Dear Republican voter:

Everything the people you placed in office have done through policy and action undermines the well being and future of my children. That is because the preeminent goal of the Republican Party is to reduce taxes to the wealthy, thereby impoverishing the many. Every proposal put forth during the Republican reign springs from this basic goal, and all other purported reasons are pure sophism.

If you are rich, I understand your protecting your interests, although I deplore your sociopathic greed and narcissistic lack of empathy. If you are not, I am astounded by the profound depth of your perversity.

President Pandemonium released a new manifesto that extends and reasserts the existing neo-conservative Bush Doctrine. That’s the one that essentially says "When you’ve got it, baby, flaunt it!" in reference to military power and advantage. You know, the one that has worked so well in Vietraq, and the reason why the per capita share of the federal deficit is now thirty thousand dollars, and why between thirty and one hundred thousand people are dead, and the reason we have to take out billions more debt on our Beijing MasterCard. You know, that one.

George Bush pledging to look for the leakers of classified information is like O.J. vowing to find the killer.

Katherine Harris says she’s putting everything she has on the line in her campaign for the Florida US Senate seat now held by Bill Nelson. This doesn’t really mean that if she loses she’ll be hustling eggs and java at her local Waffle House. Her husband’s very rich too, and presumably he would not let poor Kathie starve. So her posing as heroically risking becoming a pauper for principle is a little absurd and less noble than she would have us think. It's pretty melodramatic too. Maybe the clueless and irresolute will buy it, who knows?

3/14/6: Senator Frist claims that following the law as Senator Feingold suggests will leave us open to terrorism. First, Frist, insisting on adherence to law is not treachery. Second, the existing law is sufficient for the purpose, IF surveillance is actually confined to the stated purpose, and not a much broader sweep than we're being told. 

Third, we are open to terrorism, no matter what we do. It's an illusion to believe we can immunize an open society completely, and a con to say so. But if we let that scare the wits out of us to the point we're willing to turn our Constitution into paper machete and then invite in the Stasi and KGB, who wins? (Britain withstood terrorism for decades and didn't descend into a police state; neither did they freak out and declare a "war" after the London bombings -they just went out and caught the guys.)

I believe the powers that be are using fear to control the populace. That cynical tactic may still be unassailable as a political strategy, but would it really hurt Feingold's timid fellow Democrats to just stand up and speak truth to power for once? Heck, they're already disparaged as wimpy losers for not wanting to bomb half the world into ashes and splinters in a fit of mindless, misplaced rage. Might as well go out fighting for a principle.

The problem though is that one side stands for empire and tax breaks, while the other is still so gun shy from Ronald Reagan that it's quivering  behind a Bush.

After decades of flouting non-proliferation, India merely categorized its "nukular" facilities into two lists, one for energy generation and the other for nuclear weapons and then showed it to President Bush. Seeing this, he said "Looks good to me!" and promptly OKayed transfer of "American nuclear technology" to India.

Golly GE, if Iran is smart, it will invest some of its fortune in Bechtel
and Halliburton before their stocks take off.

Since it's official that we're "addicted to oil", what's the logic of congress going to ANWAR to get one last fix?

Faith-based programs seek to distribute public tax dollars as if the money came from their own congregation. I might say that mixing religion into politics poisons democracy as surely as mixing politics into religion corrupts religion, but the fact is that organized religions have always had their political side. Anytime an organization hands out assistance to someone, that person feels a degree of obligation along with gratitude. Capitalizing on that is pure politics. 

James Michael Curley’s doing favors with the expectation of something in return was the foundation of his political power. Likewise, doling out largesse as a way to increase the size of a flock and retain them over time is inherently manipulative. When taxpayers are forced to foot the bill for this, it’s a form of theft and unconstitutional.

Right wing religious movements are not only on the march, they’re on the make. They want money and control over people, but they seem not to dwell very much on the theme contained in the Sermon on the Mount.

Rather than funneling tax dollars through churches, the opposite should be occurring. Everything other than the pews, the roof over the pews, and the parking lot outside the church should be taxed as if it were corporate property, because all other holdings are unrelated to worship and don't deserve an exemption. The controlling party's doing this is as likely as the Japanese all going out and buying Chevy’s.

The ruling Republican Party owes its success at the ballot box to the vote of the highly motivated and disciplined religious right. That is why Republican politicians are so willing to fête them with the "faith-based" plum. Without them, the party can't hold on to power. Someone’s made a deal with the devil, but which one’s which?

Read between the lines: when DNI Negroponte and General Hayden refuse to give an estimate of how many Americans have been spied on, that means the number is probably somewhere around 300 million.

A couple of things that might surprise you if you get your news from TV alone:

(1) The same day the US Supreme Court undercuts Roe versus Wade, making abortion illegal, a blitzkrieg against the birth control pill will begin. It's a culture war, and abortion is merely the opening salvo. 

(2) Every telephone conversation you've had and every email you've written or received has been screened by computer so that it can be promoted to human attention when it meets certain criteria. Further, computers are data-mining you like demons so the authorities know what you're going to do better than you do. "YOU HAVE NO PRIVACY, get used to it!" sayeth one uber-Nerd.

What's really slick is the way they've queued up a new law to permit them to do this openly in the future; that way, when what they've been doing all along comes out, they can refuse to prosecute. After all, 'It's legal NOW, so why go after someone on a mere technicality?'

Hey, American idol's on the tube!

The Prez said in India that he will be retraining American workers who have been displaced by outsourcing. Unfortunately, the only knowledge useful to them is learning the lunch menu, because 'server' is the one job category left in America with any growth. "Fries or mango with that, sir?"

I think I finally get it: just as "an armed society is a polite society", a "nuclear-armed planet is a peaceful planet". That's the theory, anyway.

This administration has taken a lot of very large and irreversible steps based on theories. They have taken the rhetorical "If I were king" and conjured it into reality. Of course, in real life there are consequences, like Armageddon.  

single-payer universal healthcare +  clean, verifiable, instant runoff elections + a living wage + consumer protection from predatory corporate lenders + repeal of unfair tax breaks for the wealthiest + restoration of tax fairness and balance (in the 1940's corporations paid 50% of all income taxes, whereas now they barely pay 15%) + stop rewarding corporations for outsourcing jobs + mandated 40 m.p.g. average car fuel economy + purge special interest ringers from government agencies + stop whipping the poor  + cease decimating the wealth and power of the non-investing class. 

Further, remember the 17 craven Democrats who refused to filibuster Alito but then voted against his appointment in the meaningless up-or-down vote. They are worse than the maniacs who voted for him, because they have no convictions and they are dishonest. 

Act like we've already won and refuse to accept any other reality. Live free or die.

Congressional Republicans not closely tied to President Bush? Sure, just like the Palace Guard doesn't know who the king is!

In "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" the answer to the ultimate question, solved by the ultimate computer, was 42. By coincidence, that's the same as the number of Medicare Prescription plans seniors have to choose from. Oddly suitable, since in both cases the solution proffered is irrelevant to the problem presented.

General Michael Hayden, US Deputy Intelligence Director, publicly upbraided a reporter this week for maintaining the phrase "probable cause" appeared in the Fourth Amendment:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon PROBABLE CAUSE, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

How can you believe anything from an administration that even tries to spin the Constitution? By the way, lest you think the good general is simply outside his area of expertise, he is the former head of the NSA, and therefore can be reasonably expected to be familiar with the Fourth Amendment; that is, unless he views it as the president does, as "just a God-damned piece of paper".  

We in this country are deficient in empathy. This is why wedge issues have such leverage. This is why Newt’s strategy of attack/attack/attack was so successful. This is why the Republicans in control can ignore Democrats without compunction. This is why those in power could blow off the suffering people in New Orleans.

People don’t talk anymore, and isolated people are less apt to identify with others. People used to sit on the step (my grandmother called it the “stoop”) and chew the fat. But then came the highways, and people fled to suburbs in pursuit of the American Dream. Now they spend so much time commuting they don’t have time to talk, and anyway, it’s not seemly to sit outside your suburban house on the steps and chew the fat with passersby –it’s just not done.

My belief, crazy as it may be, is that the great hope for renewal is $7 per gallon gas, which will pull us all back into tightly knit neighborhoods --where we belong, where empathy comes naturally.

The anti-abortion movement isn't "pro-life" as they claim, because their primary goal is not to save fetuses, but instead to bring back the virgin population and make wives obedient again. That is, they hope to undo the sexual revolution that came about with the introduction of the birth control pill. 

The day after abortion is finally made illegal, the movement will start a new campaign to restrict sale of birth control pills to married women. They call this "the culture war", and they are implacable zealots.

There are two main factions in the Republican Party: Dominant and Submissive.

The same political party that went to the mattresses to protract the life of Terry Schiavo is taking oxygen and nutrition away from a very alert but completely disabled twenty year old Georgia man because he’s an illegal alien. I’m sure if I understood financial realities, personal responsibility, and compassionate conservatism better, I wouldn’t think they’re a bunch of hypocrites. But I don’t, and so I do.

Yesterday however, the president stated that he took Osama’s latest threat very seriously, citing it as a reason for his administration’s continuing domestic surveillance.

This brings up whether there is any standard of truth that applies to anything this administration says. The question is primarily directed at the news media, which seems to have no memory, and hence, no ability to detect contradictions over time, that is, to recognize double-speak. 

Does it really not matter that the public is told opposing stories at different times to justify the same actions, and yet this goes unchallenged? How long can a democracy survive in this lackadaisical atmosphere? Is it already dead?

Looking at most of the common indices to national well being, it would seem that the country, now in the sixth year of the G.W. Bush administration, is running off the rails. The trade deficit is staggering, the domestic savings rate is less than zero, the medical care system is in critical condition, and would be transferred to the ICU, only ICU has been closed due to budget cuts. 

We are paying for an intractable war that was pre-emptive, based on ridiculous claims, and therefore completely avoidable; that's not entirely true, the part about our paying for it is a lie, because future generations will be paying, not us. In the present, we continue to shop, borrow, spend and enjoy tax relief, while members of the all volunteer army get picked off while in pursuit of college tuition. 

Education has been hobbled by an un-funded mandate for intensified testing. It's all academic anyway, because financing for higher education has become harder to obtain. Meanwhile, presidential lip service has been paid to improving student's math skills to assure America's  technological leadership in the future. This sounds like a solid goal until one reflects that engineering jobs are being outsourced just as manufacturing jobs have been, and the educational system is incapable of producing the results anyway, because it's been gored, gypped, and bashed into infirmity. 

"What a horrible job this president has done!" you might say. Not at all. What a very clever and successful administrator he is! While the general populace scampers around in panic like the crew of a scuttled ship, he has been able to accomplish the single most import goal of every conservative in recent history: he has reduced the tax burden to the rich, both on income and inheritance. Hallelujah?

Bush-Brand  Democracy(c)  & Freedom(c)  (For export only; not available in the US or its territories.)

Every day someone in the Bush Administration stands up and proffers a different reason for why there has been warrantless domestic spying, and every day's excuse refutes the previous day's. First, the net cast by spying is too large to practically secure warrants. Then, following FISA rules would incur unendurable delay. Next, the president doesn't have to follow FISA law because of special war powers. They keep spinning the wheel daily to get a new rationalization.

This is an accelerated version of the marketing plan used for selling us the Iraq invasion. Al Qaeda ties gave way to WMD, anthrax, and finally hydrogen bombs. But the real reason this country invaded Iraq was simply that members of the administration had always wanted to. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Don Rumsfeld and others had wanted to take down Saddam for at least a decade, to the extent they even wrote to President Bill Clinton in 1998 on the eve of his State of the Union Address demanding that he invade Iraq. Word up.

In the present case, the reason the administration failed to adhere to FISA law is the same as above: it did what it wanted to do, as always, and hang the law. 

Remember that President Clinton was impeached solely because he lied to investigators about having a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. This seemed like a flimsy and ludicrous reason to bring down an administration, but at the time the opposition party fervently claimed no man was above the law; therefore, they went forward with impeachment on the principle of "rule of law". Now where is their vaunted principle?

Next big step in conservative "reform": bring back debtor's prisons.

Howard Dean got skewered with the echo of his piercing yodel/yell played in an endless loop on television. John Kerry was pinned down with inane trivialities like medals versus ribbons. Max Cleland's sacrifice was belittled and he was mocked. No matter whom Democrats put up as a candidate for national office, the right wing noise machine, with the assistance of the craven TV news-tainment industry, will inflict a thousand small wounds and preclude their getting their message out. Then the right will declare once again that, "Democrats have no ideas", having drowned their ideas out in right wing orchestrated cacophony. 

The right is conducting a class war, and they so completely control the message that anyone who states the obvious is himself instantly labeled a "class warrior". Dare to say the emperor has no clothes, and his men arrest you on the spot for indecent exposure. The right wing has limitless resources to do this, so how can liberal progressives break the stranglehold? 

Certainly, AirAmerica Radio is a critical counter-measure to the army of paid right wing propagandists. It is an essential tool in the battle to check the anti-meritocracy, and we are fortunate to have it. Its usefulness is in informing, bolstering, and giving liberal progressives a sense of community. But it alone cannot carry the day, because Ruppert Murdock never sleeps -at least not until sunrise.  

Somehow, those people who allow themselves to be bamboozled by the right's continuous trash-talking must be made aware that its purpose is to eclipse the real issues: the broken private medical care system; a child poverty rate that is far and away the highest in the industrialized world; an extreme concentration of wealth harking back to the pharaohs; enthronement of the entitlement culture; the denigration of work and impoverishment of people who do the work; constant fear mongering; diminishing liberty; the absence of a responsible energy policy leading to perpetual war; bought politicians beholden only to the money-changers.

Inoculating the population against the invective of the right's Ad Hominem Hit Squad is crucial. It cannot be accomplished by a candidate standing alone. The enlightened electorate has to take up the standard. We have to speak up and stop letting the hate mongering and character assassination disseminated in the daily talking points on right wing radio go by unchallenged.  

Forget about your blood pressure. Throw down the gauntlet. Get in somebody’s face when they regurgitate right wing swill. There's too much at stake to be composed, to continue keeping quiet.  

  continue >>