Robert F. Kennedy on Vietnam

I've been flipping through "The Vietnam Reader: Articles and Documents on American Foreign Policy and the Viet-nam Crisis" (revised edition, 1967).

Most of the articles were written early on in the conflict (at least those that I've scanned so far). The parallels between Viet-Nam and Iraq at this point, in terms of the justifications for continued involvement, and the difficulties inherent in achieving a successful resolution along the lines originally envisioned are all too clear. Strikingly so, in fact--for some of the passages, all that is needed to make them relevant to today's conflict is to substitute "Iraq" for "Viet-Nam".

I'll probably write about other portions of the book at a later point, but I was most struck by the following passages from RFK's speech to the United States Senate on February 19th, 1966:

"There are hazards in debating American policy in the face of a stern and dangerous enemy. But that hazard is the essence of our democracy."

"To attack the motives of those who express concern about our present course--to challenge their very right to speak freely--is to strike at the foundations of the democratic process which our fellow citizens, even today, are dying to protect."

Take that, Dick.

Now, for some truly prophetic words (these are what struck me most strongly as I read through his speech, even more so than the above ringing phrases):

"There are three routes before us: military victory, a peaceful settlement, or withdrawal.

The last is impossible for this country. (my emphasis) For the United States to withdraw now, as I said last May, would be a repudiation of commitments undertaken and confirmed by three administrations. It would flatly betray those in Viet-nam whom we have encouraged by our support to resist the forces of Hanoi and and the Viet-Cong. Unilateral withdrawal would injure, perhaps irreparably, the principle of collective security, and undermine the independence of small nations everywhere in the world. [...]"

But it wasn't "impossible", was it? I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to come up with a similar list of reasons why it is "impossible" to withdraw from Iraq.

RFK also discusses the requirements for a military victory, including among others, that "we continue to occupy South Viet-Nam as long as our presence is required to insure that hostilities, including insurgency, will not be resumed. And this will be a long time indeed." (sound familiar?)

His many cautions and admitted acknowledgement of the vast resources required for a military victory are accompanied by the assertion that there may be "no alternative" and that "[t]he American people possess the bravery and the will to follow such a course if others force it upon us." Of course, there was an "alternative": unilateral withdrawal, because the American people did NOT (very rationally) have the will to continue investing the blood and treasure of the American people in an apparently endless war against a foe who did not measure victory and defeat in terms of battles and lives won and lost, but simply in terms of sustaining resistance.

RFK had the wisdom to re-evaluate and modify his positions as the course of the war in Viet-Nam progressed... will President (we hope) John Kerry? Will the rest of the Democratic Party? Republicans? (fat chance, that) Or will Iraq be "Kerry's war" four years from now... Kerry's $1 trillion dollar investment in futility... Kerry's albatross around his neck, dragging down every other initiative?

Will we ultimately wind up creating a "Wall of Memory" for Iraq war veterans, visits to which will be as painful and cathartic as the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. is for veterans of that war? On that note, where will the "Wall of Memory" be for the untold millions whose lives will suffer when the health, education, housing and welfare programs that would otherwise have been funded are sacrificed on the altar of "Operation Iraqi Freedom"? (much as the "War on Poverty" was strangled by Viet-Nam)

The "insurgency" in Iraq is not "military", in any sense of the word... most of the fatalities have not been due to "armed battles", but carbombs, remotely detonated roadside bombs, and hit and run mortar attacks. Every time we have fought a "conventional" battle, we have inflicted massive and overwhelming casualties on the "enemy" (witness the hundred to one ratio of casualties sustained by the Mahdi Army vs. the American Army in Najaf) yet that has done little or nothing to demoralize or discourage even those foes suffering the conflicts, let alone "Al-Quaida in Iraq". Would/will more or different troops truly change that calculus? Did 500,000 troops on the ground in Vietnam have much more impact than 50,000? Did we learn nothing from that experience?

I hope not.

--Thomas Leavitt

NOOOOO!

Today I went into Manhattan with Erick Erickson of redstate.org. In town we met up with Tom Burka, from Opinions You Should Have. (Yes, it's true. All bloggers know each other and hang out together.)

We were waiting for someone who was going to give us a tour of the sets MSNBC has at "Democracy Plaza" and were killing some time in a downstairs cafeteria. So we're at a table and one table over is Pat Buchanan, busy working, preparing for his broadcasts. I was thinking of saying "Hi" and handing him my Seeing the Forest card but left him alone because he was busy. (He seems like a nice guy.)

This card is made in Word, and printed on my printer. (Real bloggers have self-printed cards.) It has a graphic at the top -- the graphic you will see when I finally move the weblog from Blogspot, and reads:
Seeing the Forest

A weblog for Liberals who are
FED UP with Bush and the Right!

seeingtheforest.com
So I was thinking, that card is from a right winger's nightmare: you wake up from a 3-day bender, and you look in your pocket and find that card, and you hold your head and scream, "NNOOOOO! WHAT DID I DO!!!!"

Matt Hubbard's Final Electoral College Status update

Matt Hubbard's final Weekly Electoral College Status update is now up.
Explanation here.

I predict a Kerry victory

OK, it's time to stick my neck out. I think that Kerry will do better than expected,
taking all the states he plans to and two or three unexpected states. I'm not going
to guess at numbers but I think that it's 50/50 that Kerry's win will be decisive enough
to cancel out the Republican dirty tricks and late smears, and also to make the Bush
legal challenges irrelevant.

So here's my call:

60% -- Kerry is sworn in Jan. 20.
25% -- Bush is sworn in, probably in the face of protests at massive Diebold fraud and
voter intimidation
15% -- the election is not resolved by Jan. 20, and that the country is approaching civil
war.

It's in the realm of possibility that the Democrats will retake the Senate or even the House,
but I'd put that at less than 50/50 -- let's say 25% for the Senate. Too many things would
have to go right, so I think that this will happen only in the best case of a Kerry landslide.

I don't really see the possibility of a legitimate Bush win. But as I've said before -- if Kerry isn't
elected, I will obviously have worse problems than a bad election-prediction track record. It will
mean that I am totally out of tune with this country and don't understand its people.

If Bush Wins

I think that if Bush wins, we're all going to have to make individual decisions
whether to forget about politics, to struggle on as lonely dissidents in the face
of increasing intimidation, or to emigrate as our ancestors did when they came
here.

I've already received a solicitation from an EU recruiter looking for talented and
skilled Americans, and it's a darn shame that I'm not talented or skilled. (Every
nation has its own supply of disgruntled political polemicists). I think that Bush's
election would trigger an exodus somewhat comparable to the Jews' exodus from
Spain and Germany or the Huguenots' exodus from France. I hope that there's
someone out there preparing to welcome us.

Once reelected, I expect Bush to get worse rather than better. He will have won by
dint of a moron fluff campaign, without having having made any significant concessions
to moderate Republicans or rational conservatives, and he will thus have a four-year
blank check. I would expect a draft, an expanded Middle East war, the demolition of
the New Deal (sooner rather than later), and increasing police-state measures against
American citizens. (Many of the provisions of the Patriot Act have never been used yet).

I have been mostly arguing against defeatism up until now, but if we can't beat Bush this
year I don't see how we will ever be able to do so. The second victory will ratify Bush's
policies, just as Reagan's second victory did, and upon reelection he and his team (with
the help of movement-conservative thugs) will work effectively to turn the U.S. into a
one-party state.

No, Bush isn't Hitler. History doesn't repeat itself, and I don't really expect Bush to try to
murder millions of Americans. I do think that he'll turn out to be some kind of lesser fascist,
like Admiral Horthy or Francisco Franco.

Ground Operation Wins It? Don't Know.

The Democrats are counting on the strong ground operations that have been put together to help win in the swing states. But I just don't know. I used to think that precinct operations are the key to winning. But I remember being confident that the huge volunteer army that Dean brought to Iowa would clinch it for him, and look what happened. It did not bring him victory and seemed almost irrelevant. So, like everything else in this election, I just don't know.

But there were several other factors in Iowa that contributed to Dean's defeat. Joe Trippi writes about Iowa in his book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. (I highly highly recommend this book!) I don't have the book in front of me in my hotel room in Secaucus, NJ, home of MSNBC, so this is from memory - but Joe wrote that Gephardt's attacks on Dean drove voters to Kerry and Edwards, and that the ground operation was not well-organized and needed more seasoned professionals.

And I have my own pet opinion about what happened to Dean in Iowa: message. However much the Dean campaign was tuned in to the Voice of the Grassroots, in the last weeks before Iowa they were not. Every person I was talking to in California, and every voice I was hearing on the web -- and from what I am told every voter in Iowa -- was concerned with "How do we beat Bush?" But Dean was not answering that question. I think the Dean campaign failed to understand that. They should have had a good, short, one-sentence answer to that question and he should have been repeating it over and over, no matter what question he was asked. He should have been repeating that answer until people were running away from him with their hands over their ears, and only then moved on to any other subject. Kerry sure was, and that is why Kerry won in Iowa. Kerry was a war hero, and Bush was not, and that was how he was going to win. But what do I know?

I was so happy that Dean had a strong ground operating in Iowa. But it didn't win it for Dean, and some say it may have even hurt because the door-to-door operation annoyed the locals. The current swing-state ground operations ARE managed by seasoned pros and ARE well-organized.

Does TV and spin nullify hard work and direct contact? I just don't know.

Stolen Honor

MaxNews.com will be running Stolen Honor, the notorious movie about John Kerry, almost constantly from now until the election on various stations as a paid program. I haven't gotten this morning's paper yet, so I don't know if it's listed by name. Last night's showing, on PAX, was listed only as "Paid Program." I stumbled across it by accident.

If Kerry wins, I'm sure we'll be seeing variations of this theme constantly over the next four years. The bitterness still with us because of the Vietnam war is not going to go away. Old ghosts never die. There's a lot of painful truth, but even more half-truths, in the message being brought to us, and we would do well to try to understand it. The most immediate lesson we can learn is that we must not treat the veterans of the Iraq war the way the Vietnam veterans were treated. The soldiers who fought in that war were not to blame for the war and the country turned against them and dishonored them as though they were. The Iraq war is every bit as misguided as the Vietnam war. In both wars, not only the public but even the highest levels of government were tricked and deceived.

There are wars which cannot be won except by killing everybody. If the population of a country is determined not to be defeated, it is impossible to defeat them, even by bombing them back into the Stone Age. Shock and Awe just can't cut it. Military might and power have their limits, hard as this is to believe. There are other examples that this is true, one of the best being that feeble, rag-tag army that defeated the British and founded the United States. There was Ghandi's brilliant passive resistance, which defeated the British in India. Russia pulled out of Afghanistan once it was clear that even bombing them into the Stone Age wasn't enough. The Nazis made it clear that they would, in fact, be perfectly happy to kill everybody, and they scored a brutal but temporary victory in Europe. During the Vietnam war, we could see for ourselves what was going on. It was served to us every evening as we ate dinner watching the news on TV. My most vivid memories are of the napalmed children; hardly enemies of anybody. There were indeed savage atrocities, our soldiers were not a bunch of blessed saints, and much of what is now being dumped on Kerry is denial of their own guilt.

There was no way for them to be certain who was an enemy, who harbored enemies, they were trapped in a war for which there was no obvious justification they could not win without killing everybody. This was not the fault of the soldiers, but of those who lied and deceived the country, including most of the government, into continuing the war. Blaming Kerry for having the courage to speak out against this is a fine example of attempting to Kill the Messenger. Somebody had to finally speak out, make it clear that the citizens of this country would no longer tolerate and support the war. Kerry did what he does best, have the courage to tell the truth to the country.

Thank God he had the guts to do this. There are those who will never forgive him, but lets put the blame where it belongs.

Right-wing delusions.

On October 29th, the Chron ran a feature that briefly quoted the thoughts of nine separate historians on the long term consequences of the war in Iraq.

Historians dissect war in Iraq

Eminent academics scrutinize the single most important issue in the presidential campaign and find two central truths: quick success, long-term problems

There was one exception to that overall consensus: Victor Davis Hanson, of Stanford's Hoover Institution, who was bold enough to predict that "in five years, if we persevere, there will be a stable consensual government, and then both Iraq and Afghanistan will properly be seen as the anchors of a new Middle East".

Which is, of course, exactly what I thought to myself as I opened up the article: that if any voice dissented from the overall consensus ("reality"), it would be one associated with an identifiably "conservative" institution like the Hoover Institute (who give my great uncle a bad name). ... because, of course, these organizations don't pay their "fellows" to do anything but toe the party line.

Side note: I've been making a habit of reading through the paper each day... I find that you get more out of a paper that way, as you see stories develop over time, and you begin to follow larger threads in the news that transcend individual stories. Admittedly, the San Francisco Chronicle, in comparison to the Los Angeles Times (the paper I grew up reading) is mediocure at best, but it is still better than nothing. I find reading a paper exposes me to a wider variety (in terms of topics and points of view) than merely getting my news on-line. This is a change from my previous position that "I get all my news on-line and don't need a paper."

Side, side note: Debra Saunders really is a Republican talking point parrot. We need more people writing the Chronicle and other papers complaining about this phenomenon, wherein allegedly "independent" pundits spew Republican talking point propaganda in barely edited form.

--Thomas Leavitt

Citizen Journalist

Another thing MSNBC is doing for the election is a "Citizen Journalist" experiment. Joe Trippi writes, "I am hoping you will be a citizen journalist and file your story or stories with us from now through Tuesday."

Report your stories to MSNBC.com.

And see them here.

First Post at MSNBC's Hardblogger

Part of what I'll be doing for MSNBC is helping put together a sort-of "pulse of the blogosphere" for Hardblogger. My first post is up, at The buzz from Bloggers' Cafe. (Scroll to "The Little Gift.") This is sort-of a dress rehearsal post.

In fact, they're doing a real dress rehearsal for Tuesday night's election broadcast in the big studio around the corner (and lots of remote locations) and it's on the monitors. "Pennsylvania is still too close to call."

Osama isn't running and he isn't hiding. He's laughing.

Osama doesn't have to run, and he doesn't have to hide. He's kicking back ,
and he's laughing. "I truly am not that concerned about him", says George.

Osama is looking forward to laughing at Bush for four more years.

Election Day at Seeing the Forest

For your Election Day pleasure Seeing the Forest will have a blogger writing from the Kerry Headquarters in Boston. Sam Perry will introduce himself in a post Tuesday or maybe sooner.

I'm writing this from a Starbucks in Manhattan. I took an overnight flight, and will be working from MSNBC through Tuesday night. I'll post details later.

And the other regulars will also be keeping you informed. So bookmark Seeing the Forest and check in regularly.

October Surprise

Right on schedule we've had our two terrorist warnings now.

Will they help Bush? Were they intended to help him? I have no idea. I can't read Osama's mind,
and I can't read the mind of the American people either. We've been waiting for months for something
fishy to show up, and now we have it.

Pray for the Kerry spin doctors -- let's hope they're up to the job. So far the Bush spin hasn't been
too powerful, but it usually takes them a few days to saturate the media. The Osama tape came at
almost exactly the right time for Bush, if his guys succeed in winning the spin war. He sure needs
the help.

I have no evidence, but I can't help suspecting that both warnings were fake -- Rove's magnum opus.
(Did they unload a couple of the loose billions floating around Iraq on Osama?).

But probably that's just me.

Stop Bush / Vote Kerry

Powerful images from the current cover feature of LA Weekly (via pandagon.net).

Vote or Die

From an e-mail I received:

1. A simple Banner for Florida beaches:

//
airplane ~~~ rope ~~~ banner:"READY TO DIE IN IRAQ? DON’T VOTE TODAY"
\

They have an airplane pulling a banner along Florida beaches, so young people will see them. The idea is to suggest they might want to go vote...

Uh, OK

We win

When You Vote

I recomment a post titled, Pacific Views: Emergency aid for U.S. voters. It outlines things to do before and when you vote, and includes a downloadable voter rights card from MoveOn.

Hersh, Quoted at American Street

The American Street -- Seymour Hersh Speaks:

"I hope it comes out the right way in the election. If it doesn't then we're all in trouble. The Europeans so far give us a pass on the grounds that, well, you've got these crazy leaders and they do crazy things. But if we re-elect them, then it's not just the president they're mad at. They're going to be mad at all of us."

Curse Eclipsed

The Curse of the Bambino comes to an end in Busch Stadium during an eclipse of the moon, and two Boston teams are now world champions.

That should swing the remaining undecideds for us!

Some people don't want you to vote

SOME PEOPLE DON'T WANT YOU TO VOTE



ISN'T THAT A PRETTY GOOD REASON FOR VOTING?

Some people don't want you to vote

SOME PEOPLE DON'T WANT YOU TO VOTE



ISN'T THAT A PRETTY GOOD REASON FOR VOTING?

911Truth.org

911Truth.org - Only the Truth will Set Us Free.:

"An alliance of 100 prominent Americans and many family members of those killed on 9/11 today announced the release of the 911 Truth Statement, a call for immediate inquiry into evidence that suggests high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur. The Statement supports an August 31st Zogby poll that found nearly 50% of New Yorkers believe the government had foreknowledge and "consciously failed to act," with 66% wanting a new 9/11 investigation. Focusing on twelve questions, the Statement highlights areas of incriminating evidence that were either inadequately explored or ignored by the Kean Commission, ranging from insider trading and hijacker funding to foreign government forewarnings and inactive defenses around the Pentagon. The Statement asks for four actions: an immediate investigation by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Congressional hearings, media analysis, and the formation of a truly independent citizens-based inquiry. "

And they have a blog.

Republican Switchers

Republican Switchers: "WHY REPUBLICANS ARE SWITCHING FROM BUSH TO KERRY and why you, and the conservatives you love, should vote for Kerry, too!"

DRAFT Dodging FAQ

At Enjoy The Draft:

But I'm a girl
And won't you be a popular one when they draft your ass to Iraq.

Read them all!

Iraq vs Vietnam

From an e-mail I received:

Q) What's the difference between Iraq and Vietnam?

A) Bush had a plan to get out of Vietnam.

DRAFT - Freeway Blogging

At Gropinator.

Math Pun

Ouch

Voting Machines

There is a washingtonpost.com - Live Online question/answer thing coming up. I submitted this question:

I have to say it matters little to me what anyone TELLS me about an electronic voting machine. If I can not see for myself that a machine recorded my vote and other votes correctly, then the election is not legitimate in my eyes, period. Why should I have to accept ANY other person's word that the machines are secure, working, etc.? Why can't it just print a ballot that I SEE FOR MYSELF, and that I place into a ballot box, and that can be looked at to verify that the machines reported accurate tabulations? And who in their right mind ever accepted these machines that do not do that?

There is no reason to accept the results from any election conducted with these machines.

Story Was Reported Here October 14

Iraqi nuke sites "carefully stripped", post-invasion which included the line, "Jesus honking Christ!"

Kristof Is A Nitwit

I don't know why I bothered to read it ... well, I do know why, it was the title of the piece, Pants on Fire? Otherwise I just skip most of the "mainstream" pundits. Anyway, in the piece I came across this:

"One example is Mr. Bush's determination since 9/11 to add to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, even though this pushes up gasoline prices. Mr. Bush's approach is foolish economically, and it is crazy politically. Yet his grim willingness to raise gas prices during his re-election campaign underscores a solidity of character and convictions."

This guy is writing in the NY Times, and he doesn't even follow the news.

No, it isn't a grim willingness, a sign of solidity of character. Jeeze. It's BECAUSE THE CRONY THAT BUSH GAVE THE CONTRACT TO FUNDS THE RIGHT! Even though oil is at the highest price EVER, we are BUYING it from Koch Oil, sending them BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of tax dollars, instead of releasing oil from the reserve to lessen the burden on American consumers. And the money is used to fund the Right's massive propaganda machine (and enrich Bush's cronies.) DOH!

Does anyone know how to reach Kristof with this info?

One-two

http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/10/int04054.html

http://suburbanguerrilla.blogspot.com

consortium sex

The Bush Defense -- Just Lie

I'm listening to Rush Limbaugh. He's saying that the story about the 380 tons of explosives is ... a lie. He's saying this is an attempt by "the liberal media" to affect the election, and that the explosives were gone before the war. He's just making shit up.

This is how Bush defends himself -- just lie. Just lie. Spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lies, and the right's infrastructure spends hundreds of millions ore just lying. And when anyone tries to alert the public they launch a loud smear campaign to destroy the messenger, like terrorism advisor Richard Clarke or Ambassador Joe Wilson or Treasury Secretary O'Neill... Then they tell the public not to believe the mainstream press, as Bush did during the final debate.

Democracy is gone -- history. The Congress has not done their job of oversight and has not investigated a single thing the Administration has done; the Justice Department has stopped investigations of crimes committed by Republicans; the Federalist Society court appointments have dismissed lawsuits and stopped investigations; the ideologues in the Defense Department have purged any opposition to their war plans; the Right's media has misled the public about crucial facts. And now the Democrats in the Senate have gone along and allowed a partisan to take control of the CIA and he is purging non-ideologues.

They just lie, and smear anyone who gets in their way.

On His Watch!

The AFL-CIO has a Flash presenation, titled Can America Afford Four More Years?

Pakistani schoolgirls for Kerry

Respected in the world.

Electronic Voting Machines

Electronic Voting Raises New Issues,

Voters using screens similar to ATMs are guided step-by-step through a ballot. They cannot pick too many candidates or leave marks that would have to be scrutinized to guess their intent. Counts will be generated automatically and almost instantaneously. There will be no paper ballots to transport, store or pore over. Advocates said recounts will be a thing of the past.

No possibility of recounts is GOOD?

Let me raise an issue. You can't tell me to vote on a machine that can not PROVE to me that it recorded my vote correctly. If there is no way for ME to verify that MY vote is recorded the way I voted, then forget it.

Never mind enhanced security, open source software, independent verification that the machines are working correctly, or ANYthing that OTHER people assure me makes everything OK. Doesn't matter. Not relevant. Some crank - namely me - is going to show up at every single precinct where these machines are used and say, "PROVE IT." Well, the problem is that they CAN'T prove it. THERE IS NO WAY TO PROVE THAT THE MACHINE CORRECTLY RECORDED WHAT THE VOTERS WANTED. And without that, there is no legitimacy to the election.

380 Tons of Fun, Coming Your Way Thanks to Bush

380 tons of high explosives are missing in Iraq because the Bush administration did not bother to post guards.

This is a Seeing the Forest moment. This is one of those times when the fog of propaganda is so thick that it's best to put your hands over your ears, and do nothing but look at what you can actually see for yourself as certain, and reject everything else.

They use words to misdirect you so you do not see what they are really doing. Sometimes their words-of-confusion are just so thick that you can't even figure out if your name is really your name. That's when it is important to step back and look at what they DO rather than what they SAY. Ignore everything you have been led to think, everything you hear, everything coming from their mouths ad their media channels. Just believe what your own eyes can see for themselves.

They did not guard a cache of 380 tons of extremely dangerous high explosives.

They did guard the oil pipelines, the oil ministry...

This HAS TO have an effect on Bush supporters. Circulate this story! I have gathered a few sources - starting with FOX News - for you to send to Bush supporters, and ask them to please explain why they are endangering all of our lives by voting for Bush! Don't attach any of my highly-sophisticated, ultra-nuanced, subtle but insightful, intellectual, deep analysis -- that's just between you and me (our little secret.) Just send the stories, and ask them to please explain to you how this kind of thing squares with the idea that Bush is making us safer.

380 Tons of Explosives Missing in Iraq

U.N.: Explosives Missing from Former Iraq Atomic Site

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

Kerry Facts

John Kerry for Dummies at Compassiongate.

Astroturf on the editorial page

I sent the letter below, which I have edited slightly, to Michael Arrieta-Walden, the the Oregonian public editor:

Dear Michael:

Your piece on astroturf was good. The internet can be a valuable tool in spotting that kind of thing.

You might also take a look at some of your columnists, for example Debra Saunders.

Of the 784 words in this piece, all but 88 (see below) could have been written by a Bush campaign spokesman. The arguments and talking points are identical. The Bush people have a powerful outreach program, which makes it easy for columnists to write a column with minimal research.

Furthermore, if you look at the 88 words in context, yoiu will see that they're concessive -- she's setting up other, pro-Bush points. A Bush spokesman could not allow himself make these concessions, because the Bush campaign is mostly directed at true believers who are unwilling to admit anything at all. But it is very helpful if a surrogate like Saunders makes these concessions in order to immediately dismiss them, as she did.

Your own Rick Reinhardt often writes similiarly.

I am not asking for ideological uniformity, but when columnists coordinate their efforts with the RNC (as many do -- the meaningless, endlessly repeated "flip-flop" charge being an example) rather than doing their own research and writing independently, it makes the Oregonian into an unpaid RNC organ.

When the media came under pressure to represent the conservative point of view better, it did not have to mean that there would be Republican plants in the newspapers, but that's what happened. If someone is hired as the result of outside pressure of that type, he or she is more or less invulnerable, and furthermore, the ideological content of their thinking is effectively written into their job description.

I know of very few columnists anywhere who parrot the Democratic line the way that Saunders, Reinhardt, and others do the Republican line. Of the Democratic columnists I know of -- Paul Krugman, Molly Ivins, Joe Conason, Anthony Lewis, E. J. Dionne, Frank Rich, and a handful of others -- all work independently, and they are all more likely to be ahead of the Democratic Party than they are to be following it.

Yours,

John Emerson

"The world now knows that Bush, the CIA and other countries' intelligence agencies -- and even Hussein's Iraqi lieutenants until December 2002 -- were wrong about Iraq possessing WMD.... "

"Did the Bush administration make mistakes? Of course. There is strong reason to believe this administration sent too few troops to Iraq. And it doesn't help that the top Bushies have a way of freezing out those likely to tell them news they don't want to hear. Also, Bush so overvalues loyalty that it leads him to overlook incompetence."

PS. Blogger REALLY can be annoying at times.

Things You Can Do

Visit America Coming Together | ACT for Victory for things you can do between now and election day.

Click on the Campaign for a New Majority button on the left, of just click here, and make a contribution. The DCCC will apply the money as necessary in a close House race, helping bring a Democratic Majority to the House of Representatives. Even $5 helps, because there are a lot of us.

Things You Can Do

Visit America Coming Together | ACT for Victory for things you can do between now and election day.

Click on the Campaign for a New Majority button on the left, of just click here, and make a contribution. The DCCC will apply the money as necessary in a close House race, helping bring a Democratic Majority to the House of Representatives. Even $5 helps, because there are a lot of us.

Weekly Electoral College Status Update

Matt Hubbard has a new Weekly Electoral College Status update.

Explanation here.

Reasons for Optimism III

I don't know if Oregon here is still listed as a swing state. Probably not, but I don't think that it ever should have been in the first place.

Oregon was close in 2000, but the Democratic voter registration and GOTV effort this year is the most intense by far that I've ever seen. (Canvassers end up canvassing each other.) Nader isn't a factor this year, and a significant number of moderate Republicans, including former statewide officeholders, have come out in support of Kerry. (The wingers Bush plays to have crippled the Oregon Republican party statewide, and winger control of the legislature has led to crisis after crisis.) Furthermore, I've seen reports that in Southern Oregon, which is usually reliably right-wing, Kerry and Edwards are doing far better than expected.

Everything I know tells me that the media are lowballing Kerry's chances to prevent the bandwagon effect. Some of it is political bias, some of it is pure airheadedness, and some of it might just be the desire to see a close election. But I don't think that there's any countervailing anti-Bush media tendency at work, and there's also not much voter movement in Bush's direction from Democratic ranks.

Kerry is in the driver's seat -- if the voters get to vote, and if the votes are counted. The only other thing to worry about the October Surprise, and people have been talking about that for so long that its effect should be pretty diluted by now.

(Or I could be wrong. But if I am, I'll have far more serious things to worry about than simply having miscalled this election. )

Send To Relatives and Friends!

Go see Needlenose: Visualize Winning and send it to relatives and friends.

Prediction

I have a prediction for election day. Republicans will be challenging lots of voters at lots of Democratic-majority precincts. The intent will be to tie up the polls, creating extremely long lines, and causing people to turn away and not vote.

I usually work at a polling place on election day, and I know how quickly one roblem can back up a line. I can imagine that a few people, frequently challenging voters, could cause as very large percentage of voters to leave without voting.

Anyone want to bet this happens all over the country, in the Democrat areas of swing states, as well as in minority districts in the South?

Update - Right after posting that I came across this story. In Ohio the Republicans are hiring thousands of people to do exactly that - to challenge voters in minority precincts, in an attempt to cause long lines. Ohio is a swing state with a very close race. Causing a few thousand voters to leave without voting could very well change the results!

Another Defector

Paul Craig Roberts defects. Writing at VDARE, in a piece titled Three Books On The Brownshirting Of America, he says:

"Bush’s conservative supporters want no debate. They want no facts, no analysis. They want to denounce and to demonize the enemies that the Hannitys, Limbaughs, and Savages of talk radio assure them are everywhere at work destroying their great and noble country.

I remember when conservatives favored restraint in foreign policy and wished to limit government power in order to protect civil liberties.

Today’s young conservatives are Jacobins determined to use government power to impose their will at home and abroad.

[. . .] Today, there is no one to correct a lie once it is told. The media, thanks to Republicans, has been concentrated in few hands, and they are not the hands of newsmen. Corporate values rule. If lies sell, sell them. If listeners, viewers, and readers want confirmation of their resentments and beliefs, give it to them."

Here is a brief bio for Roberts, from the end of the piece:

Dr. Roberts served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. During the Cold War era, he was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. He is a former Associate Editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal editorial page and a former contributing editor of National Review.

Reality-Based Election

The phrase "reality-based" entered the lexicon last weekend, in a New York Times Magazine story by Ron Suskind, titled Without a Doubt. The story contained the following remarkable passage:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Salon has an interview interview with Suskind, titled Reality-based Reporting.

Along these lines, a public attitudes poll released yesterday by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes shows how voters' understanding of reality itself is affecting the election. From the survey:

72% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for developing them (25%). Fifty-six percent assume that most experts believe Iraq had actual WMD and 57% also assume, incorrectly, that Duelfer concluded Iraq had at least a major WMD program. Kerry supporters hold opposite beliefs on all these points.

Similarly, 75% of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, and 63% believe that clear evidence of this support has been found. Sixty percent of Bush supporters assume that this is also the conclusion of most experts, and 55% assume, incorrectly, that this was the conclusion of the 9/11 Commission. Here again, large majorities of Kerry supporters have exactly opposite perceptions.

This tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information extends to other realms as well. Despite an abundance of evidence--including polls conducted by Gallup International in 38 countries, and more recently by a consortium of leading newspapers in 10 major countries--only 31% of Bush supporters recognize that the majority of people in the world oppose the US having gone to war with Iraq. Forty-two percent assume that views are evenly divided, and 26% assume that the majority approves. Among Kerry supporters, 74% assume that the majority of the world is opposed.

Similarly, 57% of Bush supporters assume that the majority of people in the world would favor Bush's reelection; 33% assumed that views are evenly divided and only 9% assumed that Kerry would be preferred. A recent poll by GlobeScan and PIPA of 35 of the major countries around the world found that in 30, a majority or plurality favored Kerry, while in just 3 Bush was favored. On average, Kerry was preferred more than two to one.

Bush supporters also have numerous misperceptions about Bush's international policy positions. Majorities incorrectly assume that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues--the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%)--and for addressing the problem of global warming: 51% incorrectly assume he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty. After he denounced the International Criminal Court in the debates, the perception that he favored it dropped from 66%, but still 53% continue to believe that he favors it. An overwhelming 74% incorrectly assumes that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. In all these cases, majorities of Bush supporters favor the positions they impute to Bush. Kerry supporters are much more accurate in their perceptions of his positions on these issues.

I think this points to a major failing on the part of those opposed to Bush. The Republican "machine" - their network of "think tanks", and advocacy/communications ideology marketing organizations - has for decades studied how people receive and retain information about the world and is using that information to get their information into people's minds.

And they certainly have been using their understanding of the ways people receive and retain information to full advantage in this election. We should not underestimate how important the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Paul Harvey and Fox News are to the election process! I suspect that many of you sophisticated, well-informed blog readers don't know that Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. reported -- over and over -- that the recent Iraq Duelfer WMD report supported President Bush's position that Iraq had WMD, and that the 9/11 Commission found that Iraq did support al Queda! You probably assumed that these reports would help Kerry in the election because they flatly contradicted Bush's positions. But Limbaugh and the rest have a lot of listeners and viewers, and they repeated over and over that the reports backed up President Bush, as this poll shows.

How many of us make assumptions based on what we know about the facts? But what if others are using different facts? What if others believe that 2+2=5, and are using that as the basis for their decision making? You can not effectively communicate with them if your arguments start with an assumption that you share agreement that 2+2=4, when actually you do not. Instead, to be effective, you need to start your discussion by proving that 2+2=4!

Where MoveOn and The Media Fund have been running election ads based on an assumption that basic facts are understood, it might have been better to run ads that served the function of news organizations and simply reported over and over nothing more than basic facts, like that the Duelfer Iraqi WMD and the 9/11 Commission reports did NOT back up Bush. That is the starting point -- proving that 2+2=4 before you can move on to broader arguments. Another example of the basic facts problem -- as we saw above, the survey found that among Bush supporters, "An overwhelming 74% incorrectly assumes that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements." Sheesh.

When President Bush said during the most recent debate that we should not accept mainstream news organizations as credible sources of factual information, he was revealing his understanding of the core deciding factor of this election, in my opinion. That core fact is that people are being propagandized by a right-wing machine that simply tells lies. They are intentionally misinforming people, tricking them into voting for people who will, once in office, do things like hand their retirement savings over to big corporations, start wars, ignore public health concerns -- and tell them not to believe what they hear on the "mainstream" news.

The entire report of findings is available as a PDF document here.

Voting Machines in Florida

See a short video about electronic voting machines in Florida.

"Win Back Respect"

Via Josh Micah Marshall, here's a link to "Win Back Respect", a group which produced an ad juxtaposing Bush's clown show in front of a media group last March (the one where he joked about the missing WMD) with statements by the sister of a GI killed at shortly after then. I haven't been able to view the ad because of my software-hardware problems, but it's guaranteed to be very powerful. At the WBR site it is possible to donate money so the ad can be shown more widely.

Social Security

Here is my Social Seucrity post from Wednesday's American Street. I'm hoping we can get a discussion going here.

There's a lot of talk about Social Security today, so I thought I would weigh in.

You and I pay a big Social Security tax, something like 15%. (If you work for someone the employer pays half of that.) But you don't pay when you make more than about $88,000. You don't pay it at all on capital gains, which are also taxed much lower than income, or dividends, which are not taxed at all. For many people this is the largest tax they pay.

Once again, just to make sure you hear it, you only pay this tax on the first $88,000 of your income, even if you make vastly more than that. And rich people don't pay it at all if their income is from capital gains or dividends.

So where does this money go -- this money collected from a tax that ONLY lower and middle incomes pay, and only on income from actually working for a living?

How Kerry can blow this race wide open

There's been a lot of chatter about Kerry's goose-hunting expedition. Supposedly it makes him seem like a down-to-earth, regular guy with a macho streak.

Maybe, but any yuppy can hunt goose. In England, that kind of hunting is the preserve of the pansy aristocracy. What Kerry really wants to do is go to the town dump somewhere and shoot rats. Shooting rats is so down-to-earth it makes you sick. He'll put himself right square in the middle of NRA / militia territory, and Dubya won't know what hit him.

Famous asshole Karl Malone endorses Bush

The Bush campaign has scraped together 24 -- count 'em -- Olympic and professional athletes from five decades to endorse George W. Bush. Included on the list are Todd Walker, Janet Lynn Salomon, Dot Richardson, Natalie Golda, Adam Dunn, Chris Spielman, Josh Davis, and Daniel Beery, plus 16 other people who you've actually heard of. Altogether there are eight football players, seven Olympians, seven baseball players, a basketball player, and a golfer.

Here's what Rove is having them say, and tell me if you think it makes any sense at all:

"We have given much thought to the values and characteristics that make a great athlete. Our lives have been spent trying to run farther, push further, and jump higher than the person beside us, or across the field of our chosen sport. With years of training and exhaustive competition beneath our belts, we have identified the values necessary to compete and win--values like personal strength, determination, a sense of fair play and faith.

The same qualities that make a great athlete make a great President...."

That's not George W. Bush. Maybe they forgot what year it is or something.

I was saddened to see Ernie Banks and Bob Feller on the list, but a lot of the rest of them could have been predicted: Steve Largent, Roger Staubach, and Jack Nicklaus, for example, or the notorious asshole Karl Malone. Rove might have asked himself whether some of these guys actually are going to gain the Republicans more votes than they lose.

If that's the best they can do, I think that we should just award the election to Kerry right now.

P.S. "Beneath our belts" sounds odd -- shouldn't it be "under our belts"? Perhaps the phrase "under our belts" sounds a little too close to the groin for these nice Republican folk.

Voting Machines - MOVIE!

There's a new movie about the problems with electronic voting machines! Go see Votergate.

(If you move your mouse over the brown "Card" at the top of the page you'll see a button that says "Enter." Click that to enter the site.)

(full disclosure.)

Well done, young man

The Grey Lady nods approvingly in the direction of Jon Stewart. One wonders what might be said were Stewart to tell the world what he thinks of Judy Miller.

How to

Jeanne at Body and Soul regularly amazes me. She has a special talent for putting a simple story, something that lots of blogs cover, into a genuinely personal context. It's enlightening, not some stupid kool kids me-me-me framing. Jeanne runs a how-to for blogging.

If They Win With Lies II

Rick Perlstein, in 'Sucking democracy dry':

"These are the people whose candidate just might win this election. If he does, he will have proven but one thing: Those who are willing to do anything to win can win."

Go read.

In If They Win With Lies?, I wrote,

What does it mean for the future of the country, and the world, if they are able to hold power using methods like these? In history, what kind of governments emerge from such tactics and lies, and what are the consequences to the citizens and the rest of the world?

What is in store for us if they do win? What do you think they will do? Will they be putting bloggers in jail? Maybe that's not as important to you as to me ;-)

DRAFT

Enjoy the DRAFT! 

Another "chain letter" from our side.

[Nancy Macy is a prominent Santa Cruz area environmental activist. I thought this was a detailed and well written letter, so I'm passing it along, and encourage you to do likewise. -Thomas]

Here is a letter my sister and I composed and are sending to family and friends throughout the US. I hope you will do something similar. Feel free to use any of this if it helps. Thanks Nancy Macy [deleted]

October 20, 2004

Dearest Family and Friends,

We decided we had to write to you to express our concerns about the importance of this election, because of an issue that is being ignored, in spite of its overwhelming importance to us, to our children, and to our planet. This issue is global warming.

The consequences of global warming can no longer be ignored. It¹s not just that polar bears are losing their habitat as the ice floes melt in the arctic, not just that coral reefs are bleaching and dying as their waters heat up, not just that whole island nations are being submerged as the seas rise. Global warming will affect us all. In California wewill have water shortages as winter snow is replaced by rain. This will cause either huge floods, or the rainwater will have to be stored in expensive new reservoirs. Tropical diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will migrate north into California as the temperatures rise and rainfall increases. The eastern U.S. coastline will change radically as lowlands are flooded much of the Gulf Coast within the next 70-80 years, and Manhattan Island lose land mass. Weather extremes such as tornadoes and hurricanes will increase, with enormous social and financial impact. Increased water shortages and eternal droughts will affect the Prairie states, and worsen tensions between Western states. Water will become more precious than oil, and disputes over water will increase armed conflict around the world. As land becomes uninhabitable, whole populations will migrate to cooler climates, causing massive social disruption. Florida had four hurricanes in a few short weeks this year country and around the world as global warming progresses. We are having small tornadoes here in Richmond, California, already. The climate models all agree on the major effects: the weather is only going to get worse and worse. We must take action now since our government is ignoring this problem.

Our President has sided with his friends in the oil, coal and power industries, and has caused a desperate situation to worsen. President Bush still refuses to acknowledge the fact of global warming, and the importance of taking strong, effective steps to reduce the emissions that cause global warming. He refuses to work within the Kyoto Treaty, which is taking effect in December 2004. We have lost credibility in the world for our failure to take responsibility for our own pollution.

Mr. Bush¹s claims that reducing emissions will damage the economy are NOT correct. The Global Warming articles in Business Week of August 16, 2004 confirm this. (www.businessweek.com) Economists all agree: there will be some job loss in specific industries such as coal mining, but our economy will actually benefit by implementation of limits on carbon dioxide emissions. New industries will spring up to provide the needed products for reducing emissions, creating thousands of jobs. Huge companies such as BP (formerly British Petroleum, now Beyond Petroleum), IBM, Royal Dutch Shell, Boeing, and many others have already reduced the carbon dioxide emissions of their operations. They have found that investments in energy conservation and changing their business processes are SAVING them HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.(www.pewclimate.org) Again and again it has been proven that environmentally responsible business practices, especially conservation, are money savers and moneymakers for business.

In addition, Mr. Bush is responsible for widespread and unprecedented manipulation, distortion, and suppression of government science on a wide range of issues relating to public health and the environment. It is now unstated policy to ignore scientific information and research when they disagree with it, and they try to hide it. This has been documented over and over by the Union of Concerned Scientists, among others, who have documented hundreds of examples of this. More than 4000 scientists have publicly signed a statement of concern, urging us to speak out against this effort to mislead the country. This report and their reports on the effect of global warming in California, the Gulf Coast, and the Upper Midwest are found at the UCS website, www.ucsusa.org. (We apologize to those of you who do not use the internet. Your local library will be able to help you find information on this issue, and the other issues covered in our letter.)

Mr. Bush has undermined every important environmental Law of the past thirty years -- all which had passed with bipartisan support. The Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act have been responsible for the improvement to the air in Los Angeles, the improvement in the Hudson River, and all the environmental improvements we¹ve seen since their passage. We have been enjoying the benefits for decades. Protections of our air, water, rivers, wetlands, oceans and deserts, their many forms of life, and our health! have all been drastically worsened by hundreds of changes in regulations; by removing funding for enforcement of the law; and by initiating moratoriums on regulations and relaxing rules. Mr. Bush is implementing policies that are bringing commercial development and resource extraction into areas preserved for generations as wilderness. These policies will continue and be exacerbated by four more years of the President¹s actions. The country cannot stand four more years of Mr. Bush. Our environment will be devastated if he remains in power.

Please vote for Senator Kerry for President. He understands global warming and the importance of a healthy environment to a healthy economy and healthy communities. His environmental record is at 100% FOR the environment, according to Environmental Defense and other institutions which track such records. He will engage the international community again on this most important issue of global warming. He will restore the hard-won protections of our environment put in place under President Nixon. He will work with the developing countries that have no carbon dioxide emission limits in the Kyoto Treaty to help them implement energy policies that reduce the total load of carbon dioxide emissions. China, India, Brazil, and other booming economies in the third world are facing huge environmental problems, and are already coming to recognize that they will also need to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other global warming gases. We have to face this problem NOW in order to prevent major disaster for our children and grandchildren. It is our responsibility! Please vote FOR Senator Kerry.

Global warming is THE MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM facing us. The war on terror is big, but global warming is MUCH more important in the long term. We must act NOW.

If you have questions on global warming, what it is, more specifically what will happen soon, please contact Martha. I have been studying this for over 5 years, and am familiar with the issues.


Sincerely, with love,

Martha Booz and Nancy Macy
[contact info for both available on request]

Social Security Street

I have a piece on Social Security, over at The American Street.

"Left Out" Tour - Interview with Pat LaMarche

[One more short one. Then I'll return you to your regularly scheduled Anybody But Bush Again programming.

The Green Party's nominated candidates are laying it on the line for the values and principles that they advocate. John Edwards talks about "Two Americas" - Pat LaMarche lives it. Actually, I think John Edward's "Two Americas" speech leaves out the "Third America" - people like the ones Pat encounters in this article, who aren't just struggling, but are completely wiped out. I'm proud to have my party's banner carried forward in 2004 by people like David Cobb and Pat LaMarche.

Oh yeah...

Pat on the Bush Administration:

"The bums need to go. Period. End of sentence. They’ve got to get fired. It’s
the worst administration in the history of the United States of America. And
it’s run by cowards."

Pat on the Democrats:

"Well, you know, I think your toaster oven would be better. And you’d get
toast. An occasional Pop Tart. So, they can’t help but be better. Will they be
better enough? No. If they would be better enough, I’d be a Democrat."

-Thomas]

Pat LaMarche feels left out

And not just because Dick Cheney and John Edwards wouldn't let her debate
with them

David Cobb, the Green Party’s presidential candidate, resorted last Friday to
civil disobedience, getting himself arrested in St. Louis while ambushing the
second presidential debate of the campaign. That’s the kind of tactic you
need to get attention in the presidential campaign if you’re a third-party
candidate. It’s clear that getting ballot status in 28 states and representing a
party that collected 2,882,995 votes in the last presidential election isn’t
enough.

Cobb’s running mate, Maine’s Pat LaMarche, took a slightly different tack.
She decided to embark, on September 21, on her "Left Out" tour, during which
she would sleep either on the streets or in homeless shelters in 14 cities
across the US, "to raise awareness about America’s least-privileged citizens"
because "no vice-presidential candidate has ever been bold enough to walk in
their shoes."

Sure, it was a bit of a public-relations gambit, but LaMarche hardly took the
easy way out. She traveled by herself, with fellow Greens picking her up at
airports and helping her with transportation but then dropping her off to fend
for herself in what were possibly dangerous situations. As LaMarche herself
notes in the following interview, women are raped after only an average of 11
days on the streets. LaMarche spent a total of 14, winding up in Cleveland on
the day when John Edwards and Dick Cheney debated there, while the rest of the vice-presidential candidates had their own debate across town.

[...]

full story on the Portland (Maine) Phoenix web site

--Thomas Leavitt

Top 12 Issues Censored From the Bush-Kerry Debates.

[Excerpts from a Green Party press release. Greens have a fundamentally different agenda from that of the two major parties in the United States--who are happy to remain silent about the unweaving of the global web of life and the fact that our economic and trade policies under the last two presidents, Clinton and Bush alike, have fostered a global "race to the bottom". Opinion surveys I've read recently show that a majority of Americans favor a single payer system (which is what senior citizens have with Medicare), and yet it isn't even on the radar screen of the national Democratic Party. -Thomas]

Thursday, October 14, 2004

GREENS LIST THE TOP 12 ISSUES CENSORED FROM THE BUSH-KERRY DEBATES

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Green Party leaders and candidates charged that the presidential debates, limited to the candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry, have effectively censored numerous issues important to Americans.

[deleted]

Greens listed the top twelve issues censored from the Bush-Kerry debates:

(1) When the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, it violated international laws against "preemptive" and "preventive" war (enacted after Hitler used these excuses to justify invading Czechoslovakia, Poland, and France); and violated the U.S. Constitution's limit on the deployment of armed forces to immediate protection of U.S. borders (Article I, Section 8), and requirement that the U.S. adhere to international treaties (Article VI).

[four other Iraq-specific issues deleted -Thomas ]

(6) The USA Patriot Act violates numerous rights afforded by the U.S. Constitution, especially freedom of speech, freedom from search and seizure without a warrant, and guarantee of due process. Whether Mr. Kerry or Mr. Bush is elected, if another terrorist attack occurs there are already plans to extend the USA Patriot Act even further, effectively nullifying the Constitution.

(7) If we intend to avert catastrophic global climate change, the U.S. must rejoin the Kyoto agreement, strengthen and adhere to its provisions, and make conversion to non-fossil and non-nuclear energy the great project of the 21st century. (Mr. Bush withdrew the U.S. from Kyoto, Mr. Kerry is silent about rejoining the accord.)

(8) Republicans and Democrats have abandoned working people, while coddling CEOs and major shareholders with a $137 billion tax break package for corporations. Neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Kerry mentioned a national guarantee of livable wages, repeal of Taft-Hartley limits on workplace organizing, or the Million Worker March, planned for October 17 in Washington, D.C. .

(9) Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry rejected "government-run" coverage, but Congress's General Accounting Office has determined that the only health care reform that will save money is single-payer national health insurance. Under single-payer, all Americans would be guaranteed quality treatment and medicine regardless of income, employment, age, or prior medical condition, and patients will enjoy choice of physician. Middle and lower income Americans will pay far less for single-payer coverage than they do now for private coverage through profit-driven HMOs and insurance firms.

(10) The 'War on Drugs' has not only failed to stem drug abuse, it has resulted in the highest number ever of Americans incarcerated (over 5.6 million have served time, the highest percentage in the world) -- especially young people, poor people, African Americans, and Latinos.

(11) Thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act and other deregulation measures, fewer and fewer corporations own more and more of the media and regulate our news and entertainment. Democrats who voted for the Telecommunications Act have only themselves to blame for the Sinclair Broadcast Group's plan to air an anti-Kerry documentary on 62 TV stations.

(12) At-large winner-take-all elections have allowed two parties corrupted by corporate lobby money to dominate our political system. We can restore our democracy through various reforms: Instant Runoff Voting, Proportional Representation, "clean election" options that enable candidates to run without taking corporate money, free time for candidates on our publicly owned airwaves, and auditable paper ballots. More information on election reforms: http://www.fairvote.org

Read the complete release on the Green Party web site.

Renegade Green for Cobb

[Take that Dave. :)

From the Boston Globe. The question is not: is there a real difference between Kerry and Bush... but rather, is there more of a difference between David Cobb/the Green Party, than there is between John Kerry/the Democrats and George Bush/the Republicans? David Cobb makes a strong case that there is. -Thomas]


WELCOME TO THE MAINSTREAM

BY DAVID COBB

IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT OBJECTIVELY AND IGNORE EMOTIONS AND UNSUPPORTED PERCEPTIONS, JOHN KERRY AND GEORGE BUSH ARE IN AGREEMENT ON A WIDE RANGE OF ISSUES WHICH DEFINE OUR DOMESTIC AGENDA, OUR FOREIGN POLICY, AND WHO WE ARE AS A PEOPLE. WHAT MAKES THIS ALL THE MORE INTERESTING IS THAT THIS PLACES BUSH AND KERRY AT ODDS WITH MANY MAINSTREAM AMERICAN BELIEFS. IN FACT, THESE MAJORITARIAN AMERICAN VALUES ARE ACTUALLY BEST REFLECTED IN THE PLATFORM AND POSITIONS OF THE GREEN PARTY.

Most Americans, I'm sure, believe that people working full-time should be able to support their families without using public assistance, but many full-time wage earners making minimum wage have to do just that. I support increasing the minimum wage to a living wage; Bush and Kerry do not. Most Americans are burdened and scandalized by the skyrocketing costs of health insurance and prescription drugs. I support single-payer health insurance that will provide lifetime coverage to every single citizen and cost less than our current system; Bush and Kerry do not.

Most Americans value their privacy, cherish the Constitution, and believe in due process. I support a repeal of the invasive and unconstitutional USA Patriot Act in its entirety; Bush and Kerry do not.

Most Americans are tired of spending cuts in education, social services, and environmental protection. I support shifting 50 percent of the military budget over 10 years to fund these programs; Bush and Kerry do not.

more on unrepentandnadervoter.com...

--Thomas Leavitt

Republican National Convention in a nutshell.

This hilarious video montage (courtesy of BuzzFlash) of Repblican National Convention quotes demonstrates quite concisely the Republican Party's strategy in this election cycle. Terrorize the American public into re-electing Dubya. Pure and simple.

--Thomas Leavitt

Don't let up

A diarist at dKos has the right take on Sinclair:

See, almost everyone is missing the point here. Sinclair has not changed its position one bit. They are spinning, hoping to relieve the pressure of the boycott by giving a false impression of what they are doing. But what they are doing is even worse than if they were airing Stolen Honor in full. In fact, the whole thing is a winger's dream, a Free Republic version of the perfect media event.

Read what he says, and don't let up on Sinclair. These are really nasty bastards and they will say anything to get you off their backs. But they won't stop the smear!

Calming the Public -- THIS Time

The Bush Administration is doing everything it can to calm fears caused by the shortage of flu vaccine.

"We've successfully worked through vaccine supply problems in the past and we're doing so this time as well," said Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson. "We need all of us to take a deep breath."

This is because the flu vaccine shortage makes the Bush administration look bad, and they are afraid people might vote against them as a result.

Compare this to the Bush Administration's stoking of terrorism fear! IMAGINE Bush telling people to take a breath,calm down, and not be afraid!

Ain't gonna happen.

"Love of power for its own sake is the original sin of this presidency."

Al Gore yesterday:

"Most of the problems he has caused for this country stem not from his belief in God, but from his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interests of the wealthy and of large corporations over the interests of the American people. Love of power for its own sake is the original sin of this presidency.

[. . .] The essential cruelty of Bush’s game is that he takes an astonishingly selfish and greedy collection of economic and political proposals then cloaks it with a phony moral authority, thus misleading many Americans who have a deep and genuine desire to do good in the world. And in the process he convinces them to lend unquestioning support for proposals that actually hurt their families and their communities. Bush has stolen the symbolism and body language of religion and used it to disguise the most radical effort in American history to take what rightfully belongs to the citizenry of America and give as much as possible to the already wealthy and privileged, who look at his agenda and say, as Dick Cheney said to Paul O’Neill, “this is our due.”

DRAFT - Krugman

Krugman: Feeling the Draft:

"Those who are worrying about a revived draft are in the same position as those who worried about a return to budget deficits four years ago, when President Bush began pushing through his program of tax cuts. Back then he insisted that he wouldn't drive the budget into deficit - but those who looked at the facts strongly suspected otherwise. Now he insists that he won't revive the draft. But the facts suggest that he will.

[. . .] Mr. Bush's claim that we don't need any expansion in our military is patently unrealistic; it ignores the severe stress our Army is already under. And the experience in Iraq shows that pursuing his broader foreign policy doctrine - the "Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war - would require much larger military forces than we now have.

This leads to the justified suspicion that after the election, Mr. Bush will seek a large expansion in our military, quite possibly through a return of the draft."

Vote Watch

Vote Watch 2004
Vote/Election fraud, vote suppression, voting irregularities, voter intimidation in Election 2004

No one wants us to vote

The Republicans don't want us to vote. Neither do the terrorists. Voter suppression, terror alerts, terrorist attacks -- be sure to vote, no matter what.

Kos on voter suppression
Recent history of voter suppression
Education department declares all schools (many of them polling places) to be terrorist targets
Terror warnings spread fear
Election day terrorism warnings have chilling effect

"Mission Accomplished" again

He's going to fly to Iraq again for another flightsuit photo-op? Mmmm... someone tell Peggy Noonan. He's one sexy guy who can really dish out the turkey. He just has to move that bulge down where it belongs.

But this is Halloween, not Thanksgiving -- maybe an Alfred E. Newman mask might help the troops lighten up a little. Some of them are reportedly taking all this more seriously than they really should. Or he could give them all little Snickers bars.

The same old "Mission Accomplished" banner should be fine. He'll be able to use it every year from here on out, if he gets reelected. The war against terrorism is an endless one, so you can declare victory any time you want to. Or maybe make it an annual event -- every Halloween, maybe, or every April first. Peggy's a sentimental, old-school babe, and she never gets tired of that kind of shit.

October Surprise?

There's a rumour going around. October Surprise: Would Bush Make Another Visit to Baghdad?

Would this be an effective gimmick by Bush, or just transparent? And what do YOU think the October Surprise will be?

Reasons for Optimism, II

Reading the polls can be depressing, so here are a few things to remember:

1. Very few of the polls take new voters into consideration, and this year the Democrats are putting on the biggest voter-registration drive in my memory.

2. Traditionally, undecideds break for the challenger.

3. Some of the polls have a Republican bias, especially Gallup. (And incidentally, did anyone take the recent GI poll seriously? The military has its own special way of handling that sort of thing, and I wasn't too surprised at the 70-30 Bush advantage. Let's just hope that the troops get to fill out their ballots personally.)

4. In 2000, the polls wildly underestimated Gore's vote in the Presidential race.

The main things we have to worry about are election fraud, voter suppression, and the October Surprise. I think that given the present polling numbers, Kerry should be the favorite.

Salon on the polls
Soto on Gallup (October)
Soto on Gallup (September)

Reality-based community

A lot of people are commenting on the following passage in Susskind's NYT article. According to a Bush aide, Bush's critics are from

"the reality-based community....[people] who believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.....That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

You can get a great anti-Bush zinger out of this, and I heartily endorse doing so. However, people are, to a significant degree, missing the point. The Bush aide's statement actually highlights one of the Republican party's strengths and one of the Democrats' weaknesses, especially in political campaigning.

Democrats are too tied to public administration and to the normalizing social sciences, where you try to keep things under control and running smoothly, or try to figure out the most likely thing to happen based on observed regularities. Republicans are more likely to come from wildcat entrepreneurial backgrounds, often of a semi-criminal type, where the goal is to seize a momentary advantage, find an exception or a weak spot, or find a new angle. As a result Republicans are better at spotting and exploiting the unrevealed potentials of an unstable or evolving situation.

If you don't believe me, name a national political campaign since 1976 when the Democrats outcampaigned the Republicans. There's only Bill Clinton, and he strikes me as a pretty good guy at finding an angle. Republicans hated Clinton's sleaziness, not because they hate sleaziness, but because they want a monopoly on it. Clinton beat them at their own game.

On Matt Yglesias's comments, "Cranky" pointed out that the Republican aide's assertion is pretty much what they teach in business schools these days – you don't manage based on your past experience, but upon what is going to happen in the future – and the future is something that you can do something about. Another commenter, JS, cited Marx: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it."

Ariel Sharon's "facts on the ground" is another example of what I mean. By taking bold actions, the executive can make his opponent's objections and proposals irrelevant, and this method works even if the bold action makes things worse. "So what are you gonna do now, buddy?"

However, most entrepreneurs fail, and most adventurists are defeated. Bush's great adventure is in collapse phase. In Iraq, things didn't go the way the Bush team had planned. (This is true even if you grant that their actual plans were different than their publicly-expressed plans). They gave it their best shot, but that wasn't good enough.

Adventurists cannot afford to admit defeat, because they've staked too much on success; once the jig is up, they're through for good. Bush can only try to save himself by upping the ante. If he wins in November, we can expect him to invade Iran, institute a draft, and attack the traitors and naysayers in our midst even more viciously than before.

Adventurists are only forgiven if they succeed, and Bush didn't. He gambled and lost, and now is in the running to be named the worst President in American history. It's time to escort him off the stage.

T-Shirts

These two designs happen to be by my wife Sudeep.

Tricked

Kevin at The Washington Monthly adds his voice to corporate efforts to block consumers from being able to sue corporations that harm them -- except he doesn't really realize that he has done so.

He cites a right-wing article, written by a right-wing think tank fellow, saying "huge awards in liability lawsuits" is part of why much of the American public can't get flu vaccines this year. This triggers readers to leave comments like, "Thank the trial lawyers, and those in power who get furious if a medical company makes a profit."

This is how it works. Watch your backs.

Renegade Greens for Kerry

Go here.

Christians will be judged too

Everything that the Bush team has done in the last several months has been calculated to stave off disaster in Iraq until after the election. At this point, even the Green Zone is no longer secure, so disaster looks pretty close.

If Bush wins, he'll have a free hand and a four-year blank check. If he loses, Kerry will have to clean up the mess (sort of like Clinton inheriting Somalia from Bush the first, except a hundred times worse).

There are literally thousands of media people and Republicans who pretty well know what's going on, but who aren't saying anything because of their career agendas, ideological obsessions, and utter cynicism and shallowness.

If Kerry wins, there really have to be recriminations and score-settling (as I think Krugman has said).
One peculiarity of the moral-clarity people and the religious right is that they frame their political fight as a moral fight against cynicism and relativism, but seem completely unaware that they too will be judged. The most dangerously cynical people in the U.S. today are conservative Republicans.

Anyone who's knocked around a bit has met cheesy, semi-criminal revival Christians who think that their piety gives them a special connection to Jesus, who they're counting on to save them if they ever get caught. That describes the Bush administration to a T.

(Apropos of Susskind's NYT article and this thread on Brad DeLong. Krugman called for recriminations here).

Times Change(s)

In 1971, in what is known as the Pentagon Papers case, the NY Times went to the mat to defend the right of the press to reveal that the government was lying to us about a war. A courageous individual risked everything to bring the "Pentagon Papers" and the information they contained to the public, and the Nixon Administration was trying to stop their publication.

Revealing government lies and corruption used to be an important role of the press.

Times sure have changed. The Times sure has changed. And, as we all know so well, the press and the role they see for themselves sure has changed. Now The Times and others are going to the mat to protect government officials who conspired to make war, and who hurt efforts to stop weapons of mass destruction from reaching terrorists.

A courageous individual named Joe Wilson risked all to reveal to us that the Bush administration was lying about their reasons for starting a war. To punish him, White House officials illegally revealed to reporters the identity of his wife, Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative. (This also intimidated others in government who might talk to the press.) To make matters even worse, Valerie Plame's job was hunting down people trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. They not only stopped her from this effort, by revealing her identity they alerted countries and organizations worldwide to look at who she has been meeting with over the years, in case they were informing on them.

See some editorials against revealing who in the White House did this: here, here, here, here, here, here ... many more...

Electoral College Update

Matt Hubbard has a new Weekly Electoral College Status update.

Explanation here.

A "chain letter" from our side of the fence.

[Just got this from my mother. Did a Google search, and confirmed that yes, there is a State Senator named Howard Carroll who serves in the Illinois State Senate as a representative from the Chicago area. I was only able to find one copy of this list (posted on the 15th of October), so I think this is new stuff. Pass it on! -Thomas]


Date Sent: 12 Oct 2004 09:54 AM

Absolutely Infuriating!

Please pass this along.

FW: Military experience

Hi all - As Sen. Carroll requests (see below,) please keep this
info moving...

Pattern here? What does this say?

Democrats:

* Richard Gephardt: Air National Guard, 1965-71.
* David Bonior: Staff Sgt., Air Force 1968-72.
* Tom Daschle: 1st Lt., Air Force SAC 1969-72.
* Al Gore: enlisted Aug. 1969; sent to Vietnam Jan. 1971 as an army journalist in 20th Engineer Brigade.
* Bob Kerrey: Lt. j.g. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam.
* Daniel Inouye: Army 1943-47; Medal of Honor, WWII.
* John Kerry: Lt., Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, Purple Hearts.
* Charles Rangel: Staff Sgt., Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea.
* Max Cleland: Captain, Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam.
* Ted Kennedy: Army, 1951-53.
* Tom Harkin: Lt., Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74.
* Jack Reed: Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91.
* Fritz Hollings: Army officer in WWII; Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons.
* Leonard Boswell: Lt. Col., Army 1956-76; Vietnam, DFCs, Bronze Stars, and Soldier's Medal.
* Pete Peterson: Air Force Captain, POW. Purple Heart, Silver Star and Legion of Merit.
* Mike Thompson: Staff sergeant, 173rd Airborne, Purple Heart.
* Bill McBride: Candidate for Fla. Governor. Marine in Vietnam; Bronze Star with Combat V.
* Gray Davis: Army Captain in Vietnam, Bronze Star.
* Pete Stark: Air Force 1955-57
* Chuck Robb: Vietnam
* Howell Heflin: Silver Star
* George McGovern: Silver Star & DFC during WWII.
* Bill Clinton: Did not serve. Student deferments. Entered draft but received #311.
* Jimmy Carter: Seven years in the Navy.
* Walter Mondale: Army 1951-1953
* John Glenn: WWII and Korea; six DFCs and Air Medal with 18 Clusters.
* Tom Lantos: Served in Hungarian underground in WWII. Saved by Raoul Wallenberg.


Republicans -- and these are the guys sending people to war:

* Dick Cheney: did not serve. Several deferments, the last by marriage.
* Dennis Hastert: did not serve.
* Tom Delay: did not serve.
* Roy Blunt: did not serve.
* Bill Frist: did not serve.
* Mitch McConnell: did not serve.
* Rick Santorum: did not serve.
* Trent Lott: did not serve.
* John Ashcroft: did not serve. Seven deferments to teach business.
* Jeb Bush: did not serve.
* Karl Rove: did not serve.
* Saxby Chambliss: did not serve. "Bad knee." The man who attacked Max Cleland's patriotism.
* Paul Wolfowitz: did not serve.
* Vin Weber: did not serve.
* Richard Perle: did not serve.
* Douglas Feith: did not serve.
* Eliot Abrams: did not serve.
* Richard Shelby: did not serve.
* Jon! Kyl: did not serve.
* Tim Hutchison: did not serve.
* Christopher Cox: did not serve.
* Newt Gingrich: did not serve.
* Don Rumsfeld: served in Navy (1954-57) as flight instructor.
* George W. Bush: failed to complete his six-year National Guard; got assigned to Alabama so he could campaign for family friend running for U.S. Senate; failed to show up for required medical exam, disappeared from duty.
* Ronald Reagan: due to poor eyesight, served in a non-combat role making movies.
* B-1 Bob Dornan: Consciously enlisted after fighting was over in Korea.
* Phil Gramm: did not serve.
* John McCain: Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross.
* Dana Rohrabacher: did not serve.
* John M. McHugh: did not serve.
* JC Watts: did not serve.
* Jack Kemp: did not serve. "Knee problem," although continued in NFL for 8 years.
* Dan Quayle: Journalism unit of the Indiana National Guard.
* Rudy Giuliani: did not serve.
* George Pataki: did not serve.
* Spencer Abraham: did not serve.
* John Engler: did not serve.
* Lindsey Graham: National Guard lawyer.
* Arnold Schwarzenegger: AWOL from Austrian army base.

Pundits & Preachers

* Sean Hannity: did not serve.
* Rush Limbaugh: did not serve (4-F with a 'pilonidal cyst.')
* Bill O'Reilly: did not serve.
* Michael Savage: did not serve.
* George Will: did not serve.
* Chris Matthews: did not serve.
* Paul Gigot: did not serve.
* Bill Bennett: did not serve.
* Pat Buchanan: did not serve.
* John Wayne: did not serve.
* Bill Kristol: did not serve.
* Kenneth Starr: did not serve.
* Antonin Scalia: did not serve.
* Clarence Thomas: did not serve.
* Ralph Reed: did not serve.
* Michael Medved: did not serve.
* Charlie Daniels: did not serve.
* Ted Nugent: did not serve. (He only shoots at things that don't shoot back.)

Please keep this information circulating

Sen. Howard W. Carroll
senhwc@Hotmail.com