mortgages on homes, children in school. They lived in fear of getting transferred, losing money on their homes, as they usually did. ... so they wanted another memorandum written to get us out of the trouble that we were in."

The Constitution's framers understood this dilemma as well, as Alexander Hamilton put it, "a power over a man's support is a power over his will." (Federalist No. 73)

Soon, there was no more difference of opinion within the FBI. The false accusation became the unanimous view. In exactly the same way, George Tenet's CIA eventually joined in endorsing a manifestly false view that there was a linkage between al Qaeda and the government of Iraq.

In the words of George Orwell: "We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

Whenever power is unchecked and unaccountable it almost inevitably leads to mistakes and abuses. In the absence of rigorous accountability, incompetence flourishes. Dishonesty is encouraged and rewarded.

Last week, for example, Vice President Cheney attempted to defend the Administration's eavesdropping on American citizens by saying that if it had conducted this program prior to 9/11, they would have found out the names of some of the hijackers.

Tragically, he apparently still doesn't know that the Administration did in fact have the names of at least 2 of the hijackers well before 9/11 and had available to them information that could have easily led to the identification of most of the other hijackers. And yet, because of incompetence in the handling of this information, it was never used to protect the American people.

It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.

Moreover, if the pattern of practice begun by this Administration is not challenged, it may well become a permanent part of the American system. Many conservatives have pointed out that granting unchecked power to this President means that the next President will have unchecked power as well. And the next President may be someone whose values and belief you do not trust. And this is why Republicans as well as Democrats should be concerned with what this President has done. If this President's attempt to dramatically expand executive power goes unquestioned, our constitutional design of checks and balances will be lost. And the next President or some future President will be able, in the name of national security, to restrict our liberties in a way the framers never would have thought possible.

The same instinct to expand its power and to establish dominance characterizes the relationship between this Administration and the courts and the Congress.

In a properly functioning system, the Judicial Branch would serve as the constitutional umpire to ensure that the branches of government observed their proper spheres of authority, observed civil liberties and adhered to the rule of law. Unfortunately, the unilateral executive has tried hard to thwart the ability of the judiciary to call balls and strikes by keeping controversies out of its hands - notably those challenging its ability to detain individuals without legal process -- by appointing judges who will be deferential to its exercise of power and by its support of assaults on the independence of the third branch.

The President's decision to ignore FISA was a direct assault on the power of the judges who sit on that court. Congress established the FISA court precisely to be a check on executive power to wiretap. Yet, to ensure that the court could not function as a check on executive power, the President simply did not take matters to it and did not let the court know that it was being bypassed.

The President's judicial appointments are clearly designed to ensure that the courts will not serve as an effective check on executive power. As we have all learned, Judge Alito is a longtime supporter of a powerful executive - a supporter of the so-called unitary executive, which is more properly called the unilateral executive. Whether you support his confirmation or not - and I do not - we must all agree that he will not vote as an effective check on the expansion of executive power. Likewise, Chief Justice Roberts has made plain his deference to the expansion of executive power through his support of judicial deference to executive agency rulemaking.

And the Administration has supported the assault on judicial independence that has been conducted largely in Congress. That assault includes a threat by the Republican majority in the Senate to permanently change the rules to eliminate the right of the minority to engage in extended debate of the President's judicial nominees. The assault has extended to legislative efforts to curtail the jurisdiction of courts in matters ranging from habeas corpus to the pledge of allegiance. In short, the Administration has demonstrated its contempt for the judicial role and sought to evade judicial review of its actions at every turn.

But the most serious damage has been done to the legislative branch. The sharp decline of congressional power and autonomy in recent years has been almost as shocking as the efforts by the Executive Branch to attain a massive expansion of its power.

I was elected to Congress in 1976 and served eight years in the house, 8 years in the Senate and presided over the Senate for 8 years as Vice President. As a young man, I saw the Congress first hand as the son of a Senator. My father was elected to Congress in 1938, 10 years before I was born, and left the Senate in 1971.

The Congress we have today is unrecognizable compared to the one in which my father served. There are many distinguished Senators and Congressmen serving today. I am honored that some of them are here in this hall. But the legislative branch of government under its current leadership now operates as if it is entirely subservient to the Executive Branch.

Moreover, too many Members of the House and Senate now feel compelled to spend a majority of their time not in thoughtful debate of the issues, but raising money to purchase 30 second TV commercials.

There have now been two or three generations of congressmen who don't really know what an oversight hearing is. In the 70's and 80's, the oversight hearings in which my colleagues and I participated held the feet of the Executive Branch to the fire - no matter which party was in power. Yet oversight is almost unknown in the Congress today.

The role of authorization committees has declined into insignificance. The 13 annual appropriation bills are hardly ever actually passed anymore. Everything is lumped into a single giant measure that is not even available for Members of Congress to read before they vote on it.

Members of the minority party are now routinely excluded from conference committees, and amendments are routinely not allowed during floor consideration of legislation.

In the United States Senate, which used to pride itself on being the "greatest deliberative body in the world," meaningful debate is now a rarity. Even on the eve of the fateful vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, Senator Robert Byrd famously asked: "Why is this chamber empty?"

In the House of Representatives, the number who face a genuinely competitive election contest every two years is typically less than a dozen out of 435.

And too many incumbents have come to believe that the key to continued access to the money for re-election is to stay on the good side of those who have the money to give; and, in the case of the majority party, the whole process is largely controlled by the incumbent president and his political organization.

So the willingness of Congress to challenge the Administration is further limited when the same party controls both Congress and the Executive Branch.

The Executive Branch, time and again, has co-opted Congress' role, and often Congress has been a willing accomplice in the surrender of its own power.

Look for example at the Congressional role in "overseeing" this massive four year eavesdropping campaign that on its face seemed so clearly to violate the Bill of Rights. The President says he informed Congress, but what he really means is that he talked with the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees and the top leaders of the House and Senate. This small group, in turn, claimed that they were not given the full facts, though at least one of the intelligence committee leaders handwrote a letter of concern to VP Cheney and placed a copy in his own safe.

Though I sympathize with the awkward position in which these men and women were placed, I cannot disagree with the Liberty Coalition when it says that Democrats as well as Republicans in the Congress must share the blame for not taking action to protest and seek to prevent what they consider a grossly unconstitutional program.

Moreover, in the Congress as a whole-both House and Senate-the enhanced role of money in the re-election process, coupled with the sharply diminished role for reasoned deliberation and debate, has produced an atmosphere conducive to pervasive institutionalized corruption.

The Abramoff scandal is but the tip of a giant iceberg that threatens the integrity of the entire legislative branch of government.

It is the pitiful state of our legislative branch which primarily explains the failure of our vaunted checks and balances to prevent the dangerous overreach by our Executive Branch which now threatens a radical transformation of the American system.

I call upon Democratic and Republican members of Congress today to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution. Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of government you're supposed to be.

But there is yet another Constitutional player whose pulse must be taken and whose role must be examined in order to understand the dangerous imbalance that has emerged with the efforts by the Executive Branch to dominate our constitutional system.

We the people are-collectively-still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We-as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here"-must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy.

Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will."

The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: "All just power is derived from the consent of the governed."

The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia.

Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification.

And it is "We the people" who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution.

And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates.

Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Forty years have passed since the majority of Americans adopted television as their principal source of information. Its dominance has become so extensive that virtually all significant political communication now takes place within the confines of flickering 30-second television advertisements.

And the political economy supported by these short but expensive television ads is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism which thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.

The constricted role of ideas in the American political system today has encouraged efforts by the Executive Branch to control the flow of information as a means of controlling the outcome of important decisions that still lie in the hands of the people.

The Administration vigorously asserts its power to maintain the secrecy of its operations. After all, the other branches can't check an abuse of power if they don't know it is happening.

For example, when the Administration was attempting to persuade Congress to enact the Medicare prescription drug benefit, many in the House and Senate raised concerns about the cost and design of the program. But, rather than engaging in open debate on the basis of factual data, the Administration withheld facts and prevented the Congress from hearing testimony that it sought from the principal administration expert who had compiled information showing in advance of the vote that indeed the true cost estimates were far higher than the numbers given to Congress by the President.

Deprived of that information, and believing the false numbers given to it instead, the Congress approved the program. Tragically, the entire initiative is now collapsing- all over the country- with the Administration making an appeal just this weekend to major insurance companies to volunteer to bail it out.

To take another example, scientific warnings about the catastrophic consequences of unchecked global warming were censored by a political appointee in the White House who had no scientific training. And today one of the leading scientific experts on global warming in NASA has been ordered not to talk to members of the press and to keep a careful log of everyone he meets with so that the Executive Branch can monitor and control his discussions of global warming.

One of the other ways the Administration has tried to control the flow of information is by consistently resorting to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit the debate and drive its agenda forward without regard to the evidence or the public interest. As President Eisenhower said, "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: "Men feared witches and burnt women."

The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.

Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.

Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment's notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march-when our fathers fought and won two World Wars simultaneously?

It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens' right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President's apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.

I endorse the words of Bob Barr, when he said, "The President has dared the American people to do something about it. For the sake of the Constitution, I hope they will."

A special counsel should immediately be appointed by the Attorney General to remedy the obvious conflict of interest that prevents him from investigating what many believe are serious violations of law by the President. We have had a fresh demonstration of how an independent investigation by a special counsel with integrity can rebuild confidence in our system of justice. Patrick Fitzgerald has, by all accounts, shown neither fear nor favor in pursuing allegations that the Executive Branch has violated other laws.

Republican as well as Democratic members of Congress should support the bipartisan call of the Liberty Coalition for the appointment of a special counsel to pursue the criminal issues raised by warrantless wiretapping of Americans by the President.

Second, new whistleblower protections should immediately be established for members of the Executive Branch who report evidence of wrongdoing -- especially where it involves the abuse of Executive Branch authority in the sensitive areas of national security.

Third, both Houses of Congress should hold comprehensive-and not just superficial-hearings into these serious allegations of criminal behavior on the part of the President. And, they should follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Fourth, the extensive new powers requested by the Executive Branch in its proposal to extend and enlarge the Patriot Act should, under no circumstances be granted, unless and until there are adequate and enforceable safeguards to protect the Constitution and the rights of the American people against the kinds of abuses that have so recently been revealed.

Fifth, any telecommunications company that has provided the government with access to private information concerning the communications of Americans without a proper warrant should immediately cease and desist their complicity in this apparently illegal invasion of the privacy of American citizens.

Freedom of communication is an essential prerequisite for the restoration of the health of our democracy.

It is particularly important that the freedom of the Internet be protected against either the encroachment of government or the efforts at control by large media conglomerates. The future of our democracy depends on it.

I mentioned that along with cause for concern, there is reason for hope. As I stand here today, I am filled with optimism that America is on the eve of a golden age in which the vitality of our democracy will be re-established and will flourish more vibrantly than ever. Indeed I can feel it in this hall.

As Dr. King once said, "Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us."

Gored

2006-01-14T23:26:00.000-08:00

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Various sources:

It sounds as if Al Gore is about to deliver what could be not just one of the more significant speeches of his political career but an essential challenge to the embattled presidency of George W. Bush. In a major address slated for delivery Monday in Washington, the former Vice President is expected to argue that the Bush administration has created a "Constitutional crisis" by acting without the authorization of the Congress and the courts to spy on Americans and otherwise abuse basic libertiesÂ expect Gore to make reference to Richard Nixon, whose abuses of executive authority led to calls for his impeachment -- a fate the 37th president avoided by resigning in 1974.

Now, if Bill Clinton would stop running around trying to forge a legacy about eight years too late and appear with Gore to denounce President Dipshit, maybe there could be some sort of shift as far as Democrats with backbone. No, he won't though because that could be controversial and any whiff of actual moral conviction might harm Hillary's chances in '08.

Before the war started, I had the delusion that Hillary Clinton might be a great force to be reckoned with in the future of the Democratic party. Her silence on Bush's power grabs have left a horrible stain on her credibility. Who knows, she might one day turn into a viable candidate but her shameful cowardice and silence has lost my vote for her no matter what she may do in the future.

As a matter of fact, seeing what fools the Democrats have been these last couple of years I don't believe I will ever vote Democrat again, even if a vote for a third party is a wasted vote, I will never feel dirty like I did when I held my nose and voted for Kerry.

Progressives, liberals or whatever the hell you want to call us need new leadership and we will never get it from these Republican-lite morons in the Democratic party.

Amen....Hallelujah.....Holy shit

Cyclops Boy

2006-01-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

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Been quiet the last few days. The internet is down at work so I haven't been able to spend half the time I normally do online. Sorry. I feel like I've lost one of my eyes not being able to zip online to check out news or comments. I've been going to bed sort of early this week, so I haven't been surfing much at home either.

How 'bout all the banging of war drums regarding Iran. Deja fucking vu.

So, open thread. Talk about whatever strikes your fancy.