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American Understanding Dawning

American Understanding Dawning

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We are an optimistic nation, a hopeful nation. Whatever our politics, we hope that our political and corporate leaders value our lives. This is a wonderful thing about America. But it does leave us somewhat open to manipulation, deceit, and betrayal. I think this Administration is disastrous to us in ways that are have been sufficiently transparent for some time but that many people don’t want to see or believe.

Fellow Americans, I do believe that more of us are beginning to understand. More information will only show how deep the damage goes.

Read, please. Read more. Ask questions. Find out. Pick an issue and find out everything you can about it – from different points of view. Put together your own ethical judgment – whatever it is. Become truly informed to your very best ability. Only in this way can we have a functioning democracy again.

Here are a few links to articles that I think are worth reading.

Liar Liar – What more proof?

Liar Liar – What more proof?

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Yesterday I wrote a very long and detailed post on the Plame leak situation. It had quotations and it had links. It had the whole history, the timeline, and it had several compelling points. Just as I was about to publish it, a site in another window crashed my browser. Bummer. I have really got to start writing these things offline. I’m just too disheartened to reconstruct the whole blasted thing. Since you can easily look up everything to do with it, I’ll just contribute my own thoughts to the public conversation.

I believe that Plame was outed intentionally, which is a felony crime if not outright treason. Either Cheney or Bush authorized it. I actually suspect that it was Cheney (with Rove?), and that the official story is a backdated version for coverup purposes. The outing of Plame was meant to punish Plame’s husband (Wilson) for stating the truth – and it was also a message to the intelligence community that they had better give them the “intelligence” that is wanted, rather than assessing reality.

Although people within the administration knew that Bush’s claims weren’t true – and there were efforts to remove them (including by Tenet), these claims kept getting re-added to Bush’s State of the Union speech, which was delivered. It was just one of the ways in which Americans were manipulated – playing on their fears to drum up support for our illegal and unethical invasion of Iraq. This has proven to be a disaster, and all of the people who were demonized for speaking their minds at the time have been proven correct. We took over in Iraq for reasons that will become abundantly clear in future, if they aren’t clear enough to you already (hint – permanent bases on the oil pipeline, Cheney’s secret energy meetings, Enron, Halliburton, record oil profits, corruption, fraud…).

Neither American lives nor Iraqi lives (remember, we’re “rescuing” them?) matter enough to this administration for them even to answer the basic question of what cause our soldiers are fighting for. Modus operandi: when in doubt, change the subject – when in doubt, use doublespeak – when in doubt, use your media assets or run commericals as news – when in doubt, change the “reason” we’re there – when in doubt, hide everything. If they had nothing to hide, we’d be getting a lot more information instead of being under surveillance ourselves.

To claim that “declassifying” Plame and leaking her CIA status to their kiss-butt reporter friends (remember, it wasn’t a White House press release) was in the interests of national security is an outright lie.

Tell me – how does disrupting a valuable source of intelligence, undoubtedly along with others who could be tied to her, help our national security? Isn’t it obvious that it is actually a serious breach of our national security? I wonder how many people died as a direct result, and how much real intelligence has been squandered. It is a felony for good reason.

When he was asked about this leak, he stood up and said he’d get to the bottom of it, that whoever was responsible would be fired. Fire Cheney and yourself, Mr. President. Resign. If there wasn’t anything wrong with what your administration did, you would have explained yourself at the time, not years later when Libby was in court.

Oh wait, we still haven’t really gotten an explanation from the mouth of the king. His sycophant messengers have just given us some spin, that’s all.

Whatever voting machines haven’t been hijacked yet will tell you our judgment – if that matters anymore. We’ve seen what the interests of the American people mean to you – that is, nothing at all.

Take a good look around. Our land and water are being polluted. Corporate interests are all but writing our laws. Our system isn’t functioning – ask people from New Orleans, ask people who have to face new interest rates, ask people who are working part-time in more than one job, ask people trying to navigate Medicare and Medicaid, ask the children who are left behind or who graduate from our schools with a substandard education. Many people who believe they are religious have been hookwinked into following false prophets who would like to see this country turned from the land of the free into a pseudo-christian theocracy – money-grubbers of hate and corruption are even attempting to start ’em young with home schooling and bible classes in the public schools. People openly assert claims of empire and world domination. Now you’re deliberating whether we might use nukes on Iran? So what, we’re worse than Hussein now? Wasn’t that the ultimate no-no? Oh, and didn’t you just make a deal on that very topic? What was that all about?

I’m watching to see what happens in November. We know about the election fraud, the hidden programming in the voting machines. We know that even now Diebold technicians are making the rounds. With popularity in the 30-40 percent range, it would be very strange if the Republicans retained control of both houses, wouldn’t it?

So what’s on the menu? Planning to blow up a few more towers? Maybe a Bin Laden sighting in Chicago? A nuclear meltdown in Florida? A small dirty bomb in some suburban neighborhood?

Contact your congresspeople – it’s time for them to show some spine. We still – so far – have only the soft version of fascism. There is still a chance to use our democratic system the way it was intended.

Wherever you are, do whatever you can – while you still can.

How can anyone still support this President, this Vice-President, these cronies of theirs? What more proof do you need?

Vote. Vote. Vote.

Ralph Reed Lt Gov?

Ralph Reed Lt Gov?

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“Political consultant” Ralph Reed, who was in charge of President Bush’s southeast regional campaign last year and who also once ran the Christian Coalition, is seeking Georgia’s second-highest office in the 2006 election – Lt. Governor.

Ok, that’s it. That’s it. I somehow didn’t realize that this was happening. Ralph Reed? Ralph REED?

From The Nation:

When Ralph Reed was the boyish director of the Christian Coalition, he made opposition to gambling a major plank in his “family values” agenda, calling gambling “a cancer on the American body politic” that was “stealing food from the mouths of children.” But now, a broad federal investigation into lobbying abuses connected to gambling on Indian reservations has unearthed evidence that Reed has been surreptitiously working for an Indian tribe with a large casino it sought to protect–and that Reed was paid with funds laundered through two firms to try to keep his lucrative involvement secret.

Reed’s involvement with the casino effort followed his departure from the Christian Coalition in 1997 and his reinvention of himself as a corporate lobbyist and campaign hatchet man. One of his first clients was the Enron Corporation–a deal arranged by Karl Rove when George W. Bush was starting to think about running for President in 2000. Rove wasn’t ready to put Reed directly on a campaign payroll but presumably wanted to cultivate good will from Reed toward the coming Bush candidacy. Enron paid Reed’s Century Strategies more than $300,000 to generate support for energy deregulation. In the 2000 GOP presidential primary, Reed justified his big Enron fee by helping to smear John McCain during the South Carolina primary. Now McCain’s Indian Affairs subcommittee is investigating Indian gambling in the context of lobbying abuses, kickbacks and money laundering, with public hearings scheduled for early September.

Reed is in charge of Bush’s 2004 election campaign in the Southeast, including Florida. In 2000, he was paid almost $3.7 million for helping Bush. In 1995, when he was still exploiting intolerance and fear, Time did a story on him that included the cover line “The right hand of God.” Today God’s right hand seems to be holding dice and a bloody political hatchet.

According to the New York Times, Mr. Reed wrote in his book “Active Faith: How Christians Are Changing the Soul of American Politics” that Mr. Abramoff was “a conservative firebrand.” The men became so close that Mr. Reed sometimes slept on Mr. Abramoff’s couch and later introduced Mr. Abramoff to his future wife.

AmericaBlog also has some serious questions about why he was being paid by Microsoft.

Oh, no… uh-uh. No way. Not gonna happen. Not if I have to scream “wake UP, wake UP, wake UP” in people’s faces.

How can this happen? Don’t give me that trauma-theory about 9/11. People in New York voted for Kerry. don’t give me the scapegoat theory – Republicans have been misdirecting anger for a long time. What is it? The dumbing-down, infotainment, bad education? What is it? How can so many American’s have willed themselves blind? When they finally open their eyes, will it be too late? There is already so much corruption and thuggery.

Will there be a country left to recover?

401-keg Plan

401-keg Plan

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My Aunt Elaine sent me the following as a bit of humor. I’m not sure how accurate the stats are, but it serves as a little reminder of the possible consequences what I think of as the faith-based retirement plan. Of course, this plan the President is all excited about does nothing at all to fix the social security system itself. If you’d like to invest, go ahead and invest – don’t mess up one of the few things that works pretty well in this country.

Investing for your retirement

If you had purchased $1000.00
of Nortel stock one year ago,
it would now be worth $49.00.

With Enron,
you would have had
$16.50
left of the original $1,000.00.

With WorldCom,
you would have had less than
$5.00 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000.00
worth of Beer one year ago,
drank all the beer,
then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND,
you would have had
$214.00.

Based on the above,
current investment advice is to
drink heavily and
recycle.

It’s called the 401-Keg Plan

75 Reasons to Reexamine George W

75 Reasons to Reexamine George W

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This was originally titled 75 reasons not to hire Georgie, but I think it’s a little late for that now. I’m sure this has been circulating around for a bit, but it was still interesting. Here’s some of what we know, what is out in plain sight. Assess this resume again.

Past work experience:

1) Ran for congress and lost.
2) Produced a Hollywood slasher B movie.
3) Bought an oil company, but couldn’t find any oil in Texas, company went bankrupt shortly after he sold all his stock.
4) Bought the Texas Rangers baseball team in a sweetheart deal that took land using tax-payer money.
5) With fathers help (and his name) was elected Governor of Texas.

Accomplishments:

6) Changed pollution laws for power and oil companies, making Texas the most polluted state in the Union. Replaced Los Angeles with Houston as the most smog ridden city in America.
7) Cut taxes, and bankrupted the Texas government to the tune of billions in borrowed money.
8) Set record for most executions by any Governor in American history.
9) Became president after losing the popular vote by over 500,000 votes, with the help of his daddy’s appointments to the Supreme Court.

Accomplishments as president:

10) Attacked and took over two small, helpless countries. Slaughtered over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women, and children.
11) Spent the surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
12) Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
13) Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any twelve-month period.
14) Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
15) First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
16) First president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.
17) First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history.
18) After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in US history (911).
19) Set the record for more campaign fund-raising trips than any other president in US history.
20) In his first two years in office, over 2 million Americans lost their jobs.
21) Cut unemployment benefits for more out of work Americans than any other president in US history.
22) Set the all-time record for most foreclosures in a twelve-month period.
23) Appointed more convicted criminals to administration positions than any other president in US history.
24) Set the record for the fewest press conferences of any president since the advent of television.
25) Signed more laws and executive orders amending the Constitution than any other president in US history.
26) Presided over the biggest energy crises in US history, and refused to intervene when corruption was revealed.
27) Presided over the highest gasoline prices in US history, and refused to use the national reserves, as past presidents have.
28) Cut healthcare benefits for war veterans.
29) Set the all-time record for most people worldwide simultaneously to take to the streets to protest against him (15 million people), shattering the record for protest against any one person in the history of humankind.
30) Dissolved more international treaties than any president in US history.
31) His presidency is the most secretive and un-accountable of any in US history.
32) Members of his cabinet are the richest of any administration in US history. (The ‘poorest’ multi-millionaire, Condoleeza Rice, has an Exxon oil tanker named after her).
33) First president in US history to have all 50 states simultaneously go bankrupt.
34) Presided over the biggest corporate stock market fraud of any market in any country in the history of the world.
35) First president in US history to order a US attack and military occupation of a sovereign nation. Many American boys and girls were lost to his greed, and countless civilians.
36) Created the largest government department bureaucracy in the history of the United States. How can he make government even bigger? Perhaps by establishing a Bureau for Acceptable Sexual Practices!
37) Set the all-time record for biggest annual budget spending-increases – more than any president in US history. His tax-giveaways to the very rich alone might require three million million dollars!
38) First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the Human Rights Commission.
39) First president in US history to have the United Nations remove the US from the Elections Monitoring Board.
40) He removed more checks and balances, creating less Congressional oversight, than known by any presidential administration in US history. Now, no one knows his plans until they are already accomplished!
41) He took from sound programs that helped people, and gave the money to the richest people in the world.
42) Rendered the entire United Nations irrelevant.
43) Withdrew from the World Court of Law.
44) Refused to allow inspectors access to US prisoners of war.
45) So, by default, he no longer abides by the Geneva Conventions. These have been mocked by his appointed puppet, Alberto Gonzales.
46) First president in US history to refuse United Nations election inspectors (during the twenty-oh-two US elections).
47) All-time US (and world) record holder for most corporate campaign donations.
48) His biggest life-time campaign contributor presided over one of the largest corporate bankruptcy frauds in world history (Kenneth Lay, former CEO of Enron Corporation).
49) Spent more money on polls and focus groups than any president in US history.
50) First president in US history unilaterally to attack a sovereign nation against the will of the United Nations and the world community.
51) First president to run and hide when the US came under attack (and then lied, saying that the enemy had the code to Air Force One).
52) First US president to establish a secret shadow government.
53) Took the enormous, overflowing sympathy of the whole world for the US after 911, and in less than a year, made the US the most resented and despised country in the world (possibly the biggest diplomatic failure in US and world history).
54) With a policy of “disengagement,” created the most hostile Israeli-Palestinian relations in at least 30 years.
55) First US president in history to have a majority of the people of Europe (71%) view his presidency as the biggest threat to world peace and stability.
56) First US president in history to have the people of South Korea feel more threatened by the US than by their immediate neighbor, North Korea.
57) Changed US policy to allow convicted criminals to be awarded government contracts.
58) Set all-time record for number of administration appointees who violated US law by not selling huge investments in corporations bidding for government contracts.
59) Failed to fulfill his pledge to get Osama bin Laden “dead or alive.”
60) Failed to capture the anthrax killer who tried to murder the leaders of our country at the United States Capital building. After 18 months he had no leads and zero suspects.
61) In the 18 months following the 911 attacks, he prevented any public investigation into the biggest security failure in the history of the United States.
62) Removed more freedoms and civil liberties from Americans than any other president in US history.
63) In a little over two years, he has created the most severely divided country, where people used to stand in unity. This is possibly the most divided the US has ever been since the Civil War.
64) He entered office with the strongest economy in US history; and, within less than two years turned every single economic indicator south.

Records and References:

65) At least one conviction for drunk driving in Maine (Texas driving record has been erased and is not available for public inspection).
66) AWOL from National Guard.
67) Deserted the military during a time of war.
68) Refused to take drug test.
69) Refused to answer any questions about drug-use.
70) All records of his tenure as governor of Texas have been mysteriously spirited away to his daddy’s library, sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
71) All records of any SEC investigations into his insider trading or bankrupt companies are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
72) All minutes of meetings for any public corporation in which he served on the board are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
73) Any records or minutes from meetings he (or his VP) attended regarding public energy policy are sealed in secrecy and unavailable for public view.
74) For personal references please speak to his daddy or uncle James Baker (They can both be reached at their offices at the Carlyle Group for War-profiteering.
75. Last but not least, he has taken very important and significant steps to transform the United States into a truly fascist country.
(“Fascism” is sharing governmental power with corporations.)

Thanks Richard as always!

Fahrenheit 9/11

Fahrenheit 9/11

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I’ve just seen Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

I’m going to try to get a few of my thoughts down about this film while I’m still feeling nauseous and tearful. Tears or nausea, nausea or tears?

It’s hard to know where to start – with the woman in the lobby who blindly reached for me after the film, embracing a total stranger – a middle aged, middle class woman with tears running down her face – a woman who grappled me as though I were the remaining vine that prevented her from falling off the mountain? "What have we become?" she asked me in a broken voice as her tears moistened my left shoulder.

Or perhaps with the sudden anguished moan of my intellectual husband, a man not known for displays of emotion, upon hearing the words "can they ever trust us again"? That is, after being promised not to be put in harm’s way unless it were absolutely necessary, how can those who have always been first to stand up and serve (the american poor) ever trust in their country again?

The film has faults, to be sure. It uses a bit too much caricature, which is sometimes distracting. Although I agree that our president is developmentally stunted and anything but a compassionate conservative, a less cartoonish display would have been more persuasive. What one sees in Bush finally is what one sees in the eyes of any irresponsible and narcissistic alcoholic – the dry drunk. There’s a book in that and I hope to read it one day. I also found one section of the film truly offensive. While I understood that the listing of the so-called "coalition of the willing" (outside of the US and the UK) was meant to highlight the absurdity of including nations without a military, I certainly didn’t appreciate seeing ancient film footage of nosferatu to represent Romania, a viking to represent Iceland, someone smoking a marijuana pipe to represent The Netherlands, poppies for Afghanistan (Afghanistan?!?!), and so on. Along with the superimposition of western imagery upon the current administration (which admittedly does seem driven by the tropes of westerns and thrillers), it was both off-putting and ineffective.

What sticks with me, though, are other images. I’m more of an idea person, but images from this film already haunt me. The face of the policeman who "infiltrated" the Fresno Peace group, the pro-military woman who lost her son aimlessly wandering around the white house lawn, the guy who talked about the war at the gym and was reported to the FBI, the sobs of an Iraqi woman calling out to God to avenge the houses of her innocent family, the young man digging out a piece of his neighbor’s body from the rubble, the soldiers playing their killing soundtrack, other soldiers remorseful and confused by their experiences, the brave guy who said he would never go back to Iraq "to kill the poor" no matter what the consequences – so many images, images we didn’t see, images we should be seeing. Say what you will about Michael Moore – but what comes through for me is his anger for the sake of others, and his feeling for people. He turns a mirror on America, to show us with what we have become complicit and why the nations of the world have turned away. It is a profoundly patriotic film. Its message is, in one way, very simple. For those of you on the "religious" right, you should understand: It’s all about the money, a lot more than the customary 30 pieces of silver.

However, I also learned something that I did not know and honestly had not wanted to know. Moore, after all, does not spare either the left wing or the media from his critique. All those disenfranchized voters of the last presidental "election" couldn’t get one senator to sign a petition so that their argument could be heard. Person after person stood up in the proceedings painfully led by Al Gore himself. Time and time again, they had to say they had many signatures, but the required senatorial signature was "missing." One woman said she didn’t care that she didn’t have a signature, and Gore reminded her that "the rules do care." It reminded me of what I had forgotten somehow – how very angry I was at the Democrats. Where was John Kerry for those people, or any other democratic senator for that matter? Why couldn’t they get one signature? It brought back for me the day I watched the news in disbelief as Daschle did his 180-degree turn (not long after a certain airplane crash) on his Iraq anti-war stance. Really, where IS the left in this country? I miss those old academic Marxists of the Vietnam-war era, the theorists who remembered to ask the primary questions of money and power. This isn’t really a movie about serious dissent – it’s a mainstream american film in a country that has become deeply suspicious of intelligence and education, its traditional anti-intellectualism racheted up a notch or two. For those who might not have looked at some of this information, or who are patriotic but somewhat uninformed, this movie gives a big shove in the direction of actual thinking.

All of the family ties, the network connections, the money trails – Moore points out some of the major ones – enough at least to intimate that something of major importance about Saudi Arabia is still being withheld from the American people, for example. The section dealing all the connections and disconnections between the Bin Laden family, the Taliban of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, The Carlyle Group, Enron, Arbusto Oil, Halliburton, and the Bush family – was probably a little confusing to some. If so, read any of the books on the shelves these days, from Michael Moore and others. Molly Ivins’ essays from the time of W’s Texas days are particularly enlightening with regard to such things as the Taliban. To me, it’s all about networks of power and money these days. It seems pretty clear that we mirror the terrorism network with our own nation-based criminal networks.

I don’t think Moore really got across the importance of the pipeline, or put enough into the effects of the Patriot Acts, but he did manage to convey some of what is happening to this country under this administration. Left-wingers of all types, libertarians, and republicans should see this film – the neo-cons are a different order entirely and I feel that much of America just simply doesn’t understand what is being taken from them, and what is happening in their name and to their own.

As our husbands returned from the restroom, the woman who had embraced me took a step back, embarrassed. Moving slowly, the four of us walked out into the blazing heat of the Georgia day. When you have a child and no babysitter, you don’t get to go to movies at night very often. I had to stand for a moment to breath deep against my heaving stomach. The parking lot shimmered in the sun, and for a moment, I felt profoundly alienated from everyone and everything. Then the tears came for me.