the OBJECTIVES of the Culture War

Newt is the quintessential opportunist. After failing in his early public races -in which he ran as a conservationist, not a conservative- he accidentally discovered that he could win by going negative on the woman whom he beat.

He then exploited this discovery by being the father of the Repugnican Go-Negative movement. In the nineties he put out a packet to potential publican candidates encouraging them to "go negative early, stay negative". He is the progenitor of the incivility the Congress now operates under. Unfortunately, the indolent corporate press will never lay this at his feet.

More recently, the eye of newt operated in the pentagon's "Lie Factory", where the intelligence on pre-war Iraq was cherry-picked for making the specious case for invading. this was in Mother Jones, not so much in the New York Times. Surprise, surprise!

So here he is galloping back onto the field from the forest he's been hiding in. I can only hope in his narcissistic, sociopathic striving for the brass ring he eviscerates the Repugnican party, rather than elevate it this time.

The best weapon against him, like a necklace of garlic or a silver crucifix against Dracula, is the joke Bob Dole demolished him with: "In newt's office there are three filing cabinets, two big ones and a little one. The big ones are labeled 'Newt's Big Ideas' and the little one is marked 'Newt's Good Ideas' ." 

To our great relief,  Newt weNt  away once. Let's not make the egregious mistake of inviting him back.

President Bush signed a law in February requiring individuals to present either a copy of their original birth certificate or a US Passport before receiving treatment under Medicaid. The original bill was written by two Republican Congressman from Georgia, Reps. Charles Norwood and Nathan Deal. Its intent is to deny medical treatment to illegal immigrants.

Almost certainly, however, others will unintentionally (?) be denied treatment as a result. The reason for this is that to almost everyone’s surprise, not all poor or homeless people have bank safety deposit boxes to keep their important papers in. Consequently, during the many dispossessions and displacements they’ve lived through, their original birth certificates have been lost. Furthermore, apparently not all poor people have vacationed in Europe yet, so they haven’t even gotten around to having their passport photos taken.

Thus, there may be a poor person or two in this country who after July 1 will be barred from receiving needed medical care which previous law had decreed to them. Compared to the criticality of the Gay Marriage Amendment that may not seem all that important, and besides, the real prize here is denying medical care to immigrants whom American businesses exploit in a wholesale manner to suppress wages.

Ultimately, the law is projected to save up to $220 million over five years, which then could be used to finance one morning's activity in Iraq! So the next time you’re at a stoplight and an un-medicated/ paranoid/ hallucinatory homeless man lowers his head and charges your driver’s door like an enraged rhino, remember to send a thank you note to these two deep thinkers representing Georgia in Congress. Also, don’t forget to thank the compassionate conservative who neither vetoed the bill nor negated it with a presidential signing statement afterward.

Sprawl is a monument to our folly. Two of its most damaging effects are: fractionation and separation of socioeconomic classes into insular subdivisions where fear and loathing for out-groups supplants empathy; creation of sterile bedroom communities producing three generations of bored, listless squab. Sadly, sprawl’s totalitarian grip won’t be broken without wrenching upheaval, which now seems to be right down the road.

Much is being made about Americans voting in greater numbers for "Idol" than they do for US President, and initially this fed my own disgust with voter apathy in the face of what I view as an ignominious regime in power. Then I read a short comment to the effect that voting for an American Idol contestant merely requires picking up a phone, as opposed to standing in a long line on a workday to vote at the polls.

Elsewhere, such as in Europe, voting takes place on the weekend and/or over several days, which makes it considerably easier for the hourly worker to participate. Changing election day in this country isn’t even on politicians’ radar, and I believe this is because the existing arrangement conveniently puts a roadblock before a socioeconomic segment of the population whose participation is not ardently sought. 

But there’s hope. Absentee voting has an advantage for those who don’t want to leave the kids in daycare while they stand in line in the rain for hours, and provides a verifiable paper ballot as a bonus. Further, it is an end-around carry regarding Georgia’s controversial "Voter ID Law", a.k.a. the "Poll Tax for the 21st Century". It’s surprisingly easy to do in some states (even in Ohio, theoretically). I hope working people will look into it very soon, before the November election arrives.

   Contrasting Values

Can the government, without a warrant, go out and dig up a list of videos you’ve rented? Hell, no! On the other hand, can the government legally obtain the same information from a private company? Sure! Same thing with listening to phone calls. Privatization, the express route to totalitarianism!

On November 7th, Americans are sure to concentrate on gay marriage and sundry other Red State Red Herring while their children are being evermore deeply and irretrievably subjugated to the power-elite.

Quick quiz. Which of the following are the words of Patrick Henry, and which came from Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS): A) "Give me liberty, or give me death!" or B) "You have no civil liberties if you are dead." ?

Has the US Senate (and the Georgia legislature) been working on universal healthcare, declining wages,  continuing concentration of wealth, and worrisome negative individual savings rates? Nope, gay marriage. Election’s coming up, so it’s time to strike up the fear and loathing.

The Senate immigration bill calls for doubling H-1B visas to 120,000 annually, with provision for a 20 per cent annual increase. The rationale for this is these workers are "necessary to maintain US Tech industry’s competitiveness". Meanwhile, tens of thousands of native-born US engineers can’t get jobs in their field, are under-utilized, or unemployed. They can’t get jobs now because of simultaneous outsourcing and H-1B importing, either of which is cheaper than hiring engineers born here.

It’s the same old tactic of increasing labor supply to undercut wages, no different now in labs across the country than it was in textile mills in the past. What baffles me is this: since the American engineer is as anachronistic as the American mill worker, why has President Bush called for intensified concentration in math in schools to produce more engineers? Does he anticipate the overseas supply will eventually dry up, or is he projecting that eventually wages here can be brought down to a level competitive with Asia?

In any case, it’s ironic that what’s perceived as populist immigration bill is actually being used to undercut the last great hope of the American workforce, the vaunted high tech job.

Alberto Gonzales has said it loud and clear: investigative reporters who uncover and report secret government activities will be treated as spies. That those activities are illegal, immoral, unconstitutional and fundamentally un-American makes no difference. If people don't turn off their TV and break its mesmerizing spell pretty soon, when they finally do snap out of it they'll be enchained by totalitarianism.

President Bush says, “Deadlines are important. Deadline mean finality. People need to get after it.” Was he talking about Iraq, Iran, or Medicare?

Low in the polls because of Iraq? But think of his domestic successes! 1) Vast reduction in taxes to the richest, including capitol gains and estate tax reduction. 2) Dismantling of FEMA, the CIA, EPA, FDA and other agencies, decimating and where applicable turning them into politicized drive-thru's for the very special interests they were originally intended to control. 3) Complete undermining of the public education system through unfunded "no upper-middle class child left behind" requirements that accelerate schools' failure, with the objective of reverting to school vouchers for talibanesque religious education. 4) Control of the population through fear and hate, bringing us to the threshold of a totalitarian police torture state. 5) A poison-pill Medicare drug prescription program that obviated having to address the broken medical care system and the need for single-payer healthcare.

This is an awesome list of accomplishments. His only unrealized domestic "reform" was privatization of Social Security. Give the guy his due. In his own idiom, he's a giant!

Across the street from where I work there’s a corporate dialysis shop. It’s right in the heart of an industrial area. Nothing on the planet in 2006 so approximates the Matrix as the for-profit dialysis game. It’s where people on Medicare go to have their blood filtered, to have done for them by machines what their kidneys can no longer do effectively.

In the mode of all corporations, these “clinics” seek to maximize profit by cutting corners. There are minimum standards for care, which they marginally meet. That this shortchanges patients is evidenced in this fact: in Europe the life span of a dialysis patient is nine or ten years, whereas in the US it is three. 

Coming back from lunch one afternoon last week, I rounded the corner and came upon a private medical van parked five or six feet from the curb. I usually shave this curve fast and close, because in my Walter Mitty life I am a grand prix driver. This time I had to swing wide to avoid the van, however. I glanced back and took a mental snapshot of the scene, curious that someone would stop just there.

My snapshot revealed a haggard young woman standing on the grass, and beside her a child in a wheelchair. The child was small, her body slightly twisted in the chair. Her coloring was wrong, off. The mother’s clothes were loosely fitting and unstylish. She was smoking a cigarette, and appeared to be old beyond her years. 

I parked in a lot a hundred yards beyond the curve and walked back to see if there was anything wrong. Was the van broken down, or was there some other problem? Despite the passage of less than two minutes, the scene was abandoned. They were already gone, presumably into the dialysis shop.

I was a lab technician in the USAF, long ago. The needles used to draw units of blood were of a large “lumen”, meaning bigger than what was used in the civilian world. Getting the blood fast was the objective. I always avoided drawing blood during blood drives. I gave, but I didn’t draw, because I disdained stabbing anyone with a four-penny nail. Apparently, private, for-profit corporate dialysis facilities have the same “get ‘em, get ‘em out” mentality. I’ve read there is consequently a high incidence of damaged veins among patients.

I’ve tried to imagine what went on in this curbside vignette. Perhaps within yards of the clinic the mother became shaken, seized with the memory of her daughter’s last treatment, when an unqualified, inexperienced, under-paid, and under-trained worker did violence to her slowly dying daughter. The clumsy lacerating of her daughter’s delicate vein with an oversized needle. The suffering inflicted that time must have rushed over her. Or perhaps she needed to steel herself for arguing with the staff for a fresh filter, not the same one used last time. (The for-profits reuse filters from the same patient to save money.) 

Perhaps the mother was intelligent enough to see the enormity of the predicament she and her daughter were in, the Faustian bargain they had to accept. Unable to afford private treatment, they had to submit to a cruel handout that would cut the girl’s life by two thirds. All this so the politically connected and protected corporation could enjoy a hefty profit. (After all, its objective is to make money, and the patient’s health is secondary, incidental.)

This dirty secret of the medical industry goes unmarked. Shame on the medical profession that acquiesces to this perfidy!

And the only hero that day was the young black man driving the medical van, no doubt working for minimum wage. He had enough compassion for the distraught mother to let her bolster herself with a cigarette before delivering her daughter into maws of the Matrix. He risked being rear-ended by a middle-aged Mario Andretti a stone’s throw from delivering his charge.

The devil take us all.

The government is able to collate and analyze every phone connection any of us has ever made, so why is it unable to look at the records of businesses to determine whether they employ illegal aliens? The answer is that it easily can, but would rather grandstand by sending troops to patrol the border because that brings in votes on election day.

This way conservative businesses get to keep their cheap source of labor, and none of the immigrants, though stigmatized, really gets hurt. The only people put out are the National Guard members who are already exhausted from their Iraq duty. Guess the idea is to support the troops by grinding them into dust.

Anyone who thinks Steven Colbert "crossed the line" is looking at it from the wrong side of the line.

It is pure hypocrisy to on the one hand recruit cheap labor to whom you offer no benefits and on the other to post soldiers at the border to make a show of fending off the very disposable workers you rely on to depress wages. This is an election year, however, so nothing is too shameless, and besides, harnessing hate is a proven winning political strategy.

Because the average person is more scared of foreign terrorism than they are of Big Brother government (correctly or incorrectly) at this point, Democrats may be falling into a Rovian trap if they protest too loudly about the NSA's gargantuan database of private telephone records we've just found out about. Rachael Maddow of Air America Radio pointed this out on her 5/12/6 broadcast, in which she observed there was an uncharacteristically immediate government response to this latest leak regarding domestic spying, as if it had been prepared in advance. 

Unsurprisingly, the response invoked 9/11 strongly, but it arrived so swiftly and was so seamless that it begs the question of whether the simultaneity of the leak, the official response, and the nomination of the father of wide-net domestic spying, General Michael Hayden, to head the CIA are all concerted. Astutely, Dr. ("not-that-kind-of-a-doctor") Maddow detects the whiff of a Rove-engineered election wedge issue in all this.

What do you call Rove’s plan to bring out the base in November with cries of "activist judges", "gay marriage", "cut and run in Iraq", and "weak on terror"? Answer: The 31 Percent Solution.

I often hear remarks attributed to one or other of our militant adversaries to the effect that the US is soft and lacks resolve, that the spoiled American people will call for withdrawal from any military conflict after passage of a relatively short period of time.

When I hear this, I figure it’s propaganda put out by our government to steer us away from questioning whatever war is at hand. The mechanism is to stir our dander by saying the enemy is calling us "chicken". The desired reaction is, "Oh yah, I’ll show YOU who’s chicken!" and generally, it works.

Now it is possible that some incredible fool really has made these reputed remarks, but he would have to have lived in a cave during Vietnam and Korea. The past has shown very clearly that once the US puts up tents in a place where it has interests, the only time those tents come down is to make way for heavy construction.

Somalia was the exception, but there was no oil or other overriding economic interest there to hold us, and besides, there was a politically motivated campaign by the then opposition party to chasten President Clinton by opposing military action there.

Far and away, most "pro-life" people are also anti-contraception and anti-sex education. The irony of this is that unavailability of contraception and lack of practical information lead to increased unwanted pregnancy and hence, more abortions. Every time, in all countries, all cultures. No exceptions. And the pro-lifers know this.

What gives? How do you explain this apparent contradiction? Easy: many people want to reverse the sexual revolution brought about by the advent of the birth control pill. They want to turn back time. This is the real centerpiece of their Culture War. Abortion is a rallying point, a battleground, but it is not the final goal. Eradicating the pill, ending its general availability is the final goal.

When this is achieved, a girl’s punishment for being a "whore" will be to bring the fetus to full gestation, or else undergo an un-sterile back-alley abortion. Either way, her suffering will provide an object lesson to her peers. An individual’s downfall will result in good for the many.

Bringing chastity back to adolescence isn’t the only anticipated benefit. Mature married women can now control their reproductive function, and hence, plan careers and participate in the workplace to a degree not possible when they were chained to a reproductive roulette wheel. And because they are more self-sufficient, divorce is a more practical alternative. Putting restrictions on the availability of the pill to these women will pull the plug on their careers and get them back in the home where they belong!

So, it’s about much more than abortion. It’s about restoring women back to a June Cleaver prototype. What’s forgotten, of course, is that the Cleavers were just characters in a sitcom, not real people. With tremendous energy we’re attempting to return to a moment that didn’t really exist and couldn’t exist anywhere other than in a scripted idealization. "You’re looking very lovely (and two-dimensional) in that ‘anti-contraception’ T-shirt today, Mrs. Cleaver!"

If you get hit with a rock, do you blame the rock or the person who threw it? If wages are depressed, do you blame the foreign worker brought in to undercut labor, or the employer making money hand-over-fist by paying sub-standard wages? The answer's obvious for those who put aside rage and use reason.

Last week in Atlanta Donald Rumsfeld stood at a podium and said "I’m not in the intelligence business." In reality, the Pentagon has a huge and expanding intelligence budget, and many of the selective facts used to justify the Iraq invasion were garnered by the Pentagon’s intelligence apparatus. Rummy’s an intelligence maven.

That he told another lie and the press failed to call him on it is unimportant. What is important is that his statement belies the impending demise of the CIA in favor of his own military intelligence apparatus. The traditional intelligence agency is going the way of FEMA. It’s being dismantled and cannibalized, but unlike FEMA, it will not be sold for parts (privatized). Instead, its assets will absorbed by the Pentagon.

That a military general is picked to take over the CIA is telling. Porter Goss, who left abruptly on Friday, did the work of ferreting out liberals among CIA operatives. Now all Michael Hayden has to do is oversee shipping whoever’s left across town to Rumsfeld’s operation. And to do that, the general really doesn’t even have to know that the Fourth Amendment contains the words "probable cause".

They are data-mining. They are keeping this stuff. Forever. It can and will be used against you in a kangaroo court of law. It will be used to look for patterns, patterns that have a correlation to some activity -not something you've done, but something the computer says you're likely to do, within a certain probability. Eventually, it will usher in pre-emptive incarceration based on patterns found in data-mining.

And the above assumes the game is on the level. What if it's run in reverse? What if you are not popular with the resurrected clone of J. Edgar (pretty-in-pink) Hoover and he just wants to go back into the data to illuminate a pattern to get to you?

Everything will be abused eventually by someone. It's the law of unintended effects.

Today they are using it to find terrorists (although there are a butt-load of cheaper, more effective ways). Tomorrow they will use it to ferret out child molesters; they are probably already doing this. Yes, this is laudable, but there are privacy issues that project into liberty issues.

Soon they will use it to find daddy-o's who don't pay child support. Then down the ladder of egregiousness to red light runners. Then pot users, jay walkers, and people who don't smile enough.

The party is over where the Internet is concerned. Up until now when you accessed a website, the information came to you at a rate of transfer that was limited only by the speed of your service. Not so anymore. Soon some sites will load at the same speed you’re used to, but others will load more slowly.

The reason for the change is that your Internet service provider (ISP) now wants to charge at both ends of the line. Congress is poised to approve a law allowing them to charge the website you go to, collecting a fee for high priority delivery. If a website does not pay that fee, its content will be delivered on an "as available" basis behind the paid-up sites. This means slower delivery, if even that, for the websites unable to pay.

Thus, because the Internet service providers have cooked up a new revenue stream and imposed their will on Congress, you can say goodbye to obscure websites and blogs. The very egalitarian nature of the Internet that has made it a font of free speech is about to turn sour.

Hereafter you will be pushed toward sites that pay bribes to the ISPs: large commercial sites; well-funded special interest groups; mainstream political campaigns. The net is about to become as commercialized and lobotomized as your TV.

Dissecting the immigration wedge issue: there are two parts, first is the obvious pitch to energize the Repubs' racist base. But second, the more insidious aim is to appeal to the disaffected low wage earner who might be enticed to blame the Latinos for depressing wages.

Of course, this turns logic on it’s head because it’s the wealthy conservative manipulators who have used Latinos to drive down wages, just as they used my ancestors from Canada and Ireland to drive wages down in the mills of New England in the early 1900’s.

The Nazi’s cynically used the Jews as a scapegoat to harness the anger of the impoverished German people. The Repubs' scapegoating Latinos to harness the anger of poor Americans is even more outrageous, because they, the Repubs themselves, engineered the misery they're seeking to exploit.

Possibly, the whole immigration thing could backfire on the Repubs. Seeing the massive demonstrations on May 1 by the offended and enraged immigrant population, the underpaid American worker might just be impressed enough to come to believe again in the power of the little guy -his power.

Starting in the Reagan years, he was made to feel puny and unworthy of any rights. Hopefully, seeing the demonstrations and learning of recent strides Latino labor organizations have made in forming unions and demanding higher wages will embolden him. Hopefully, he will stand tall once again and claim what is his from those that took it, not blame whichever scapegoat they proffer.

In the present paradigm for governance, the federal system exists primarily to pave the way for corporate business. Beyond that, whatever services cannot be eliminated entirely must be privatized. To this end, agencies have been taken over by managers committed to farming out the functions of their agencies to private companies. These companies are very often represented by the managers’ longtime business associates --or even themselves, once they have left their agency.

The Repub's extension of tax cuts on capital gains and dividends as well as tax breaks for financial service companies’ overseas operations is instrumental in creating service sector jobs here like... "serf".

The sham lobbying and ethics "reform" bill passed by the House shows real contempt for The People's contempt.

Consciously and literally, the Republican Party follows the guidance of Lenin channeled through David Horowitz, who says in The Art of Political War, "You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can do it only by following Lenin's injunction: 'In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent's argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.' "

Karl Rove called The Art of Political War "a perfect guide to winning on the political battlefield." And so it was distributed to all Republican senators, congressmen, and thousands of conservative activists in time for the 2000 election. Keep this in mind when you hear any Republican call for bipartisanship or especially when Bush claims he’s "a uniter not a divider".

NSA 2006 Telephone Database, Pattern Searching Schedule: 

 JAN -potential terrorists
 FEB -probable drug traffickers
 MAR -reputed daddy-O's
 APR -possible tax cheats
 MAY -suspected red light runners
 JUN -plausible cable TV thieves
 JUL -presumed pot smokers
 AUG -supposed heavy drinkers
 SEP –alleged double parkers
 OCT –seeming contrarians
 NOV –evident political opponents
 DEC –apparent poker faces and under-smilers>

CIA Agent Mary McCarthy did NOT confess to divulging the existence of CIA Black Site interrogation centers; she was never in a position to even know about them. Also, she was embarrassed and betrayed after being given official assurances her name would not be dragged through the mud. Furthermore, her firing was particularly vindictive because she was days from retirement.

This is a political purge at the CIA, pure and simple. Everyday we seem to take another step along the path to tyranny. It makes me sick that they are even hunting for the whistleblower, whoever it is, because torture is un-American. Period. It should scare every citizen and alert them to the fact that terrorism isn’t the only grave danger facing the nation.

From the Washington Post: "The White House also has recently barraged the agency [CIA] with questions about the political affiliations of some of its senior intelligence officers, according to intelligence officials." 

Get ready for the K-Streeting of the CIA. Then it will be an arm of the Republican Cosa Nostra too!

Make sure that everything you do or say is classified as secret, then declassify, ad hoc, anything that serves your political purposes whenever it’s convenient. However, should anyone else divulge any of the mountains of secrets you’ve amassed, especially if the revelation is politically inauspicious for you, clap them in irons. Now that’s Tyranny on it’s way to Totalitarianism!

Democracy on the march (out the door): Diebold programs its voting machines with uncertified code and lies about it to the California Secretary of State. Then a whistleblower exposes the fraudulent use of uncertified code and the lie, but the only outcome is that the whistleblower is put on trial and Diebold gets a pass to use the code.

Following this model, the next time the little boy shouts the emperor has no clothes, the response will be to drag him off to an asylum and put the naked emperor on the cover of GQ. Getting more surreal every day, isn’t it?

The reason the Bush Administration won't set a timetable for leaving Iraq is that it wants to leave the occupation open-ended. Why? To use newly built, permanent US fortresses in Iraq as lily pads to launch into Iran and Syria, and as guard posts to assure "our" oil flows west, not east.

Rove's blueprint for Dubya's Reign