NY Scribe

Hoods

2008-08-28T14:23:00.002-04:00

Version A

Version B

GOP Senate Hypocrisy

2008-07-30T14:00:00.004-04:00

Remember when the Democrats threatened to filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court? The Republicans went nuts, calling the Democrats every name in the book, and basically saying that everything wrong in America was the fault of those obstructionist Democrats.

Well, it turned out that everything wrong with America was actually the fault of the Republicans, including invading and occupying a country that posed no threat to us, totally botching the occupation, letting Afghanistan slide back into the hands of the Taliban, letting Osama bin Laden escape, letting our nation torture and detain indefinitely its prisoners, letting the President subvert the Constitution by stoking our fears, letting New Orleans rot in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, letting mortgage brokers run amok, letting our national debt balloon to nightmare proportions, letting the dollar slide to new lows, letting hundreds of thousands of jobs evaporate, giving oil companies billions in tax rebates during a time of record oil profits, doing nothing to address our pathetic and disgraceful health care system, and doing absolutely nothing to confront the potentially devastating effects of climate change.

Oh, and that Alito guy turned out to be the exact Judicial distaster the Democrats were trying to avoid.

Now, with Democrats finally holding a slim majority in Congress, who is keeping them from finally addressing and trying to correct these grave problems? The Republicans! THEY'VE DONE MORE FILIBUSTERING IN THE PAST YEAR-AND-A-HALF THAN IN ANY OTHER TIME IN OUR NATION'S HISTORY.

Like babies banging their fists on high-chair trays, Republican Senators just refuse to allow the Democrats to move forward with agendas that the bulk of Americans desperately want, because they still feel bound to small but vocal clusters of radical conservatives unable to grasp or acknowledge what the rest of our citizens understand - that the best way to move forward is to do exactly the opposite of what Republicans have done for six years.

So the next time you hear about a good bill stalling in the Senate, chances are it's the filibustering Republicans, kicking and screaming, railing against a more just and sensible future that they can't keep from us forever. What a disgrace.

Equality, Yes or No?

2008-06-17T18:31:00.004-04:00

Q: What stops a state from putting a referendum on the ballot which, if passed, would alter the state constitution to prohibit interracial marriage?

A: The courts. Such legislation would be ruled unconstitutional, in clear violation of our bedrock principle of equality.

Q: What stops a state from putting a referendum on the ballot which, if passed, would prohibit same-sex marriage?

A: Nothing. It is not clear that our courts recognize gay and lesbian Americans as human beings.

Until our "justice" system gets this equality no-brainer right, perhaps we should refrain from recognizing certain Judges as human. Or at least, as people who can apply logic and common sense to the administration of justice without prejudice, superstition or hypocrisy.

Attempts to prohibit interracial marriage in the nineteenth century seem grotesquely absurd today. And a century from now, people will view current attempts to prohibit gay marriage the same way.

Those who contend that marriage is fixed and unchanging haven't studied history. For centuries, in many parts of the world, marriages were arranged and had nothing to do with romantic love as we have come to define it and cherish it in the West. Many societies were built around polygamy, and some still encourage plural marriage today. In present-day Bhutan, not only may a man take more than one wife, but a woman may take more than one husband. Even in America, thousands of plural marriages hide in plain sight.

During some periods of history, middle-aged men married teenage women because teenage men, as a general rule, could not afford to support a family. In other periods, it was commonplace for thirteen and fourteen year-olds to marry each other. And so on.

The nature, format and definition of marriage have been in constant flux since the beginning of recorded history. Those who want to deny this fact are wasting their time, and the future will prove them wrong when it comes to same-sex marriage as well. They may be aided by our current Supreme Court, stuffed by George W. Bush with ideological activists diguised as judges. But eventually, if America and the Constitution stand for anything, they stand for liberty. And thus, trying to prohibit same sex marriage is about as unequal and un-American as you can get.

- JT Compton
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Climate Denial

2008-05-31T14:26:00.005-04:00

Here's an email I wrote to Joe Nocera of the NY Times in response to his article about the Rockefeller family's attempts to push Exxon in a new direction. You can almost count on business writers to be antagonistic toward global warming, perhaps because their audience (wealthy corporate types) remain in denial about the science supporting climate change, and the liklihood of catastrophic damage likely to result from climate change. What a shame...

Dear Joe,

You write, "Expecting Exxon Mobil to move the world to an oil-free future is a little like expecting buggy-whip manufacturers to invent the automobile." This is a poor analogy. A better one would have been "expecting buggy manufacturers to begin making automobiles." Which is exactly what some buggy manufacturers did. Exxon doesn't just define itself as an oil and gas company. It also states as its mission, "To help meet the world’s growing energy needs...and explore emerging energy sources and technologies." By any definition or standard, Exxon is failing to adequately or meaningfully explore emerging energy sources and technologies. And to assume that the worlds growing energy needs can only be met by fossil fuels is foolhardy. Exxon should be reinvesting billions in solar nano-tech. It should be developing long-term strategies to address the growing global desire to shift away from fossil fuels. But it's not. Their main discipline, it would seem, is to make short term profits with little or no regard for the long-term direction of energy.
Also, to characterize climate change as something that might not cause much harm, or be cheap to fix, is misleading. Yes, those assertions are possible, but a stunning majority of scientists are giving them a very low probability. By any reasonable reading of the scientific literature, catastrophic consequences of climate change are a high probability. So please, stop writing about remote, pie-in-the-sky possibilities and start looking at the future in terms of likelihoods. That would qualify as a disciplined approach.

Sincerely,

- JT Compton
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Anton Scalia, Supreme Court (In)Justice

2008-04-29T23:04:00.005-04:00

The recent Supreme Court decision affirming Indiana’s right to require its voters to buy burdensome government ID’s was a slap in the face of court precedent, going squarely against the spirit of prior voting rights decisions. It used to be that the Supreme Court protected citizens (in this case, the poor, mostly minorities) from those who wanted to shut them out of the polls (in this case, Republicans) and keep them from voting for the opposition (in this case, Democrats).

By contrast, the Supreme Court had no problem handing the Presidency to George Bush in 2000 on an election technicality, favoring his individual claim over those of the Florida election system and the majority of voters.

To summarize the court's positions:

In 2000, protect the individual from the state.
In 2008, protect the state from the individual.

When asked about this glaring and blatant contradiction, Justice Anton Scalia, in typically coarse and malicious fashion, said to the American public, “Get over it.”

What exactly does “get over it” mean?

In this case, he’s really saying, “We, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court, care less about the public and justice than about using our position to promote our own personal, conservative agendas, even if they subvert long-standing precedent, the constitution or the rights and liberties of individuals. Furthermore, my pride is so rigid and my ego so overweening and fragile that I cannot admit hypocrisy nor inconsistency even when it is as plain as the sun in the sky, especially because I'm smart enough to understand the futility of trying to justify the unjustifiable. So instead, I’ll shift the blame to you, the person asking the question, by saying 'get over it,' suggesting that the failing is not my lack of scruples nor dishonesty, but rather your inability to accept the injustice my toxic agenda helped foster.”

The next time you see a smirking, bloated man wearing a robe, sitting in a grand chair in a large courtroom, speaking in a condescending manner to the serfs that have come begging for a few crumbs of justice, it is likely Anton Scalia, the “Justice” who told us all, in his own snide way, to go screw ourselves.

- JT Compton

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The Perfect Financial Storm

2008-03-12T15:46:00.003-04:00

Yesterday the Federal Reserve decided to effectively lend $200 Billion to primary dealers (investment banks) to ease the credit crunch caused by the sub-prime mortgage mess. In response, the beleaguered stock market soared over 400 points, its third best day ever. Traders apparently decided that the Fed move, designed to be open-ended, would put a floor beneath an otherwise downward spiraling bond market.

It might, but they're overlooking a larger and more ominous reality.

Yes, the Fed move will provide investment banks greater liquidity and free up capital to lend and commit to transactions, but it won’t solve all their problems. The sub-prime crisis has spread into other asset classes, including “Alt-A” loans and asset-backed paper, whose underlying instruments are not easy to value. This uncertainty, rather than an actual material decrease in value, caused a panic that effectively froze these multi-multi-billion dollar markets. Basically, every institution holding these bonds tried to sell them at the same time, and without buyers to take them, their values plummeted. In the best scenario, it will take continued Fed support to gradually restore order to these markets and allow rating agencies to reaffirm or adjust their views. The market will slowly re-price these instruments and buyers will eventually emerge, but it will take time.

Meanwhile, few new financings will take place, merger activity will slow to a trickle and lending will remain greatly diminished. Wall Street earnings will plummet, as will the earnings of most hedge funds, money managers, builders, brokers and the like.

More importantly, the Fed action will do nothing to mitigate broader forces crushing the economy. First quarter earnings will be coming soon, and it’s hard to imagine they will be anything but dismal. Real estate has been hammered, and everything connected with housing will be down significantly. Meanwhile, heating costs are way up. Gasoline is heading toward four dollars a gallon (yes Dubya, FOUR), and oil just passed $110 a barrel with no ceiling in sight. Consumption will have to suffer.

But the real harbinger of bad times ahead is employment. As last month’s shocking employment report demonstrated, jobs are getting hammered, with additional layoff announcements coming daily. Thousands more will be booted from the financial and real estate sectors soon, and retail and manufacturing will surely follow. We’ve seen this pattern before. Communities lay people off, retail stores begin to sag, inventories begin to rise, earnings go down, expansion stops, ad budgets are slashed, all in succession.

The stock market downturn has almost certainly not reached a bottom. The recent Fed-prompted rally was merely a bear rally, a “sucker’s rally”, a positive distraction from a much more pernicious and cyclical bear market. Last month’s shocking employment numbers were just the tip of an iceberg that will slowly emerge over the course of the coming year. In the short run, it’s hard to imagine where any good news will come from. With gasoline, heating oil, medical and other basic costs skyrocketing, consumption and retail sales won’t rebound any time soon. With credit tight, housing and finance won’t rebound any time soon. The weak dollar will help our balance of trade, but that will take time to add to our bottom line. And with the impotent and incompetent Bush Administration at the helm, we can expect no meaningful leadership to soften the blow.

In short, things are going to get worse before they get better. A few of my friends wonder if this could be the beginning of a second great depression. I doubt things will get that bad, but with the national debt soaring, Iraq draining our treasury, oil prices and medical costs skyrocketing, lending in a slump, we could be facing the perfect financial storm. At least the next President, whoever it is, can’t possibly be as hideously incompetent and lacking credibility as Bush, and this alone may help lift the markets and consumer confidence once the November election is settled. As a wise friend was fond of saying in the face of catastrophe, more will be revealed.

- JT Compton
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Nader Nonsense

2008-02-24T13:21:00.002-05:00

Is Ralph Nader kidding?

The fragmented Republicans, going against thirty years of history, seem poised to nominate John McCain, despised by much of “the conservative base,” whose image as a Maverick, though largely mythologized and undeserved, appeals mostly to moderates and party outsiders.

The Democrats, meanwhile, have narrowed their choice to a woman and an African American man. Despite being married to Bill, Hillary Clinton’s gender would represent a radical departure from our nation’s presidential history, and Barack Obama’s success has been powered by an appeal for a dramatic change in the way our leaders practice politics. Both have gathered massive crowds and generated record turnout in Presidential primaries, including large numbers of independent and first-time voters.

In other words, to differing extents, all three candidates represent radical, transformational change, and their success is a measure of the voter’s desire to alter the status quo.

Recently, however, Ralph Nader has decided to throw his hat into the ring and run for president, saying on MSNBC’s Meet The Press, “You go from Iraq, to Palestine to Israel, from Enron to Wall Street, from Katrina to the bumbling of the Bush administration, to the complicity of the Democrats in not stopping him on the war, stopping him on the tax cuts." He concluded, "In that context, I have decided to run for president."

Never has Nader’s egomaniacal arrogance been more starkly displayed. Despite a high probability that our next President will be an African American Democrat, Nader somehow sees Barack Obama as an undesirable insider. And yet Obama seems to embody so many of the principles Nader claims for himself. Obama was always against the Iraq war. Obama is a Washington newcomer, not yet entrenched in the culture of payola and cronyism. Obama is a champion of the little guy. Obama’s entire campaign has been crafted around the notion that the political process must change.

So when Nader starts whining and spewing his distaste for the presidential field, only two conclusions can be drawn. He is either incredibly stupid or wildly arrogant. Given his history of intelligent consumer advocacy, the only possible conclusion is the latter. By running for president, and hopefully appearing in debates alongside nominees who had to work hard to get there, Nader can stroke his own ego and insert himself into the political dialog regardless of the cost to the nation. Indeed, Nader is incapable of taking responsibility for the consequeces of his actions. His presidential bids in 2000 and 2004 likely cost the Democrats the presidency in at least one of those cycles.

And yet Nader sees no harm in this because he seems to see both parties as twin sons of different mothers. In other words, the world would be no different now if a Democrat had been president the last eight years.

This flawed and thoroughly absurd notion lies at the heart of the Nader deception. The truth is, our nation would be radically different in a host of significant and life-changing ways if George Bush had not been elected president. But for Nader to acknowledge this would also require him to acnowledge the part he played in getting Bush elected. And it would also rob his presidential aspirations of any weight.

The fact is, America has already been voting for radical change for months now, and Nader’s presidential bid will only serve to illuminate his vast insecurity and bottomless need for relevancy. This time, his candidacy will not be a deciding factor in the election, and the voters will once again recognize that Ralph Nader is, in fact, irrelevant.

We can only hope that no organization is spineless enough to allow him on stage for any of the debates.

- JT Compton
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Huckabee's Hate Flag

2008-01-22T00:05:00.000-05:00

Mike Huckabee, campaigning recently in South Carolina, declared that the federal government should have no opinion on decisions about state flags, claiming the matter "has no business from the president of the United States." Speaking specifically about the Confederate Flag, Huckabee said, "You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do." In other words, our nation's leader should remain silent about a long-recognized icon of hatred and injustice.

That's moral leadership?

Despite Minister Huckabee’s Christian faith, his inability to reject the Confederate Flag sent a coded message to the Conservative base meant to suggest, “I’m a bigot like you!”

Some Southerners remain incapable of accepting the defeat of the Civil War. Visit a hundred diners in the Northeast and you will never hear mention of the Civil War. But put hidden tape recorders in a hundred diners south of the Mason Dixon Line and you will capture regular comments on the “War of Northern Aggression.”

Despite the immorality of slavery, the humiliation of the South remains a smoldering insult, and some fly the Confederate Flag to vent their anger. Rather than speak about what the flag really means to them, they claim the flag represents the lost “Southern way of life” or is a "symbol of lost heritage." But what do those phrases mean - that Southerners have lost the right to sip mint juleps? Of course not. They're euphemisms for lost slavery. Southern life revolved around the economic bounty of enslaving and the social lift of belittling kidnapped Africans.

Wealthy Southerners needed slavery to maintain their wealth. And poor white Southerners needed slavery to maintain their social status. They may have been poor, but at least they weren’t slaves. So the Emancipation Proclamation and the ensuing, bitter, devastating military defeat placed poor Southern whites on a par with people previously denigrated and looked down upon, an adjustment still apparently taking place.

For decades now, the Confederate Flag has represented injustice, racism, discrimination, segregation, lynching, intolerance and inhumanity, the apparent core values of the old “Southern way of life” and "heritage." Mike Huckabee’s coded embrace of it was a grotesque and un-Christian gesture, and reveals much about his character, or lack of it.

- JT Compton
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The Hillary Anger Mystery

2008-01-09T16:49:00.000-05:00

“Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back To The White House?” That’s the question Maureen Dowd asked in her New York Times column today. And as much as I revere Maureen’s abilities as a writer and cultural observer, her take on the Clinton candidacy mirrors the current position of the rest of the media establishment; they despise Hillary Clinton and seem willing to go to any length to eviscerate her.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

Sure, I understand why narrow-minded conservative rednecks dislike her after hearing decades of demonizing smears and conspiracy theories from losers like Rush Limbaugh. He’s blamed her for everything bad under the sun. But for people with more than two brain cells to rub together, why do some bear such an intense rage against her?

The same journalists (and some moderates, for that matter) who spit while saying her name still want to treat convicted felons like Scooter Libby with a modicum of respect, and they continue to approach demonstrably despicable public officials like Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales within the framework of decency. But not Hillary.

I’m sure it’s been psychoanalyzed to death, but it still amazes me, the dismissive, flash-anger response to her. I’ve never heard anyone give a well-considered, meaningful account of their negative feelings. All I’ve heard are vagaries and superficial annoyances.

“She’ll do anything to get elected.” And the others won't? To suggest that any candidate won't do anything more or less than Hillary to get elected is entirely bogus. They’ve all equivocated and calculated and strategized—that’s what modern politics require.

“She’s secretive and conniving and mean.” Really? In what ways that are materially different than any other politician running? Please. Rudy can be as mean as a snake, and Huckabee's attacks on Romney were schoolyard nasty. The current Bush administration is the most secretive and opaque and mean-spirited in our lifetime, even worse than the disgraceful and un-American presidency of Richard Nixon. It bends credulity to think that Hillary will relinquish her party’s history of greater presidential transparency than the Republicans. This entire criticism is a hollow dodge.

“She’s crying her way to the White House.” So far, she’s only teared up once. Meanwhile, Rudy is 9-11-ing his way to the White House, Huckabee is Jesus-ing his way to the White House, and Obama is rhetoric-ing his way to the White House. How many more times will Obama shout “We’re changing the world!” before people realize it’s just a hollow slogan.

To be sure, I like Barack Obama. He’s a magnificent orator and would make a better President than any of the Republicans. But then any of the Democrats would. The Republican field is a mostly backward looking, militaristic, small-government-obsessed group of old-school white country-club types. Just like George W. Bush, more of the same. But though Obama talks a good talk, he’s done nothing to convince me that he will be able to translate his pie-in-the-sky rhetoric, his new paradigm, into actual results.

And everything in my experience tells me that new paradigms are usually a recipe for disappointment. Remember the Internet bubble? It was supposed to be a new financial paradigm, and legions of tech weenies spread across the corporate landscape scolding non-believers who questioned the new model of the dot com boom. Yet after the tech bubble burst, it turned out there was no new paradigm. The rules of finance were just as valid then as ever.

Remember the Iraq invasion? The post 9-11 world requires a new paradigm, a new way of deterring enemies from striking us. Or does it? Turns out, the same old rules still apply. When you break it, you own it. When you invade, you become the monster your enemies have always accused you of being. When you kill innocent civilians, no matter what your intentions, you create legions of new enemies. When you force Democracy at the point of a gun you get something worse. No new paradigm here.

So whatever new paradigm Obama is touting, I remain a skeptic. Meanwhile, I know that Hillary is a hard worker and a shrewd coalition builder. She’ll choose good people for the important roles in her administration, not for the Bush reason that they gave a lot of money, but because they can do a good job. She’ll reverse so many of the grotesque and lamentable policy disasters of the Bush mess. And talk about change--Obama’s mantra--a woman president represents just as revolutionary a change as an African American male president.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to wait for the bile-spewers to put their bitterness of Hillary into a meaningful and beyond-hearsay rationale. So far, they haven’t come close. They've simply spun stories that create controversy and drama to sell "news" but are unsupported by facts. Don't be hatin'!

- JT Compton
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Bhutto, Bush and Buffoonery

2007-12-28T19:11:00.000-05:00

The assassination of Pakistani presidential hopeful Benazir Bhutto was a sad, tragic reminder of how blindly absurd President Bush’s policies have been toward Bhutto's homeland and its liar-in-chief, Pervez Musharraf.

In recent years, along with giving billions of dollars in military aid, Bush has consistently praised and defended President Musharraf. According to Dubya, “[Musharraf has] been an absolute reliable partner.” But as anyone with a brain and a pair of eyes can see, the actions of his regime stand in lethal opposition to his claims.

Despite glowing statements and assertions coming from Musharraf’s mouth, his military has consistently partnered with and protected Afghan Taliban refugees living in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas, radicals who were initially funded and urged on by Pakistan itself. It’s not a stretch to imagine our billions going to buy better arms for those extremists despite Musharraf’s hollow assurances to the West that he stands against terrorism. Sadly, nothing he and his troops have done to stop radicals amounts to anything beyond window dressing. Asking the Pakistani military to wage war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban would be like asking our Army to wage war against the Marines. They are really part of the same outfit. And they continue to breed hatred of women, modernity and plurality with virtually no governmental restraint, effectively creating a new Taliban nation within Pakistan.

Moreover, Musharraf and his military have repeatedly put off fair and free elections, jailing opponents—judges, lawyers, politicians, journalists—and declaring martial law to suit their purposes. Calling him a dictator, and labeling him and his party anti-democracy, would be more than fair and accurate.

But Bush, as stubborn, stupid and incapable of diplomacy as ever, refuses to put any public pressure on Musharraf, much less place conditions on our billions in aid. Bush clings to his beer-buddy instinct, which told him early-on that Musharraf, like Russian Premiere Vladimir Putin, was a “good guy.” Tragically, once Bush decides that you’re a “good guy”, you can break any law, destroy any nation, commit any crime, and remain in Dubya’s good graces without consequence.

May the moderate, democratic spirit of Bhutto live on in Pakistan.

And may the blind stupidity, arrogance, incompetence, hypocrisy, stubbornness and dishonesty of the Bush Administration cease to further damage our nation and world before it crawls out of office in disgrace a little more than a year from now.

- JT Compton
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The Gore Reminder

2007-12-10T13:09:00.000-05:00

Al Gore was interviewed on a CNN Global Warming special today, and yet again, it proved to be a heartbreaking reminder of how different our nation and place in the world would be if George Bush had not been given the Presidency by the Supreme Court.

Critics love to mock Gore because he’s not a blustering redneck-wannabe like Bush, because he doesn’t strut and smirk and pretend to be a working-class good-ol’ boy. They make fun of his intellect and deride his claim—which proves to be accurate—that he had a hand in starting the Internet, painting him as an annoying know-it-all. But recent history has demonstrated that a know-nothing President like Bush can do immense and lasting damage to our treasury, reputation, environment and democracy.

How utterly sad that instead of the dignified, articulate Gore—as wise, learned and measured a politician as I have seen in my lifetime—we have a ridiculous, obtuse, rude, ignorant, narrow-minded, angry and defiant loser in George Bush.

Bush has done virtually nothing constructive as President—increased AIDS funding to Africa (with strings attached to curtail use of condoms!)—and has done a thousand things to weaken and degrade a broad array of institutions and communities here and abroad. Watching Bush is like watching a sick joke, a phony cowboy with a phony accent trying desperately to distance himself from his blue-blooded, patrician, wimpy Yale-cheerleader past.

A Gore Presidency would have completely avoided the historic mess in Iraq, would have likely got the job done in Afghanistan, would have jump-started bold and broad initiatives to combat Climate Change, would have done a significantly better job in New Orleans (not the least of which because he would have given the FEMA job to someone capable instead of an inept crony), would never have put two extremist-revisionist judges on the Supreme Court, would never have allowed Big Business to write energy policy and rape the land (like the hideous mountaintop mining that has ruined vast areas of land in the Virginias), would never have encouraged torture or secret prisons or indefinite detention, would never have allowed unlimited spying on citizens, would never have made gaffe after gaffe on the world stage, would never have become an embarrassing international icon of ridicule and hatred.

How sad that cynical, dark-hearted hate mongers, neo-cons and wimps-trying-to-be-tough-guys like Charles Krauthammer (whose pathetic smear of Gore was featured on the same CNN show) would rather have as President a fool like Bush than a sage like Gore. How sad that so many Americans would rather vote for a beer buddy than a scholar. They get what they pay for—a President with wet brain, and policies and staff to match.

- JT Compton
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They Keep Getting Crazier

2007-12-05T17:43:00.000-05:00

This has been a weird, angry week in America. And it’s only Wednesday.

After shredding the Oval Office, heard shouting “I’ll waterboard those spooks if it’s the last thing I do,” tossing lamps and framed pictures against the walls, President Bush dragged himself in front of the press and declared, in his own words, (these are mine), “Any nation that wishes to produce or possess a nuclear weapon in the future should be bombed and invaded and retrofitted to protect us. The recent report that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program is exactly what I’ve been saying all along. They want to have one, which makes them the most dangerous and immoral pack of blood-thirsty terrorists in the history of the world. And by the way, I’m an incurious idiot convinced that the only people dumber than me are you, American Citizens, which gives me license to lie, twist and deceive you as long as it allows my infallible, all-knowing handlers, Dick and Josh, as well as my equity shareholders, the Oil Lobby, the Wealthy Pricks for Tax Fairness, the NRA and the Coalition for Raping our Natural Resources, to do whatever will enrich them and their CEO buddies. After all, we know that CEOs are the most important people around. If you’re not a CEO, then you’re a lazy communist who doesn't deserve to vote, much less live, unless you live to serve the CEO class, carrying their golf clubs, polishing their Bentleys, mowing their lawns, and so forth. Heck, if we prevent CEOs from trading in their ninety-foot yachts and buying the hundred-and-forty-foot models, they might lose face with their international peers, which would be your fault entirely. So I say again, bomb Iran, believe everything I say, and kiss the feet of any God-like CEO you might be lucky enough to meet before you disappear forever into a secret prison.”

Meanwhile, Presidential Candidate Mike Huckabee bristled at the question asked by so many reporters, “Do you not believe in evolution?” Standing, looking toward heaven and lifting his arms in a grand, celestial arc, Huckabee replied, “Like any true Christian believer, I know the mind of the bearded man who created the Universe and now sits on a cloud, watching our every move, keeping track of who has been naughty or nice. Ignoring the horrible collision occurring in the Praxis constellation, and despite the murderous rampages of the Janjaweed in Darfur, I know God is very concerned that if we allow certain microscopic Stem Cells to be used to cure disease and decrease suffering, our race will soon be worshipping Satan, dancing naked under the full moon, having sex with multiple partners and taking His glorious name in vain. Further, He is concerned that we, his special children, have allowed our minds to be corrupted by the maggot infested, hunchbacked scientists and polluted by their logic and testing and reason and common sense. God has often whispered into my ear, ‘I made the Earth six-thousand-thirty-six years ago, just for you, my worshipers, to rape and pillage as you please, as long as the only people you kill, molest, enslave or ignore are non-Christians. And just use your eyes—it is flat. Duh.’ This I say unto you.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

- JT Compton
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Hillary Battles Rove's Ghost

2007-10-31T13:07:00.000-04:00

When will pundits get the joke? Republicans are blabbering about wanting to face Hillary in the general election precisely because they don’t want to face her. Their Rovean logic goes like this: If we keep screaming, on every news show and campaign stop, that we want to run against Witch Hillary, we might be able to scare Democrats into voting for someone else, because in truth, she would kick out butts. We would much rather face someone else. If we can bully Democrats into thinking Hillary can’t win, we've won.

Duh.

Hillary Clinton is the GOP’s worst nightmare, not just because she would undo so many of the egregious, unconstitutional and un-American alterations made by Emperor Bush and his conservative incompetents, but because she is a stronger, more capable candidate than any of the Republicans. Her policies are much more congruent with the sentiments of Main Street America, her presentation is more balanced and considered, and her persona is, quite frankly, less toxic. I mean, what could be more hideous and lamentable than an enraged, bile-spewing Rudy Giuliani in the White House, or a moralizing, pompous Mitt Romney? Most of the GOP field can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge that global warming is a scientific reality. Can anyone say Deranged Creationists?

When critics talk about breaking the Bush-Clinton-Bush chain, they ignore several simple facts. First, that while Dubya is a Bush, like his Daddy, Hillary is not a Clinton, like her husband. She is a Rodham. So in reality, her candidacy is less a continuation of dynasty than a partnership among co-equal geniuses. Second, when it comes to change, nothing the Republicans can offer comes close to the historic, momentous change represented by a female President. Which is why so many Americans would simply refuse to cast a vote for Jeb Bush, but would be quite happy to vote for Hillary.

Voters aren’t sick of Bushes and Clintons. They’re sick of Bush. They’re sick of incompetence, secrecy, lies, cronyism, division, fear-mongering, superstition, irresponsibility, excess, stubbornness and stupidity. They’re looking for a new direction only if it’s a better direction, like the direction we were heading when Hillary’s husband left office.

- JT Compton

v

This Is Not Justice

2007-09-26T02:32:00.000-04:00

In a curious editorial in the Times today, Jena prosecutor Reed Walters wants the world to know that he had no choice but to follow his solemn duty and prosecute Mychal Bell and a half-dozen other African American teens for beating up a white fellow student. But as many readers will quickly notice, Mr. Walters conspicuously fails to detail whether the initial blow allegedly struck by Mychal Bell to Justin Barker was with a fist or a deadly weapon. Nor does he describe why Bell might have intended permanent harm or death. His use of subjective words like "vicious" merely inflame.

If every person who ever delivered a sucker punch were guilty of attempted murder, then there were at least a dozen such felons in my high school alone. While not a fight, the Jena incident was the result of an ongoing conflict among kids. No, not hardened adult criminals, but children. Doesn't every childhood prank have an instigator? Instigation should have no bearing on whether the perpetrator is given the status of an adult. I would wager that the mistakes of white teens are dismissed far more often than those of black teens, so I have to wonder, what principle other than bias led to that initial adult charge? Indeed, why were the severe charges of attempted murder initially brought? One could easily argue that hanging nooses on a tree is tantamount to conspiring to commit murder. What message does it send other than "we want to kill you!"? And yet, no charges could be found for this so-called prank?

Hiding behind "just doing my job" doesn't change the fact that Mr. Walters has discretion over the cases he chooses to prosecute, and how he chooses to prosecute them. Why were no African Americans on Mychal Bell's jury? So many questions persist, and given the checkered history of justice in Dixie, the system there remains guilty until proven innocent.

- JT Compton

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Kicking A.S.S.

2007-09-11T13:33:00.000-04:00

Congressional hearings on Iraq this week, featuring the report by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on the Surge, became a showcase for Democrats to rake the Bush Administration over the coals for its grotesque bungling and mismanagement of the Iraq occupation.

President Bush, speaking in Australia, claimed that his Surge was “kicking ass.” But given the level of violence, which even under the most optimistic assessment has only receded to its 2006 level, Bush’s “kicking ass” comment was used repeatedly as a point of ridicule. If a slight reduction in horrific violence can be called “kicking ass”, then it’s hard to imagine how much lower the bar for success in Iraq can be set.

The most important question of today’s Senate hearings came from Barack Obama, and it went unanswered. In essence, he wanted to know under what circumstances the Ambassador and General would recommend that we withdraw our forces without our goals being met.

It’s more than a fair question. And the absence of an answer tells us that the Bush Administration and its minions want to meet their “goals” under any circumstances, suffering any losses.

But their “goals” have always been wildly unattainable and misguided. They wanted to kill every individual in Iraq who fit the description of a terrorist, as if this were a finite number. They wanted to impose order and security, apparently in the fashion that we enjoy here in America. And they wanted an American-style democracy to flourish, absent any notion of ethnic or tribal identity. Now, as then, these goals are tragically laughable, deranged and effectively impossible.

The latest goal, facilitated by the Surge, has been to provide better security while the government, military and police "stand up". But the Surge has done little to change the facts on the ground in Iraq. Other developments unrelated to the Surge have given small glimmers of hope. That the Sunnis have grown sick of Al Qaeda and kicked them to the curb is the most important of these. But the long-running and deep-seated conflicts and resentment among tribes and clans is not going to go away any time soon.

Thus, it is becoming clear that we remain faced with two hideous choices. Stay the course without any end in sight, with mounting casualties and with no guarantee of success, or begin a phased withdrawal and hope that Iraq doesn’t fully implode.

The only thing getting its ass kicked these days is President Bush and his policies.

- JT Compton

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It’s Meltdown Time Again

2007-08-11T18:13:00.000-04:00

How odd that so many business-news pundits are “shocked” by the recent credit crunch affecting investors in mortgage-backed derivative securities.

To be sure, the situation is a disaster. The equity and credit markets have been hammered almost daily by announcements of financial institutions closing or suspending operations of funds invested in securities backed by sub-prime loans. And despite falling treasury yields, mortgage rates have risen dramatically for non-conforming borrowers, further damaging the ability of shaky homeowners to refinance out of expensive ARM and Interest Only loans into something with a lower fixed rate.

But what caused the problem? Nothing new—it happens on a regular basis. Financial institutions with little oversight take ever-increasing risks and eventually pay a steep price when the markets become volatile. Remember the Savings and Loan crisis? Remember the Junk Bond meltdown? Remember the mortgage REIT disaster? Remember the Long Term Capital fiasco? All the same, and all tied to the mispricing of options.

During periods of low volatility, money managers tend to increasingly minimize the risks they are taking. The longer markets stay calm, the longer participants assume they will remain calm into the future, building those assumptions into their pricing models. And what instruments depend heavily on such predictions for their value? Options.

For example, the S&L crisis occurred because poorly regulated savings banks were motivated to take larger and larger risks with their investment portfolios to compensate for dwindling loan volume in the face of a cooling real estate market. But as interest rates fell to support the real estate market, the investment portfolios lost billions because they were stuffed with highly risky securities with embedded options, such as IO’s and Inverse Floaters backed by mortgages—the same instruments that had burned several mortgage REITs years earlier.

Long Term Capital collapsed because award-winning finance gurus bet the firm’s money on option-pricing models that failed to properly assess real-world risks. And the Junk Bond fiasco occurred because investors failed to properly value the risk of default on sub-investment-grade paper.

In other words, instruments that rely on sophisticated predictive models for pricing are notoriously difficult to manage. And hedge funds have become the S&L’s of the present moment. They are virtually unregulated, and many have invested heavily in the most risky and volatile securities, mortgage and/or credit derivatives. How else could they achieve their stellar results? Reward, after all, is commensurate with risk.

In many ways, however, hedge funds are a scam. Their managers have little direct investment themselves, usually something nominal to give the appearance of a stake but nothing compared to the fees they can earn, and they are compensated lavishly. Their fees come from a percentage of the size of the fund, usually 1-2%, as well as a huge portion of the fund’s appreciation in any given year, usually 20% of the gain.

This scheme motivates the managers to take enormous risks and thereby reap enormous rewards…until the fund fails, whereupon the managers lose their income streams while the investors lose their equity. If you’ve made tens or hundreds of millions in management fees, you only sacrifice your reputation if the fund goes belly up. So you sit on the beach in front of your Hamptons mansion and wait a few years until the market forgets about you. Then you try your luck again.

Some managers are clever enough to get out of the way of a pending disaster, but many are not. And as the credit crunch continues to send ripples through the financial markets, we should continue to see further fund closures and red ink.

A federal bail-out of any of these gamblers would be an insult to ordinary Americans, adding to the greater insult of the recently changed bankruptcy laws that make it virtually impossible for individuals to escape financial catastrophe while insulating giant corporations from relatively insignificant losses.

If the feds want to help, they should police unscrupulous lenders and force them to disclose in a plain and understandable way the risks of today’s mortgage products. They should also regulate the hedge fund industry and find ways to keep managers from rolling the dice with other people’s money.

Until then, nobody should be surprised by the latest market meltdown. It’s just another chapter in a long, growing history of the market for derivative securities and the people who fail to manage them.

- JT Compton

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It's About A Failed Presidency, Stupid

2007-07-23T14:32:00.000-04:00

The recently scrapped Senate bill requiring a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq was ridiculed by conservatives as an attempt by Congress to micro-manage the “war” in Iraq. But their scorn misses a much larger and more ominous point, eclipsing mere policy disputes.

How should America deal with a President who is incompetent, corrupt and holds the actions of his administration above the law?

Even Republicans are increasingly conceding that President Bush mismanaged the invasion of Iraq, often using the phrase “mistakes were made” to substitute for a more realistic, catastrophic and lamentable description.

But beyond Iraq, Bush has done deliberate and entirely avoidable harm to a broad range of important institutions and policies at home.

He turned governmental agencies and departments – Justice, Interior, Energy, Environmental Protection, etc. – into extensions of the Republican party, in some cases clearly violating the law.

He staffed those same institutions with unqualified cronies or with partisan members of the industries those institutions were supposed to regulate, resulting in tragedy ("Heck of a job, Brownie!").

He supported and sustained immoral policies such as torture and rendition that shattered our credibility in the world community and put our troops at risk.

He held no high official responsible for the outrageous abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, which further damaged our international standing.

He held none of his cabinet responsible for the illegal and disgraceful outing of a covert CIA officer despite clear supporting evidence.

He failed to respond adequately to the ravages of Hurricane Katrina, and continues to fail to provide adequate, much less competent, support for the victims of that disaster.

He failed to respond effectively and continues to ignore the genocide in Darfur.

And so on.

When a President botches a war we shouldn’t trust that same person to clean up the mess. Yet we’ve been forced to wait almost five years for President Bush to come up with a plan to sort out what many now call the worst foreign policy disaster in our nation’s history.

Republicans acknowledge that “mistakes have been made” but they still can’t embrace what so many Americans have already concluded – that the real issue has little to do with military strategy and everything to do with our national response to a failed and catastrophic Presidency.

Do we have to wait until a President gets caught on tape covering up a robbery or lying about adultery before we can act to limit his power or remove him from office? The Constitution allows for impeachment when the President commits “high crimes and misdemeanors”. A misdemeanor, in modern usage, could mean a traffic violation or drunk and disorderly.

Certainly the failures and scandals of the Bush White House are more egregious than drunk and disorderly.

If the actions of President Bush and his cabinet aren't excellent and proper candidates for impeachment, much less outrage, it’s hard to imagine what would be.

- JT Compton

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Michael Moore, Patriot

2007-07-10T13:39:00.001-04:00

Nothing makes me happier than seeing Michael Moore banging his fists and dressing down CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. Somebody’s got to do it. Not that I have anything against Blitzer specifically, but as an iconic member of the news media it took Blitzer and his counterparts years to finally ask the hapless, incompetent Bush Administration the hard questions that might have prevented the Iraq war in the first place.

As Moore pointed out to Blitzer in yesterday’s interview, they never asked “why”. Why were we going to Iraq? Why was there no plan to secure the country? Why was there no international support? And on and on.

At this point, the Bush Administration couldn’t find it’s way out of a cardboard box. And all but the most frightened, reticent, inflexible conservatives have concluded that Bush and his team are the most lame, corrupt and disastrous leaders of a lifetime.

But Moore and others knew this long ago, and their criticisms were either ignored or trivialized by Blitzer and his peers for the sake of political access while at the same time sacrificing truth and journalistic integrity.

Those who criticize Moore usually miss his point. Moore isn’t trying to be “fair and balanced” in his documentaries. He’s not a newsman - he’s a truth teller. Truth doesn’t always have or need two sides, despite the typical talk-show debate format we’ve all become accustomed to. There are issues that are so screamingly obvious and so tragically critical that it becomes imperative to place them squarely in front of the public and put them into sharp focus. Sure, he’s also an entertainer, but that’s what makes him such an effective communicator.

It’s almost comical to listen to the shrill, whiny voices of the status quo criticizing Moore. They almost always attack his appearance or label him with vague generalizations like “liberal nut job,” but seldom do they actually address his issues. Even CNN consultant Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who recently produced a critical piece on Moore, eventually had to admit that Moore got the overwhelming majority of his facts right in his recent movie “Sicko.”

For those who are too wealthy to use insurance, too poor to afford it, or too healthy to have yet needed it, “Sicko” exposes what the rest of us already know. That our health care system is a disastrous, disgraceful scam. It is hopelessly bloated and ineffective, except when it comes to making its top industry executives grotesquely rich. It delivers one of the worst care products among developed nations at the highest price. In other words, the system is horribly broken.

As a progressive visionary, Moore has put this truth into sharp focus. We don’t need to hear from executives from Big Pharma or the HMO industry to understand why the system is a mess, just as we don’t need to hear from the hijackers to know that 9-11 was an abominable slaughter.

If more Americans questioned the status quo, if more Americans held their politicians accountable, if more Americans denounced lobbyists and influence peddling, if more Americans were critical of the authorities and institutions that have such a direct impact on our lives, we would have a higher quality of life, greater liberties and a safer world.

Michael Moore has always known this, and has always put his money where his mouth is. I challenge his detractors to make their own films. They might be able to find a few people who like our health care system. They might be able to find a few citizens who think that Bush has done a good job. They might even be able to find a unicorn. But the fact that nothing has been done along these lines – that no compelling counterpoint exists to Michael Moore – tells us all we need to know. Michael Moore is telling us something extremely important. If that’s not patriotism, I don’t know what is.

- JT Compton

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Justice Bush

2007-07-02T18:43:00.000-04:00

God forbid a wealthy white man be forced to go to prison. At least, that’s what President Bush seemed to be saying with his commutation of Scooter Libby’s prison sentence today. It’s okay to throw Blacks and Hispanics in jail for life in Texas on the flimsiest of charges, even when it can be shown that the state's legal system is fatally flawed. They’ve been charged with crimes and they're not white, so they're probably guilty.

But in the twisted mess of today’s conservative mind, Libby’s misdeeds are trivial—covering up potential crimes of the Vice President, crimes like outing a CIA officer in order to bolster lies that led us into the most costly and bungled war in our nation’s history. Why should anyone go to jail for that?

Bush left Libby’s felony conviction and $250,000 fine in place but commuted his 30 month sentence after the court announced that Libby would be required to serve time in jail while waiting for his appeal. In a lengthy statement, Bush declared that, in his judgment, Libby’s jail sentence was too harsh, and it was punishment enough that he will lose his license to practice law. After all, Libby has a family, he's been a loyal Republican soldier and he’s white. Cut the poor guy a break!

But this “punishment” is of minor consequence to Libby, who will now be handed a seven-figure job with a Republican think-tank, defense contractor, HMO or any number of other businesses controlled by conservatives whose profits depend on the greed and loyalty of conservative politicians.

Equally disturbing, the commutation was based on Bush’s judgment—as though that fact should impress anyone with a measurable IQ. This is the same Bush judgment that took us to war prematurely, failed to plan for the occupation, failed to hold anyone accountable for the abominations of Guantanamo, Abu Ghirab, rendition and torture, failed to find consensus on our Social Security mess, failed to rebuild New Orleans, failed to staff government agencies with qualified professionals and failed to uphold constitutional protections when it came to wiretapping and surveillance.

For a President and party who accused everyone else of lacking values, who laced speech after speech with words like evil and immoral, who scolded their adversaries for being soft on crime, the Libby commutation stinks. It has little to do with justice and everything to do with partisan politics. It is perfectly legal, but like so many actions of the Bush Administration, it is utterly unethical.

Sadly, the world would be a much better place without the judgments of President Bush and his corrupt, misguided, incompetent team.

- JT Compton

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Cheney's Family Jewels

2007-06-27T02:10:00.000-04:00

While lying media whore Ann Coulter dragged Chris Matthews and Hardball into the gutter today on MSNBC, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer was busy tackling serious issues.

Giving Coulter a platform to spew her hateful rancor – thinly and disingenuously disguised as “humor” – is as inappropriate as allowing Noah Wiley to speak about heart disease on a panel sponsored by the American Medical Association. Shame on Chris Matthews.

Meanwhile, Blitzer showcased one of the most fascinating and historically important developments in Washington since the Pentagon Papers: the publishing by the CIA of an internal expose entitled “Family Jewels.” Prompted in large part by Freedom Of Information Act requests, Jewels is a detailed accounting of cold-war era CIA excesses from the ‘50s through the ‘70s.

Though many details are still forthcoming, such excesses included employing the Mafia to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro, providing materials and assistance to domestic law enforcement, spying on domestic anti-war demonstrators and spying on domestic journalists who published sensitive government data.

Recall that the CIA is prohibited from operating domestically - the exclusive turf of the FBI.

Significant about this publication is the weight it gives those who have been screaming for decades that the CIA was involved in dirty and illegal deeds, and the shadow it casts over those increasingly ridiculous deniers who all along claimed that the CIA was a lily-white tower of patriotic virtue.

In other words, this tome is yet another example of how our nation does wrong while trying to maintain the illusion of doing right. This alone should underscore how crucial it is for dissent and criticism to play a central role in government and politics, because sadly, denying citizens their constitutional rights by placing them under illegal surveillance isn’t a thing of the past. The recent warrantless wiretapping scandals are proof. So is Dick Cheney.

As recently as this week Vice President Cheney claimed he was not subject to laws governing how the Executive Branch compiles and stores official communications…because he does not consider himself part of the Executive Branch! At least not today.

Setting aside the fact that Dick Cheney doesn’t want investigators and historians to read his emails and memos because they would reveal damning evidence of his blatant dishonesty, malicious temperament and disastrous incompetence, Cheney would rather insult the intelligence of the American public by claiming that he is above the law rather than complying with it.

While the CIA's Jewels are a chilling confirmation of the excesses of power and the ease with which the institutions of government can be co-opted into actions that are un-American, unpatriotic and against everything we say we stand for, Cheney’s malevolent authorizations of surveillance, rendition, unconditional detention and torture (the very same dirty laundry that the CIA is now admitting) are the most recent embodiments of power run amok.

The CIA did a great service to the nation by releasing this unflattering information. Hopefully it will motivate Congress to hold the Executive Branch accountable for its actions. Because until we hold our so-called leaders accountable for their misdeeds, nothing will change. Thanks to Cheney, the first step will be forcing the Bush Crew to comply with the law instead of holding themselves above it. Because few things are more disgraceful than leaders who hold themselves above the law. And as history confirms, few things are more dangerous.

- JT Compton

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Mayor Mike Madness

2007-06-21T15:50:00.000-04:00

I met Michael Bloomberg in the late ‘80s, when his company was gaining traction mainly because it provided high-powered analytics to bond traders. He was already a legendary figure, both for his prior success at Salomon Brothers and his willingness to roll the dice by starting a company that provided technical data on little yellow screens.

Unlike many moguls from that period, I still admire Michael Bloomberg and appreciate the job he’s done as Mayor of New York City. While the city isn’t run as tightly as it was under Giuliani – Subway panhandlers appeared almost overnight after Rudy left office – Bloomberg has been a solid steward. He’s done a great job with the finances and he’s been sensitive to the needs of the most vulnerable.

Nonetheless, what is Mayor Mike thinking?

Perhaps it’s just the hubris that comes with being a billionaire, or the myopia that comes with living in a bubble of constant praise and adulation, but from a real-world perspective, Bloomberg doesn’t have a chicken’s chance in a gator farm of becoming the next president.

Very simply, few people outside the tri-state area know who he is. And even if he’s able to get onto their radar screens, several important cards are stacked against him. He’s a Harvard MBA geek. He's a divorced bachelor. He's been sued for sexual harassment. He’s Jewish. He's switched parties twice. And he has no political experience on a national or international level.

Sure, as an Independent he might be able to avoid the primary process and wind up in debates with the Republican and Democratic nominees, but when it comes to charisma, Mike makes Hilary look like Princess Di. As a public speaker, he’s deadly dull.

I’d be happy for him to run since he would likely steal more votes from the Republicans than the Democrats in states where it mattered. But it would be a fantastic waste of time and effort. Maybe he’s trying to set the stage for a stronger run four or eight years from now, however he would still have significant hurdles to overcome.

It’s hard to imagine a greater insult to the intelligence of the voting public than term limits, and sadly, Bloomberg is prohibited from running for Mayor again. But I’m sure he can find other ways to contribute to public life once his office is up. Rather than spending a hundred and fifty million on a Presidential campaign, he might be better off investing the money in scholarships for disadvantaged teens. At least they would have a chance to succeed. His Presidential bid has none.

- JT Compton

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Conservatives in Wonderland

2007-06-08T02:10:00.000-04:00

If the conservative movement were a mental patient, it would surely be diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.

At this week’s Republican Presidential Debate on CNN, the dominant emotion was self-righteous anger, along with a strong dose of indignation. Anger at President Bush, anger at the Democrats and anger at the nation for parting ways with the conservative agenda. For example, the candidates wailed about how our troops needed to stay in Iraq until the mission was complete. Rudy Giuliani even shouted about the good things that would fall into place “if we can get this right.”

But on this and virtually every other issue, the responses made it clear that these conservatives live in a fantasyland built from the ashes their own failures. Not a single candidate acknowledged the generally accepted fact that the mission in Iraq has reached the point of a zero chance for "success." Providing security and stability to the Iraqi people in the face of a multi-faceted civil war is something our military is not capable of “getting right.”

And counter to what the candidates profess, withdrawal won’t unleash chaos because chaos has already been the rule of life in Iraq for years. Only a delusional mind would believe that a nation we already have virtually no control over would “burst into flames” once we leave. We provide a modicum of security for government officials, but little more. Terrorists and death squads already operate with impunity. Once we leave, politicians will simply get security from their own tribal factions. And while progress, such as it is, may go from a trickle to a stop, it’s an arrogant fantasy to think that our presence is a magic glue holding things together.

But Rudy Giuliani didn’t limit his arrogant fantasies to the subject of Iraq. He also screamed about the health-care mess, bitterly claiming that the system is broken because it’s “government dominated.” That’s right, the multi-billion dollar for-profit industry isn’t dominated by the greedy health care providers or the pharmaceutical industry—it’s dominated by our very own government.

Is he insane?

We should be so lucky for our government to take control of health care, which it clearly has no control over outside of Medicare despite Giuliani’s delusions. But hey, according to conservatives, “the government has never gotten anything right!” Well, under the Bush Administration the government has gotten a lot of important things wrong. But we trust the government to get a lot of life and death enterprises right. The military. The police. The fire department. The coast guard. The forest service. So why not health care? Are the other industrialized nations that much more capable than we are? Or are their politicians just much more capable than our very own Republicans? I don’t hear any mainstream conservatives talking about privatizing law enforcement.

Going on to achieve the Lunacy Trifecta, Giuliani later echoed the sentiments of many Bush conservatives by commenting on the jail sentence handed to convicted felon Scooter Libby, saying he thought Libby was a good candidate for a pardon. As Rudy resentfully pointed out, “a man’s life is at stake.” But Rudy seems unconcerned that the integrity of the Presidency is also at stake. That the outing of a covert CIA officer is also at stake. That the lives of that officer and her husband were at stake, and were damaged by Libby’s lies. That ethics were at stake because the office of the Vice President waged an unethical smear campaign to cover its lies about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities and then tried to cover tracks by lying to a special prosecutor.

Stakes like those don’t seem to register in conservative fantasyland. Because they don’t serve the cause of making conservatives look like capable heroes. And darn it, conservatives have to look perfect in order to feel good about themselves. That’s their fantasy—that they can do no wrong, just like America itself.

But the more conservatives try to push fantasies and delusions and wishful thinking, the more transparent and pitiful they become. Consider the new show on Fox News, “The 1/2 Hour News Hour”, which is meant to be a conservative version of “The Daily Show.” Its mere existence tells us three things about Fox. One, that it is desperately trying not to wither into complete and total irrelevance. Two, that Fox has never really been about news or journalism. And three, that it doesn’t get the joke—Jon Stewart doesn’t skewer Bush and Cheney and the others because they are conservatives—he makes fun of them because they are so damned dangerously ridiculous! And when moderates, progressives and liberals become as idiotic and incompetent, The Daily Show will make fun of them, too.

Conservatives choose to live in a fantasy world to avoid confronting the realities of their own failures, many of which have been egregious and calamitous of late. But the longer they spew wishful thinking and ignore hard facts, the further away they get from the electorate.

If “Angry and Deluded” describes the bulk of the conservative platform, 2008 is going to be a really bad year for Republicans. And a good year for America.

- JT Compton

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Bullying Works

2007-05-29T14:27:00.000-04:00

As historians look back on the Bush Mess, one of the great lessons will be that bullying works. Using lies, smears and misinformation, the Bush administration demonstrated that bullying is an extremely effective method of manipulating the political process and public opinion.

For example, when the Bush crew used the anguish and trauma of 9/11 to gain support for a nation-building scheme in Iraq, members of the media and Congress who questioned the policy were quickly accused of being unpatriotic, which shut many of them up. It was classic school-yard bullying.

When a seasoned diplomat exposed as fraudulent claims by the Bush administration that Iraq had been trying to buy Uranium from Niger, the Bush crew smeared his reputation and in the process exposed his wife as a CIA operative. Again, classic bullying.

When elections neared, the Bush crew pushed U. S. Attorneys across the nation to pursue voter-fraud cases against Democrats despite a lack of evidence, threatening the attorneys with termination for non-compliance. First rate bullying.

Further examples are legion. On virtually every issue, in virtually every instance, when faced with hard questions, the Bush administration went on the offensive using distorted accusations, character assassination, misinformation and personal innuendo rather than address the substance of the policy or decision being questioned.

If you attack the question or the critic, you’ll never have to give a straight answer!

Even today, their bullying tactics infect the national discourse. For example, when Congress recently voted to authorize funds for the continuing occupation of Iraq, the final compromise bill excluded a timeline for withdrawal. Pundits asked whether the bill would hurt Democrats, since, as CNN White House Correspondent Ed Henry put it, the “left wing of the Democratic party” was against the war.

His comment, however, was a reflection of the lies and distortions the Bush crew and their minions have successfully bullied our media into accepting.

The “left wing of the Democratic party” is a smear phrase intended to trivialize and marginalize an issue or critic. Yet mainstream journalists use it ad nauseam because it creates a sense of conflict, and conflict generates ratings, even when the assertion is wildly inaccurate. In this instance, a large majority of Americans from both sides of the political spectrum want our troops withdrawn from Iraq immediately, not just “left wing” Democrats.

Here’s a note I wrote to CNN's Wolf Blitzer (Late Edition, 5-27-07) in response to Ed Henry’s remark:

Dear Mr. Blitzer,

Several times on today's show, your guests characterized the "left wing" of the Democratic party as being against the war in Iraq.

That characterization is stale, inflammatory and entirely false. The middle of the nation, both left and right, is against the war, and polls show that a large majority of our fellow citizens want our troops withdrawn beginning immediately. You, yourself, have mentioned polls which reflect this undisputed fact.

It would be accurate to say that a majority of Americans are against the war and want us out, spanning both Democrats and Republicans, left and right.

Until journalists stop using divisive, infotainment language like "left wing of the Democratic party" and use, instead, the FACTS, our nation will not get news, but rather a distorted editorial. Shame on your guests for skewing the national mood and keeping the dialog bound by distinctions that have become irrelevant to the issue. CNN should be better than that.

Bullying, by its nature, is divisive and polarizing. It creates dialog based on insinuation and stereotype, rather than on substance and logic.

Unless we reduce the infection bullying has produced, our political landscape will continue to be littered with distortions and divisions while the real issues remain on the sidelines, tragically unaddressed.

- JT Compton

V

Fundamentally Crazy

2007-05-16T22:07:00.000-04:00

This week offered several horrifying reminders of how our nation has been infected by the mental cancer of fundamentalism.

The recent death of Reverend Jerry Falwell produced scores of obituaries and televised summaries of his career, including clips of his infamous, bigoted rants against a wide variety of people he judged to be of lesser spiritual worth.

But it also demonstrated that his views were not a thing of the past, but an ongoing phenomenon in places like Liberty University, the religion-based institution he founded and whose graduates now serve by the dozens in places like the White House and the Justice Department.

His acolytes and followers filled the airwaves yesterday confessing that they, like Falwell, were convinced that the “second coming” of Jesus would happen soon, that the "end days" were finally approaching.

Despite the presence of highly advanced, science-based technology in virtually every facet of life, it's astonishing that many evangelicals and members of other religious brands continue to ridicule science while embracing the medieval superstitions of books written thousands of years ago, claiming that those books were authored not by men but by the creator of the universe.

Their religion is more than a way to truth or enlightenment or peace.

It is The Way, while all others are wrong, bankrupt and of lesser worth.

This distinction separates fundamentalists from the sensible, sane and rational among us. Their certainty and conviction are actually the grave symptoms of people living in an intellectual black hole.

No matter how you slice it, believing that the Bible, Torah or Koran are literally true (rather than figuratively or metaphorically true) requires a grotesque suspension of judgment and reason in favor of powerful fantasy and fairy tales.

Take the “second coming” myth. It predicts, among other things, that Satan, in the form of a dragon, will be cast into a bottomless pit by an angel.

How is this tale any different than the Odyssey, which uses historical fact—the Trojan war—as a starting point for a fable that includes a Cyclops and Sirens? Other than words on a page, we have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anybody walked on water or that any virgin gave birth to a child. Dragons and Miracles, like Sirens, are the fantastical imaginings of early writers hoping to imbue history with magic powerful enough to influence their intended readership.

Likewise, today’s fundamentalists want to frighten and control their communities using crazy stories like the End Days. Or by claiming, as several Republican presidential hopefuls have, that a fetus or embryo is actually a wide-eyed, innocent child. Indeed, Governor Mike Huckabee claimed in last night’s GOP debate that a fetus was a “person”.

But a fetus is most certainly not a person. Just look in the Dictionary. Among other things, a person has a moral sense, as well as an awareness and comprehension of the world around it. Thus a fetus might be a potential person, but it is clearly not an actual person.

Ultimately, fundamentalists care little about facts. They want to sprinkle magic fairy dust on anything they deem sacred or important. Then need to claim divine license in order to give their superstitions weight while forcing the world to conform to the lunacy of their sacred texts.

For example, even though a vast, overwhelming majority of scientists believe that life on Earth has been developing for millions of years, fundamentalists argue that God created the world six thousand years ago. Why? Because the Bible says so. (Or at least some believe it implies so.)

Three of the Republican presidential candidates don’t even believe in evolution. They’ve chosen instead to elevate superstition above science and reason.

I don’t know how many Americans qualify as fundamentalists. But I’m sure the number is large. And every time their particular religious leader decides to alter an interpretation of holy scripture, they seem distressingly happy to go along with it.

How long until one of those leaders decides that the Constitution is immoral? How long before one of those leaders decides Democracy is against God? How long until one of those leaders decides that citizens who sin should be stoned to death?

As long as a person is infected with the cancer of fundamentalism, anything is possible. And as Muslim fundamentalists have demonstrated, that means anything.

- JT Compton

v

Shifting The Failure

2007-05-11T14:12:00.000-04:00

Suddenly, benchmarks are making a lot of sense.

Yes, President Bush has seen the light again, and it is telling him to accept benchmarks. Forget that the Democrats and the American public have been screaming for tangible benchmarks in Iraq for years. The grey matter inside the President’s head finally wrapped itself around the necessity of creating solid criteria for success or failure in our effort to police the civil war in Iraq.

Forget also that eleven Republican congress members came to the President this week and told him that their constituents are so sick and tired of the mismanagement of the occupation that they are willing to throw in the towel and call our soldiers home. The President's new willingness to consider benchmarks is unrelated, nor does it have anything to do with his ever-worsening approval rating, now lower than any President in the last 30 years. (In one of the eleven’s home district, Bush’s approval rating is a mere five percent!)

No, the President's decision to consider benchmarks is part of a larger plan to make small, incremental concessions to Democratic lawmakers while forestalling the inevitable withdrawal from Iraq. If the President can just hang on and keep our troops from coming home, he can pass his historic catastrophe to the next administraion—almost certainly run by a Democrat—and blame them for “losing the war” when they bring the troops home.

Despite the grotesque toll in lives and treasure, it’s fatally important to Bush and his dishonest, scheming advisors Karl Rove and Dick Cheney that they not take the blame for losing a war that, in reality, was never winnable in the first place. The main thing that gives away their plan to shift the blame to the next President involves language. They are desperately trying to keep their operatives talking about the Iraq mess in conventional terms.

In other words, they are trying to maintain the fiction that Iraq is a “war” that we can still “win” or at least achieve something close to “victory”. But alas, this sham stopped working months ago. Americans have come to understand that there is no possibility of conventional victory in Iraq. It is quite literally impossible to “kill all the terrorists,” and it is equally impossible to force two tribes to set aside centuries of hatred fueled by fundamentalist dogma to live together in peace.

Supporting our troops should mean getting our remaining soldiers home safely. Winning should mean putting an end to the massive, almost incomprehensible cost of this bungled occupation. Victory should mean putting an end to the biggest terrorist recruiting tool of a lifetime.

And the public understands this. Only now—years too late—does the President seem to be seeing a glimmer of the light of reason when it comes to benchmarks. But not because he wants to put an end to his horrific blunder. Because he wants to play politics until he can pass the buck to someone else.

- JT Compton

v

Ten White Men

2007-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00

The Republicans held their first debate Thursday in California, moderated by Chris Matthews of MSNBC. The ten candidates found themselves crammed on a stage, and it became quickly clear that they were each going to grab as much air time as possible to recite their rehearsed campaign pitches.

More significantly, the candidates did everything they could to look like Real Conservatives. Again and again, they defined themselves by the worn, calcified clichés Americans have grown tired of, mouthing the same slogans made monotonous by the Bush spin machine.

While the Democratic candidates looked like tomorrow, the Republicans looked like yesterday. While the Democrats felt like a breath of fresh air, the Republicans felt like more of the same. While the Democrats appeared confident and passionate, the Republicans seemed frightened and defensive.

Americans need forward thinking leaders, not moralizing preachers. Until the GOP and its candidates stop telling Americans how to live their lives and passing judgment, the voting public will refuse to send ideologues to the White House just because they claim to be holier than thou. If recent history is any gauge, the more stridently candidates claim to be virtuous, the more likely they are to be dangerously incompetent and wrong on the issues that matter.

Sadly, the Republican candidates spent most of their debate trying to out-holy each other while doing virtually nothing to reassure Americans that they are anything but stay the course.

The same, disastrous course we’ve suffered for six years.

If that’s their best, the GOP is in real trouble next election cycle. Which is great news for America.

- JT Compton

.

Bush to America: Go To Hell

2007-04-26T14:56:00.000-04:00

George Bush refuses to accept the will of the American people. Despite polls showing overwhelming support for a timetable for phased withdrawal from Iraq, the President and his embattled, scandal-scarred inner circle continue to defend the course of their grotesquely mismanaged war by implying that their fellow citizens are traitors.

Every day, whether from the floor of Congress or TV talk-shows, the few remaining Bush dead-enders continue to question the patriotism of the Democrat’s plan, including anyone who supports it, labeling the entire enterprise “defeatist” while claiming it impossible to support both the troops and withdrawal. But the divisiveness of this tactic smacks of McCarthyism and its logic seems blatantly disingenuous.

It’s a plain fact that soldiers who disagree with our mission in Iraq—or aren’t even sure what the real mission is nowadays—feel supported knowing that their fellow citizens are trying to bring them home. In the view of many, a timetable for withdrawal is supporting our troops.

And calling withdrawal “defeatist” ignores another sad fact. We have already been defeated. Not just by bombs or terrorists, but by the historic blunders of our own civilian leadership. By ignoring the cultural realities of Iraq and invading without a robust plan to secure the country, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others all but ensured the outcome we now face. Their ignorance and incompetence let the Chaos Genie out of the bottle, and an extra twenty thousand troops won’t come close to putting it back.

We may never know what it would take to restore order in Baghdad because we have never been able to maintain order in Baghdad. If securing Baghdad has been the objective, we have been failing almost from day one. And Americans understand this. They understand that asking a few hundred thousand soldiers who don’t speak the language and don’t understand the customs or culture to police an entire nation is a recipe for failure, especially when that “nation” is actually an artificial fusion of three radically different tribal communities with long-standing hatreds and grievances.

A new zenith of Presidential arrogance and defiance will occur this evening when George Bush vetoes broadly supported legislation that ties further Iraq war funding to a phased withdrawal. His administration’s bruised but stubborn ego will continue to cling to a failed policy, even if he has to tell the vast majority of voting citizens, including our soldiers, to go to hell.

- JT Compton

.

Reject Guns

2007-04-23T13:14:00.000-04:00

Want to get death threats?? It’s easy. Write something negative about guns or gun ownership.

Several years ago I urged individuals to pledge not to own guns and received several angry emails including a threatening note from a gun fan calling himself—surprise, surprise—Wotanbornprince.

But my attitude toward guns hasn’t changed and this week’s massacre at Virginia Tech only confirms what many Americans already understand.

Guns are an abomination.

So said Richard Nixon in a rare flash of clearheaded brilliance. The debate about whether guns kill or people kill is an irrelevant dodge. Guns are, quite fundamentally, instruments of death. They fascinate the powerless. They attract the weak. They seduce the frightened.

Guns are a necessary evil, but necessary only insofar as they are critical to the conduct of the military and law enforcement.

It’s no coincidence that the more insecure, fearful and paranoid, the more likely a person is to own a gun. We often see images of children and teens wielding guns, playing soldier or gangster—because they often feel afraid and powerless in the face of a complex and intimidating adult world.

But it’s safe to say that a secure, emotionally mature person lacking the need to kill animals has no reason to own a tool designed solely to produce death. Indeed, such a person would understand that the presence of a gun in their household increases the risk of death by gun accident. The number of people who successfully defend themselves with a gun from a gun-wielding attacker is insignificant compared to the thirty-thousand or so gun-related deaths each year in America.

Forgetting that the Constitution only addresses gun ownership within the context of a well regulated state militia (which is why supremacist hate groups call themselves militias—to ensure they can safely own guns), the laws of any given state still have no bearing on the notion that guns are an abomination. After all, laws fail to restrict plenty of things that are wrong. It’s not against the law to hate, but that doesn’t make hating right.

Since virtually none of our citizens need to hunt to stay alive, why do people still hunt? In the vast majority of cases, people hunt to satisfy an urge to feel powerful, to feel a certain rush and vitality lacking in their lives. How sad. And how unsportsmanlike. It’s virtually impossible to respect hunting with a gun. Any child can pull a trigger and kill something. And while it may take skill to track an animal and aim well, killing it with a gun is antithetical to sport—it’s no contest, just a one-sided slaughter.

So the question begs itself: How many gun hunters are emotional children trying to feel big and macho by killing things? More broadly, how many gun owners are compensating for a lack of something?

Which brings me back to death threats. When you take toys away from children, they often go into a rage and throw a tantrum. And likewise, gun people are often so insecure that any threat to their unfettered access to guns fills them with rage and fear. They lack the maturity, intelligence or character to navigate the perils of life without deadly weapons nearby.

In the hate mail I received, gun nuts consistently portrayed themselves as strong and tough versus the weak, “limp-wristed” liberals opposing their guns. How ironic that gun fanatics who strive to project a macho façade are actually fueled by fear and inadequacy. By using slurs like “limp-wristed” and worse, they tell the world a lot about themselves.

And by owning a gun, they tell the world they feel scared, insecure and impotent. By owning a gun, they demonstrate immaturity, bad judgment and/or malignant priorities.

Regardless of what our laws allow, in modern-day America there is simply no good reason to own a gun. Though gun ownership will likely remain legal, until more citizens take a personal stand and reject gun ownership, until more of us reject the childish glorification of gun culture, we will continue to live in a nation plagued by gun violence.

- JT Compton

Bush Screwed Us Again

2007-04-06T11:42:00.000-04:00

Just when you thought the Bush Administration couldn’t do any worse, just when their approval rating hit an all-time low, just when it made the most sense for them to reach out to Congress and mend fences, what does the President do? He uses a recess appointment to make a Swift Boat supporter Ambassador to Belgium. In other words, he told Congress to go to hell.

And thus, he told the American people to go to hell.

When Sam Fox appeared at a confirmation hearing before Congress, it became clear that he was either being dishonest or had remarkably poor judgment when it came to his rationale for giving $50,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a smear group that spread malicious lies about Presidential hopeful John Kerry.

Fox’s performance at the hearing was so dreadful and embarrassing that the Bush Administration withdrew his candidacy. A few days later, when Congress broke for Easter recess, Bush appointed Fox to the ambassadorship using a recess appointment, meant to allow the President to appoint crucial operatives under emergency circumstances when Congress was unable to convene.

But there was no emergency. Bush used the recess appointment to blatantly thwart the will of Congress, and by direct extension, the will of the people.

It marked another low point in the worst Presidency in our nation’s history. Bush is so isolated, so insecure and yet so arrogant, he can only appoint his own cronies, no matter how inept or incompetent, to ensure they don’t turn against him down the road. Because when your presidency is wildly incompetent and operates on lies, secrecy, deception and dirty tricks, you run the risk that minions will become disgusted with your so-called “values” and go public.

It has happened many times to the Bush regime, and each time the turncoat is deemed a lunatic or an opportunist by Karl Rove and other Bush spinmeisters. But the public is no longer fooled by their accusations and stale rhetoric.

And in this case, we all have reason to be outraged. Our government, yet again, is being staffed by a person who paid big money to get Dubya elected—often through unethical means—but who offers little to his post. “Heck of a job, Brownie.”

How much damage can this loser of a President and his pompous, bumbling team do to our nation before their disastrous term ends? Sadly, more will be revealed.

I’m on vacation next week. Happy Easter…

- JT Compton

Unwise And Inappropriate

2007-04-02T18:59:00.000-04:00

Responding today to Congressional legislation setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney said "Democrats think they can impose unwise and inappropriate restrictions on our commanders."

It was a moment of breathtaking, almost laughable hypocrisy.

No elected leader in recent memory has been so utterly wrong on any number of judgments and predictions than Cheney, and no administration in the past hundred years has made more "unwise and inappropriate" decisions than the Bush team.

But don’t take my word for it. Matthew Dowd, a former advisor to President Bush, ripped his ex-boss in an interview this weekend in the New York Times. Dowd left the White House disillusioned by the handling of the Iraq war and claimed Bush was increasingly out of touch with average Americans.

But recent examples of glaring incompetence extend far beyond Bush and Company. Senator McCain visited Baghdad hoping to confirm troop surge "progress", but was instead confronted by hostile journalists wondering if he had been living in an alternate universe. Despite whines and moans from conservative pundits, the journalistic disdain was justified and well within the bounds of a critical media. Past heroism doesn’t absolve McCain from painting a picture of Iraq that amounts to a lie. Though the weekly civilian death toll falling from 100 to 99 might be technically termed "progress" it amounts to little more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. Of note, McCain never took a lone, leisurely stroll outside the green zone. He would likely have been killed.

And let’s not overlook the smack-down given by the Supreme Court today to the EPA. By failing to enforce the law under the Clean Air Act, said the Supremes, the EPA failed to do its job. Why would the EPA drag its feet on something as important as enforcing environmental law? To help the energy industry, which gave mountains of money to the candidacy of George Bush. His cronies at the agency were the foxes in the proverbial hen-house, helping the EPA to sprinkle glaring incompetence with sleaze.

The media isn’t immune from blunders, either. They’ve been reporting all day about the implications of huge first-quarter money raised by the 2008 Presidential candidates. But they have entirely missed a major point: the Democrats out-raised the Republicans. In past years the GOP had a substantial fundraising edge thanks to ties with big business. But that paradigm has changed, in part because of the ineptitude of the Bush regime and in part because of the Internet’s ability to reach grass-roots activists who were relegated to the sidelines in years past.

Finally, we were reminded this week of the most audacious of the glaringly incompetent—Middle Eastern Governments. The seizure of 15 British sailors by Iran underscores the need by theocrats to obscure their own incompetence by demonizing the West, in this ridiculous case by forcing prisoners to parrot incriminating statements to reporters. Without an enemy to blame for their problems, states like Iran, Syria, Egypt and Lebanon would have to explain to citizens why their unemployment rates are obscenely high, why their economies have been left behind by the rest of the world, why their societies are hopelessly stratified and filled with inequality, and why their cultures remain brutally tribal, stale and myopic.

If only our own leaders understood this dynamic enough to avoid playing into it. But alas, elite-sissy-turned-wannabe-tough-guys like Dick Cheney are convinced that bullying and threats succeed while diplomacy fails. We’ll still be paying for this misjudgment generations from now.

- JT Compton

GOP Fantasy World

2007-03-28T15:23:00.000-04:00

Speaking to Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Senator John McCain blasted the recently passed Senate bill setting a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. McCain claimed that the Bush troop surge was working, stridently insisting that Baghdad was now safe for Westerners to roam. When challenged on this claim by Blitzer, McCain adopted what has become a typical conservative stance—I know more than you, you stupid idiot.

But McCain was horribly wrong.

As reporters on the ground in Baghdad continue to point out, the city remains absolutely lethal for Westerners to travel and very little has changed. Some sectarian death squads have moved to outlying areas, but car bombs continue unabated, disappearances are rampant and revenge killings still the norm.

McCain displayed an all-too-familiar Republican mindset. Ignore reality and make up "facts" to fit a wishful fantasy. When challenged, act outraged and indignant...

I wish Baghdad were safer…so I’ll claim that it is.
I wish Global Warming weren’t happening…so I’ll claim it’s a hoax.
I wish we didn’t torture prisoners…so I’ll simply deny it.
I wish we didn’t fire US Attorneys to obstruct justice…so I’ll make up an excuse.
I wish Iraq had something to do with 9/11…so I’ll pretend it did.
I wish Evolution weren’t a scientific fact…so I’ll call it an unproven theory.
I wish Dick Cheney didn't smear Joe Wilson...so I'll lie about it.
I wish we didn’t staff departments with inept cronies…so I’ll ignore their failures.

“Heck of a job, Brownie!”

Republicans used the horror and widespread fear generated by 9/11 to take Americans on a fantasy ride, painting the world in simplified, black-and-white terms while providing rosy, wishful justifications for forcibly remaking the Middle East in our own image.

But their dream has become a nightmare. Six years of lies, distortions, manipulations, failures and scandals have created an atmosphere of distrust and intense scrutiny. When politicians like George Bush, Alberto Gonzales or John McCain make pompous, self-serving and wishful claims, the press and public no longer give them the benefit of the doubt. But Republicans have yet to learn the lesson.

McCain’s statement to Blitzer was either a bold-faced lie or a mistake born of unforgivable ignorance. Either way, Americans are sick of it. Until Republicans prove they have a handle on reality and stop peddling fantasies and half-truths, Americans will punish them in the media and at the ballot box.

Today, Senator John McCain looked like a fool, not a President. And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine him or any other reality-challenged Republican becoming the next President. We should all be so lucky.

- JT Compton

No Retreat, No Humility

2007-03-23T15:40:00.000-04:00

President Bush clearly plans to go down swinging. Even though he’s getting bludgeoned on multiple fronts, he won’t back down. His party’s house is on fire, but he and many of his true believers refuse to leave.

And even though Alberto Gonzales fired US Attorneys for purely political purposes, lied to at least one Senator about the process, attempted to lie to the media about the rationale and changed his story multiple times, Bush refuses to get rid of him or even chastise him.

Speaking to the press, Bush attacked the critics of Gonzales, saying cynically that “there’s a lot of politics in this town.” But Bush is apparently blind to the total politicization of many branches of government by his own team. A strong argument can be made that no presidency has been more politically divisive nor injected politics where it has never been tolerated before than the Bush Administration.

Another flagrant example of Bush’s hypocrisy came during his press conference today attacking the bill recently passed by the House restricting spending in Iraq and setting a timetable for withdrawal. Bush promised a veto and pointed out that it was passed by a narrow margin, implying that the House has only a shaky mandate for change. But Bush was elected by the slimmest margin in history and conducted himself as if his mandate came from a landslide.

(He and GOP pundits don’t want congress to influence war strategy, but they fail to understand that the public would rather congress micro-manage the war than Bush continue to mismanage the war.)

Going further, Bush ridiculed the House bill for containing “too much pork.” But every single spending bill he signed while Congress was under Republican control contained vast and unprecedented pork. He never once complained.

This type of grotesque, deceitful hubris was also displayed recently on the Daily Show, where UN Ambassador John Bolton made an appearance. His attitude toward host Jon Stewart could best be summarized as, “I know more than you do about every subject under the sun, so shut up and let me explain things.” His arrogance was repulsive, and consistent with the attitude of the Bush administration. And his comments demonstrated shocking ignorance, especially concerning historical facts about the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

Take as another example disgraced and indicted ex-Congressman Tom DeLay, who appeared recently on Meet The Press. Neither cowed nor contrite, his new book is entitled “No Retreat, No Surrender.” Like Bush, DeLay is constitutionally incapable of taking responsibility for, or even acknowledging, mistakes or blunders. Listening to him, the President and GOP have done absolutely nothing wrong in the past six years and the 2006 elections were just an aberration.

Such astonishing hubris, lack of insight and absence of humility are the fatal flaws that guarantee the demise of the failed neo-conservative experiment. And even though that demise is well under way, people like Bush, Cheney, Bolton, DeLay and their myopic faithful are incapable of grasping the fact. They plan to go down swinging. And go down they will. In 2008, the GOP will suffer a TKO. Not only will the next president be a liberal, but the Senate may garner a veto-proof sixty or more Democrats when the dust finally settles.

Until then, Bush and his arrogant, incompetent Administration will apparently continue to obstruct justice, thwart the Constitution, lie to the public, mismanage the war and rage against agents of change elected by the public. What a sad disgrace.

- JT Compton

Utah Taliban

2007-03-17T20:14:00.000-04:00

Another reminder that the Radical Right is the Christian version of the Taliban—Utah just passed strict new rules governing how clubs in public schools can be formed and run. Officially described as an effort to provide uniformity in administration, the rules are actually a thinly veiled attack on gay-straight alliance clubs that have proliferated in recent years.

A ban on any discussion of human sexuality within clubs tells us all we need to know about the intention of the law’s authors, especially because it includes in its defition “presenting or discussing information relating to the use of contraceptive devices.” Reasonable people can differ on abortion, but those who want to curtail the use of contraceptives by others, much less curtail the mere mention of contraception, are neither reasonable nor moral--they are nothing less than cruel, judgmental tyrants.

As ever, puritanical fundamentalists feel that the human body and human sexuality are dirty and sinful, especially when used by non-believers for pleasure rather than procreation. They apparently see our physical bodies not as beautiful temples made by God but as foul instruments of the devil, and thus should never be a topic of conversation, a subject of art or an avenue of pleasure.

"If nobody talks about it, it won't exist!"

Mired in ancient superstition, repression and ignorance, the forces of religious tyranny are horrified by modernity, especially when it comes to scientific realities that subvert or contradict the magic of their beliefs. Though study after study concludes that homosexuality is an orientation mostly hard-wired at or before birth, the thought that God may have created people gay goes against the fundamentalist interpretation of scripture and the brittle notions of manhood and womanhood that their "faith" requires. How sad.

How sad that a large segment of our nation clings to superstitions from the past with no tolerance for other possibilities. How sad that they would rather condemn and judge rather than live and let live. How sad that they feel so threatened by gays, presumably in direct proportion to their own sexual insecurities and deformations. How sad that it’s not enough for them to abstain from certain behaviors—they have to force the rest of the world to live they way they see fit.

My question continues to be: How long before "true believers" in this country resort to the same tactics and methods as the Taliban in Afghanistan? How long before they start using violence to achieve their goals using God as an excuse?

At the end of the day, they don’t care about the Constitution or our cherished notions of Liberty. They care about a compilation of scrolls and "testaments" written by men thousands of years ago containing wildly conflicting and often magical fables, claiming such were written by the creator of the universe and are perfect and infallible accounts of history. Remind you of anyone?

It reminds me of the fundamentalists in the Middle East.

If American fundamentalists had their way, American women might be required to wear only skirts. They might not have an equal say in matters of family. They might not have equal protection under the law. They might be stoned to death for adultery. And so on.

American fundamentalists are scary. And every day, they try to push their superstitions on the rest of us. This week, they gained some ground in Utah. Next week, who knows.

Gonzo Must Go

2007-03-15T18:50:00.000-04:00

In a press conference this week regarding the firing by the Justice Department of eight regional U.S. Attorneys for what appear to be purely political reasons, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez conceded that “mistakes were made.” But like so many others serving at the pleasure of President Bush, the mistakes belonged to somebody other than Gonzalez.

Rather than take direct responsibility, Gonzo reminded the press of his humble origins, apparently in a preemptive attempt to thwart calls for his resignation. But those calls came anyway, from both sides of the political spectrum.

As with the Valerie Plame outing, Republican operatives and pundits assert that Gonzalez and his Justice Department broke no laws, which has become the Bush Administration’s dividing line between right and wrong.

If a law wasn’t broken, it couldn’t be wrong!

But the Bush team cannot grasp something the press has lost sight of - ethics.

Outing a CIA agent to smear an administration critic may not have been illegal, but it was clearly unethical. As well, firing US Attorneys because they act independently of executive branch influence is an unethical outrage. For this reason alone, Gonzalez should be fired.

Recall that Gonzalez is same the administration official who provided legal cover for the Bush team to torture detainees. He’s also the official who argued that the widespread, warrant-less wiretapping of American phones was legal, when most knew it wasn’t.

Gonzalez has never been open nor forthcoming in front of Congress, opting to stonewall and evade questions that go to the heart of our constitutional liberties. Like strict constructionists on the Supreme Court, Gonzalez interprets some laws strictly and ignores others to suit the purposes of his masters.

Sadly, because he has been a loyal Bush crony for decades it seems highly unlikely that the Great Decider will deign to get rid of him. To President Bush, loyalty overrides everything, including incompetence and unethical behavior.

Whether it’s Alberto Gonzalez, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Karl Rove, or any number of other bad actors in the Executive Branch, the common denominator is Dick Cheney and his imperial, hawkish, ideologically driven policies. Bush has the starring role, but Cheney is clearly the director, and everyone else follows his lead, even if it leads them off a cliff.

Congress may not be able to force Gonzalez to resign, but only by impeaching Dick Cheney for the Plame incident will they ever have a prayer of changing the course of this Administration.

Ultimately, the Bush Administration may follow the letter of the law but they’ve done everything humanly possible to trash and sully the spirit of the law. That Alberto Gonzalez has played a supporting role is particularly troubling, and yet another Bush-era disgrace.

- JT Compton

Do As They Say, Not As They Do

2007-03-09T19:19:00.000-05:00

Which is the bigger group—fundamentalist preachers and politicians who have cheated on their wives or those who haven’t?

Revelations that Radical Right politician Newt Gingrich cheated on his wife at the same time he was trying get President Clinton impeached for lying about cheating on Hilary simply confirms that the hypocrisy of arrogant, self-righteous, moralizing religious crusaders knows no bounds.

They talk the talk, but they don’t even crawl the walk.

Take the Bush Administration. No other presidency in my lifetime has paid such lip service to values, as if God himself anointed them custodians of human virtue. And yet their actions have demonstrated quite the opposite, exposing dishonesty, hubris, vengeance, cronyism, myopia, bias, indifference and incompetence. Their tenure is so disgraced, discredited and toxic that they can no longer point a finger at anyone lest ten come pointing back.

And what of Republican power brokers? Abramoff in jail, Libby guilty, DeLay on trial, Reed disgraced, Norquist exposed. It’s tough to recall a more corrupt, cancerous group of thugs in the history of the Beltway.

And what of fundamentalist Christian leaders? Beyond the notorious dealings of Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Jones and David Koresh, we have the recent scandal of Evangelical leader Ted Haggard having drug-fueled sex with a gay escort. And let’s not forget Pat Robertson’s long history of shocking and abominable public statements.

Which brings me to The Lost Tomb of Jesus, a recent Discovery channel docu-drama about a group of ossuaries (bone caskets) found near Jerusalem that may contain the remains of the family of Jesus of Nazareth, including his wife and son.

Before it even aired I could hear shrieks and moans coming from the fundamentalist right, terrified and angered at a potential assault on the rigid pillars of their orthodoxy. And sure enough, the Discovery channel decided to produce a special "discussion" segment after the show—maybe bowing to pressure—to give "other perspectives," knowing the network was going to get a lot of heat from religious fanatics.

But the panel of theological experts did less to undermine the facts of the documentary than to undermine the topsy-turvy nature of their own "faith." Few things are easier than spotting inconsistencies in the statements of religious professionals, and this show was no exception. One of the panelists, Dr. Judy Fentress-Willams of Virginia Theological Institute, made a stark statement about the Lost Tomb of Jesus documentary that I was compelled to respond to. The issue explains itself…

Dear Dr. Fentress-Williams,

On the Discovery Channel's post-"Lost Tomb Of Jesus" panel discussion, you suggested that we bring critical thinking (or its equivalent) to our assessment of the show’s content. Frankly, I was surprised.

With all due respect, it seems that critical thinking has played an insignificant role in the history of Christian faith, and certainly plays a minor role in American Christian faith today. I never hear "people of faith" defending fundamentalist beliefs on the basis of reason, rationality or common sense. Indeed, a literal reading of the Bible or any other major religious text flies in the face of reason, rationality and common sense.

If fundamentalists adopt critical thinking, it will certainly lead them to reject "sacred texts" as perfect, infallible historical documents, and to accept as fiction many of their most cherished assertions and miracles. It will likely render the Bible much like Homer’s Odyssey—a story whose seeds are historical fact, but whose fruits are magical, mythical exaggerations and fantasies.

As an American, I will defend-to-the-death the right of any citizen to believe whatever they want. But I also reserve the right to call things as I see them. How is blind faith anything but antithetical to critical thinking? As far as I can see, faith in a literal interpretation of the Bible—or any other religious text—is terrifying in its rejection of reason, rationality and common sense. It produces, by its nature, arrogance, intolerance, judgment and division.

Yes, what is left out of the "Lost Tomb Of Jesus" is significant, but so are the gospels left out of the New Testament. So are the stories, psalms and books left out of the Old Testament. The "Lost Tomb" is part fact, part fiction, part persuasion and part entertainment…and so, to any standard of common sense, is the Bible.

I’m happy to assess the "Lost Tomb Of Jesus" in the light of critical thinking. I only wish fundamentalists of all faiths were willing to assess their beliefs in the same light.

Whenever anyone uses absolutes to proclaim their moral virtue and dictate how the rest of us should live, and especially when they allow double standards, they are really exposing their own fear, insecurity and narrowness—as well as creating the perfect conditions for hypocrisy.

- JT Compton

Liar Libby

2007-03-06T19:51:00.000-05:00

Former Cheney chief-of-staff Scooter Libby was found Guilty today on 4 of 5 felony charges including perjury, obstruction of justice and making false statements. On the show that bears his name, Lou Dobbs wondered what brought Libby to this sorry verdict, asking legal expert Jeffrey Toobin, “what happened here?” Toobin’s bizarre response: “It’s really baffling.”

No Jeffrey, it’s not baffling at all. It’s quite simple…

Dick Cheney’s lie about enriched uranium going from Niger to Iraq was exposed and challenged by Ambassador Joe Wilson. Dick organized his advisors to smear Wilson. Part of that campaign included implying that Wilson was a sissy because his CIA wife, Valerie Plame, sent him to Niger. Plame’s job as a covert agent at the CIA was thus blown—a potential crime—and an investigation was launched. Cheney was terrified that he might be implicated in the crime or exposed as an unethical thug. So his right-hand-man, Libby, lied to cover the tracks back to Cheney.

And now Libby is facing serious jail time while the Bush administration is reeling from another major scandal.

President Bush today sent a low-level staff member to inform the press that he accepted the verdict of the jury—in other words, he wasn’t planning to exercise his Imperial power to nullify the verdict just yet. But like a defiant grade-schooler unwilling to accept yet another loss, Dick Cheney came to Scooter’s defense. Despite the very foundation of the Vice Presidency crumbling, Tricky Dick II would rather risk further damaging the Presidency of Dubya than come clean about a dirty, rotten scheme of his own making that went public.

And other hard-core, evidence-be-damned conservatives like pundit Ed Rodgers absolutely, categorically refuse to admit to any mistakes, miscalculations or shortcomings of what most of the rest of the world now considers the worst American Presidency in modern history.

Believing that they can do no wrong, that they know better than “the little people” public, and that anyone who disagrees with them is an unpatriotic, Commie Judas, the Cheney dead-enders will only be cowed by the judgment of history. But if an easier political prediction were ever possible, I’m not aware of it: the Bush crew will be seen by history as a nepotistic, ineffective, incompetent, blundering, divisive, scheming, arrogant, secretive, tyrannical, bullying pack of liars.

Sadly, that’s not hyperbole. It’s not even an exaggeration. Their long and growing list of failures and scandals leads firmly, inexorably to that conclusion. Indeed, in six years they’ve accomplished little except to increase the wealth of the wealthy. The only other “accomplishment” they regularly claim is that the nation hasn’t yet been completely destroyed by our enemies. As if they had any significant influence over that fact.

Meanwhile, red-faced Bush conservatives continue to shriek that their lily-white standard bearers are being falsely accused and persecuted, even as their neo-con movement dissolves and the public stands poised to toss them onto the ash-heap of history.

At this stage, nothing could be more absurd than an enraged conservative denying fact after fact. It’s a momentous, shameful disgrace, brought home this week by the conviction of Scooter Libby, liar.

- JT Compton

More Conservative Nonsense

2007-02-26T16:07:00.000-05:00

The lies, mistakes and misjudgments of the hapless and increasingly impotent Bush administration have forced conservatives to try to salvage their “movement” by retreating to the radical fringes of their constituency. Unfortunately, they’ve also retreated to the fringes of logic, reason and common sense. Consider the three glaringly idiotic positions taken by various conservatives during the past week.

1) Requiring young girls to take an HPV vaccine will encourage promiscuity.

And tetanus shots will encourage children to impale themselves on rusty metal objects.

Please. This claim is so hollow and pathetic it draws into question the intelligence, integrity and motivation of anyone who utters it. And yet conservative groups in several states are trying to block legislation requiring the vaccines for girls.

Social conservatives are terrified of their own urges and seek to limit the behavior of others in order to feel safe from dangerous territory like human sexuality—often at the expense of long-term health. How sad and tyrannical. Reasonable people need to ensure that the superstitions of social conservatives don’t infect our laws and keep our children from important medical advances, like the HPV vaccine.

2) Criticizing, restricting or rejecting the Iraq troop surge harms the morale of our troops.

Again, utter nonsense. And yet conservatives on the talk-show circuit are making the claim over and over.

What is more comforting to soldiers – the knowledge that the nation is going to get them out of a lethal, untenable and relentless civil war, or the knowledge that the nation is keeping them there and committing more lives and resources to a hopeless situation?

Debate, oversight and the reversal of the worst foreign policy mistake in our nation’s history serves to comfort our troops, and further demonstrates to enemies and others the principles and values of our democratic system. On the other hand, an unfettered Imperial President whose ego drives him to compound his mistakes at the expense of our military hurts morale and emboldens our enemies.

3) Global warming scientists are just bureaucrats and can't predict the future.

Conservative Michael Crichton appeared on Charlie Rose last week and made a series of bold, knowing, professorial pronouncements about Global Warming. But rather than offer any data of substance to back his position, he spent his time criticizing and belittling the recently released IPCC report, a consensus document stating that global warming was real, grave and caused by human activity (see my 2/6 post).

According to Crichton, his information providers are skilled and correct while the sixteen hundred international scientists who contributed to the IPCC report were all “bureaucrats,” and thus worthy of dismissal.

Like so many conservatives, Crichton gives blanket condemnation to an entire group of people whose position he disagrees with. Rather than attack the substance of their conclusions, he attacks their character and belittles them with labels, all to sell his own book. But like other climate change Denialists, Crichton has done nothing to change the fundamentals of what we know about global warming.

Reading from standard conservative talking points, he also claimed that predicting the future is impossible, and thus any projections made by climatologists should be dismissed. Which is also utter nonsense. Climate models, like all complex, technology-based mathematical models, are getting more accurate and robust with every passing day. To completely dismiss their conclusions would be pure folly. And few of them are predicting anything less than dire.

But even if they turn out to be inaccurate, wouldn’t it be better to err on the side of safety and prevention than on the side of doing nothing? Thus far, Crichton and his ilk are just a lot of dangerous hot air.

- JT Compton

Global Warming's Dangerous Deniers

2007-02-06T15:27:00.000-05:00

A recently released report by the International Panel on Climate Change stated that Global Warming was a certainty, that the cause was human activity to at least a 90% probability, and that the consequences would be dire. The IPCC has a history of caution and rigor, and this report was formed by a huge number of respected scientists from 40 countries. It represents a broad, unparalleled scientific consensus

But two other aspects of this report were notable.

First, that a large number of scientists vehemently disagreed with the report. No, not the oil-funded pseudo-scientists—they’ve all but disappeared. These dissenters felt that the word “dire” was too weak. They wanted stronger language, stating that words like “catastrophic” were much more appropriate.

It's significant that the possibilities for Global Warming are increasingly falling into the range of “dire” to “catastrophic”. There are no longer legitimate groups or bodies of scientists arguing that the consequences will be mild or beneficial.

Second, another group of dissenters--outside the scientific community--disagreed with the report, led by Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma. These might best be described as the oil addicts in denial. Flying in the face of a sea of facts and consensus reports, Inhofe and his small but angry following claimed that Global Warming was a “hoax.” Indeed, Inhofe stated recently that the hoax is being perpetrated because The Weather Channel and others stand to make money off it by spreading fear.

As grotesquely ridiculous as Inhofe and his claim are, his office gives him a legitimacy that continues to impede progress on this crucial issue. It should come as no surprise that the oil-patch Senator Inhofe received more campaign contributions from the oil industry than any other, by almost a two-to-one margin.

But beyond revealing ignorance and a conflict of interest, Inhofe’s comment also reveals the dark side of the Conservative mentality. His claim that cable channels make money from climate change is a reflection of the greedy, money grubbing, pay-for-play world he comes from. He’s taking the reality of his own office—one bought and paid for by oil companies and others whose motives are to keep their elite officers in the millions by paying for legislative favors—and projecting that reality on others.

But Senator Inhofe’s brain can neither grasp nor trust that scientists and the environmental community are often motivated by a passion for truth and nature. Unlike Inhofe, they’re not desperate to maintain their hundred-grand membership at the local country club so they can hang with a bunch of other back-slapping, drunken, wealthy white golfers and scheme on ways to make more money by screwing others.

Conservatives like Inhofe have a tough time understanding anything but the motivation to make a buck, and the last six years of GOP rule reflect that mindset. By shifting vast amounts of wealth to the already-wealthy, they’ve done an effective job of widening the gap between rich and poor in America. Which is why those who deny Global Warming are often those who have the most invested in conspicuous consumption and a lavish, wasteful lifestyle.

Denial is a means to avoid responsibility. Accepting the harm that carbon emissions do to the environment--and the threat they have created--means taking responsibility for developing a new paradigm for society, not to mention making personal sacrifices.

In a perfectly just world, our future would include keeping track of those who deny climate change and impede its correction, penalizing them as the situation worsens. If food or energy shortages occur, the deniers would stand at the back of the line. As regions bake, deniers would be the last ones allowed to move.

But the world isn’t just, and voters are often as ignorant and deluded as their leaders. Until people stop electing dangerously misguided and reckless people like Inhofe, the issue of Global Warming will continue to be attacked and impeded while the world burns.

- JT Compton

Republicans Hating Bush

2007-01-26T13:22:00.000-05:00

This week in Washington, President Bush continued doing a wonderful job of ruining his party’s future. His State of the Union speech paid lip service to a number of hot-button domestic issues, but a closer examination revealed neither substance nor a genuine willingness to make fundamental change.

Meanwhile, Democrats continued to ramp up efforts to investigate the myriad mistakes, deceptions and possible illegalities committed during the last five years. It looks like a report will finally be issued on pre-war intelligence distortions, and hearings on illegal wiretapping will continue despite the recent administration flip-flop allowing courts to oversee the surveillance program.

As if ripping a scab off an old wound, the Scooter Libby trial also began this week, and it has already made sensational headlines. The prosecution is alleging—as I predicted long ago—that Libby lied to investigators to hide the fact that his boss, Vice President Cheney, was behind the Joe Wilson smear campaign and the outing of Valerie Plame. Cheney was apparently enraged that his brilliance was being questioned and his lies exposed, and became obsessed with discrediting critic Wilson. Were this fact to become public during the first investigation, it would have cast further aspersion on the White House at a critical and vulnerable time, a time when the Bush team wanted to redraw the map of the Middle East by trumping up the easiest available excuse, WMD.

The news coming from Congressional investigations and the Libby trial will only hasten what the Bush Troop Surge has ensured—the demise of Bush’s failed presidency. But with a tide of legislation sure to flow from the newly Democratic congress, Bush seems determined to go down swinging. By vetoing items like a minimum wage hike, he will ensure that his own party will suffer in 2008 when 21 Republican Senators go up for re-election versus only 12 Democrats. No wonder so many of the 21 are breaking ranks and openly opposing the Bush Troop Surge, as well as embracing a number of other issues that Bush stubbornly opposes.

The Bush disaster may also guarantee that a Democrat will be elected President in 2008. John McCain has already damaged his chances by pushing for an even bigger troop surge than Bush. In fact, I feel comfortable predicting that if John McCain became the GOP nominee, he would lose to whoever the Democrats chose—Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Gore or Mickey Mouse. The Republican who currently stands a chance of beating the Democrats is Rudy Giuliani, but he will have a tough time getting his party’s nomination. The only other hope the Republicans have to salvage the Presidency from the bomb-crater left by Bush would be a come-from-behind surge by a maverick underdog like Chuck Hegel. Otherwise, forget it.

Bush and Cheney love to defer questions about their legacy, claiming that history will be the judge. But it doesn’t take a high-school diploma to see that the Bush Administration is an unmitigated disaster. Along almost every axis, on virtually every subject, Bush has failed to achieve anything of substance or value, while at the same time compromising our military, destroying or damaging countless lives, trashing our international credibility, wasting a vast trove of money and making our future less safe. Bland, happy speeches filled with focus-group-tested phrases will do nothing to alter the downward spiral of the Bush Presidency and the Republican Party. No wonder so many in the GOP are fighting mad.

- JT Compton

Labeling Liberals

2007-01-22T14:17:00.000-05:00

Broadcast media can't resist using labels, especially when describing Democrats. Despite the bludgeoning taken by the GOP in the last election, and despite the ongoing disaster in the White House, newscasters seem intent on slamming Dems while granting Republicans immunity.

When was the last time you heard anyone describe Rudy Giuliani as a Liberal Republican? When was the last time you heard anyone describe Jack Murtha as a Conservative Democrat? These labels are as true as any, but you'll never hear them because they don't play into the stereotypes that so-called journalists love to fall back on.

When was the last time you heard anyone call Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Gingrich, Brownback or their ilk "radical fundamentalists" or "far-right fanatics"? Never. When was the last time you heard anyone call any number of Democrats "lefties" or "far-left liberals" or "on the liberal fringe" or "hysterical activists"? Just turn on the television.

I noticed on MSNBC that commentator Norah O'Donnell enjoys taking an obviously mocking, derisive tone when talking about Democratic Presidential hopefuls. In my experience, she has yet to do the same with Republican contenders. Shame on her, and shame on so many other commentators who lack the integrity and imagination to stop using convenient slurs in favor of commentary worthy of a journalist.

Here is a letter I wrote to O'Donnell in frustration:

Dear Norah,

Watching MSNBC Live recently, I noticed that you consistently describe Democratic presidential hopefuls in ways that are insulting, personal and derisive. You often use a mocking tone, as you did today when you suggested that Hilary Clinton's presidential announcement was softened to contrast her, using your words, "cold, calculating" persona.

I'm not sure if you consider yourself a journalist, but if you do, I'm wondering when I will get to hear you talk about Republicans in the same way.

For example, when will I hear your voice take on a phony-southern accent as you describe John McCain as a "hypocritical flip-flopper"?

When will I hear you dumb down your voice to describe Sam Brownback as a "right-wing extremist fundamentalist"?

For that matter, when will I get to hear you knowingly describe President Bush as a "lying, incompetent failure"?

Thanks for all the editorials. I'm sure Focus On The Family will give you a nice seven-figure consulting job the minute you want to leave MSNBC...

- JT Compton

Victory Fantasy

2007-01-16T17:10:00.000-05:00

On Meet The Press last weekend, Bush Administration mouthpieces including Senator Joe Lieberman and National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley came out in support of the Bush troop surge.

In his usual whiny cadence, Lieberman mumbled to Tim Russert of the Bush plan, “It’s a plan to win in Iraq, and I believe we still can.”

Leaving aside that Joe Lieberman is a walking caricature—a bizarrely awkward man whose statements are often so ridiculous, off-putting and bereft of common sense that his reelection was nothing short of astonishing—what does his strange mind imagine when it contemplates winning in Iraq?

On the Bush perspective, Stephen Hadley agreed with Lieberman, saying of Iraq that, "...both of us have an interest in success. The costs of failure are just too high." He went on to note that, "...the president understands the American people are tired of this war."

Wrong. The American people are tired of the lies, distortions, bad decisions and incompetence that shaped Iraq into a disaster of historic proportions. And they have no faith that the President and his civilian leaders can suddenly “succeed” in Iraq after a long seige of failure.

Despite years of rhetoric and propaganda to the contrary, Iraq is not a war. It is an occupation and police action. We are fighting a “war” of sorts against al-Qaeda, but Iraq has much less to do with terrorism than it has to do with nation building and forced democracy. Because we are occupying a nation as a de facto security force, Americans understand that “victory” is not the proper term to be using. There is nothing to “win.”

So until the small and shrinking group of stalwart administration officials, including cheerleader Lieberman, grasp the fact that winning and victory have become meaningless—as the American public already has—they will continue to make historic blunder after historic blunder.

We only have two forms of real influence left in Iraq. Our munitions and our occupation. Clearly, we cannot bomb Iraq into peace. Indeed, the more force we use, the worse the situation gets for all involved. Our only other leverage is our physical presence. When we threaten to begin to withdraw, Iraqi politicians and moderates will truly face up to the prospect of an Iraq without our troops. Whether Iraqis will then come together has always been, and will ever remain, beyond our control. If our withdrawal unleashes full-blown genocide (as opposed to the small-scale genocide currently occurring every day in Iraq), the UN should step in and try to do what our inept and bungling leaders failed to do—put together a coalition of nations to shepherd a resolution.

Sadly, because of the arrogance and rancor of the Bush approach to invasion, nobody will come to the aid of Iraq until we are gone and humiliated.

Every time you hear a deluded hawk talk about “winning” in Iraq, they are really talking about the victory of fantasy over reality, of spin over truth. George Bush was stupid enough to stir a hornet's nest and twenty thousand additional troops will do nothing to get the hornets back in the hive. What idiots.

- JT Compton

Too Much Too Late

2007-01-10T22:16:00.000-05:00

In tonight's address to the nation, President Bush spoke more honestly and precisely than at any time in his entire presidency. Sadly, his speech raised as many troubling questions as it answered, and fell far short of the convincing rationale needed to rescue his folly in Iraq. Doubling down with a new troop surge still sounds like a solidly tragic idea.

Though his characterization of the chaos in Baghdad was refreshingly stark and honest, he made it seem like the horrific violence was a recent, post-election occurrence, which is absolutely false and misleading. Sectarian violence has been endemic in Baghdad almost from the beginning of our occupation, increasing steadily and unfettered for years. How can we trust Bush to fix this mess if we he can’t even understand or acknowledge the actual timing and history of the mess?

Also, the details of Bush’s “new” strategy included a host of things we should have been doing from the very start. Holding cleared territory. Preventing arms from entering via Iran and Syria. Using diplomacy to pressure moderates to join our effort. Very little of substance was offered tonight that we haven’t already tried before—and found lacking.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of his strategy involved how much of it rests on the Iraqi leadership for success. According to Bush, the troop surge will “provide breathing room” for the Iraqi government to bolster its grip on security. But can we honestly believe that the Iraqi leaders will chasten their militias, forgo vengeance and set aside deep-seated tribal hatreds because we tell them to? We’ve been begging them to stop their militias for months, but things have only worsened.

Bush made it clear that this is the time for Iraq to stand up and take responsibility for its future. But he’s made the same call to action countless times before: after the elections, after the capture of Saddam, after the death of al-Zawahiri, and so on. America is sick and tired of last chances. The only leverage we have over the leadership of Iraq is our ability to leave. The timing and pace of our departure must be the final motivation for Iraq to choose civility over bloodshed.

Otherwise, it makes me wonder, yet again, if Iraq has anyone like a Muslim Martin Luther King—a courageous, high-profile leader promoting non-violent change and reconciliation. Absent such an icon, and with our troops a permanent though impotent fixture, it’s hard to see anything that might catalyze a change in their national ethos and stop a civil war.

Imagine if Bush had said, “We’ve come to the conclusion that a slow, phased withdrawal, at a timing and pace of our choosing, will give Iraqi leaders the best motivation to set their differences aside, order their minions to stop the torture and murder, and bring their nation into civility.”

Instead, his troop surge will likely only postpone the day of our departure at an even higher and more tragic cost, while doing little to alter the bloody course Iraq seems otherwise determined to follow.

- JT Compton

New Direction for Health Care?

2007-01-01T19:30:00.000-05:00

As a self-employed American, I know first-hand the ridiculous, wasteful and burdensome state of our broken, pitiful health care system. Unlike many, I’m fortunate to barely afford the sky-high premiums of one of the few single-payer plans offered in New York State. And I’m horrified but not surprised that my premiums have increased by 20%, 20%, and 12% in the last three years. This year’s increase will add a whopping $1,227 to my already enormous insurance bill.

The recent drubbing of the GOP at the polls--a repudiation of the Bush Presidency--gave me new hope that our leaders would stop gorging themselves on health care lobby cash and finally focus on this critical issue, but history suggests otherwise. As Paul Krugman reminded us in today’s excellent New York Times Op Ed entitled A Healthy New Year, when the Clinton White House tried even modest changes to the system, the health-care industry went into overdrive to crush his plan, throwing mountains of money at lawmakers and the media.

More insidious and corrosive, however, are those citizens who believe Universal Health Care is somehow tantamount to socialism. Despite the fact that a Medicare-for-all system would significantly decrease the total cost of our collective medical burden (which, like global warming, is a consensus fact), naysayers can’t set their anger, bigotry and ignorance aside to embrace something that would benefit so many.

People against Universal Health Care rarely give informed or rational reasons to support their position, relying instead on jingoistic notions of capitalism and self sufficiency, or on old, tired stereotypes about Godless Communists or the French (who, by the way, have a better and less expensive health care system than ours). Their stance flies in the face of both compassion and utility, having more to do with raging against handouts benefiting others (usually minorities) while confusing Heath Care with Welfare. Their immoral “logic” goes like this; Giving health care to lazy poor people is the same as giving welfare to lazy poor people.

I believe it is far better to teach a person to fish than to give a person a fish, but Health Care is an entirely different issue. In fact, the “lazy poor” use emergency rooms for their health care, which increases costs for the rest of us. It is, instead, the hardworking middle who often don’t have coverage and are forced into bankruptcy when a medical crisis occurs. Many people make enough to afford food and shelter but can’t afford single-payer health insurance premiums because they work for themselves, for small businesses or for the growing numbers of huge corporations like Wal-Mart who go out of their way to designate workers as part-time employees.

As Democrats take control of Congress and begin to address the wide array of important issues fat, greedy Republican lawmakers were paid to ignore, I’m sure I’ll hear a new raft of heartless, irrational whiners trying to keep HMOs and Insurance Companies in record profits while the rest of us suffer. As they try to smear and label anyone not in their camp, their anger, rage and bitterness will become increasingly apparent. But will that help to turn the tide and force lawmakers to provide health benefits for all? Will we be able catch up to the rest of the civilized world and create a system that we can be proud of, instead of the disgraceful system our wealthy lobbyists bribe politicians to maintain? I hope so. But if not, we should ridicule and shun those who put their immoral, selfish agendas in the way of progress and decency. Shame on them.

Healthy New Year.

- JT Compton

New Business vs. Business as Usual

2006-12-21T18:00:00.000-05:00

The spotlight returned to the 2008 Presidential race this week as Senator Obama made speeches in several different states and Senator Evan Bayh, assumed to be a contender, officially declined to run.

Pundits framed the potential candidacies of Obama and Hilary Clinton as "New Ideas vs Old Ideas", which may be true. But a similar line of thinking works with the putative Republican frontrunners, Rudy Giuliani and John McCain.

McCain is coming to represent business as usual, while Rudy represents a new direction for the GOP, one less focused on curbing social liberties and more focused on competent stewardship--"New Business vs Business as Usual". The catastrophic failures and ineptitude of the Bush Administration will give candidates like John McCain a tough time.

Though posing as a Maverick, McCain has rarely broken step with the President, and his support of a troop surge in Iraq may doom his candidacy before it ever gets off the ground. By sending more troops to stem a brutal civil war (apparently against the advice of the Joint Chiefs), Bush might as well be putting the military and treasury on the roulette table and betting it all on the number thirteen. His chances of success are virtually none, while his chances of compounding tragedy are high.

A former Democrat, Liberal Republican Giuliani is a candidate that Democrats uneasy with Hilary Clinton can embrace. Unlike ultra-conservative McCain, Giuliani won't be tainted by the mistakes of the Bush team, and won't be swayed by religious fanatics on the ultra-right fringe, the same fanatics McCain once denounced but now embraces.

Keep in mind that many Republicans despise McCain, and consider him untrustworthy. His nomination is anything but certain. At this early stage, I suspect Republicans understand that McCain may not be electable, and may overlook Rudy's social policies and support him in numbers large enough to overcome McCain.

If so, Hilary would be in trouble. But then, frontrunners are vulnerable and Hilary has Obama, Edwards, Gore and others to contend with. No matter how much Democratic voters like her, if they feel she is unelectable they won't support her, either. The stakes in 2008 are too high.

Happy Holidays!

- JT Compton

Afraid To Work

2006-12-12T17:26:00.000-05:00

Once again, congressional Republicans are giving us a brilliant demonstration of why they lost power, and why their party has become the standard-bearer of sloth and hypocrisy.

Republican Representatives have become outraged by a five-day work week recently mandated by the Democratic Leadership. They claim Democrats are anti-family because the new rule will keep them from their kids—and whatever else they want to do in their free time. No wonder nothing meaningful got done on Capitol Hill in the past five years. No wonder, when asked by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart to point to one good thing Congress had done in that time, Senator Lincoln Chafee couldn't muster a single answer. Those poor Republicans. What a disgrace.

So are Republicans becoming Socialists? Do they feel entitled to Government pay regardless of the quantity or quality of their work? Or instead, do they feel entitled to their positions because they see themselves as the wealthy elite? Or are they anti-capitalism? Or are they anti work? Do they not understand that most Americans—often both parents—work five days or more per week to support their families? Do they think voters put them into office to write flag-burning amendments?

Until they get off their fat, lazy wallets and try to solve the problems facing this nation (many of which they bear responsibility for), they will continue to lose elections. Until they stop listening to their CEO buddies in their private clubs and listen, instead, to the millions living without health insurance, without stable jobs, without pensions and without hope, they deserve nothing less than the boot.

Which brings me to Tom DeLay, poster boy for everything corrupt and unethical about the Bush Congress. Tom still thinks he has a future in politics and maybe he’s right. Maybe there are enough gullible people in Texas or wherever he claims to be living nowadays to fool with his phony-pious "I was a victim of the media" nonsense.

But like other politicians whose egos drive them into big trouble, DeLay still doesn’t get the joke. He doesn't grasp that he's become a disgraced laughing stock. In fact, his newly introduced Blog had to be taken down because it received a massive flood of negative comments from Americans disgusted and horrified by his scandalous Congressional conduct.

So Republicans, both those in office and those who have resigned in disgrace, can keep kicking and screaming and pretending the world has done them wrong. And in the process, they’ll keep losing elections and losing ground in American politics. Given their recent history, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

- JT Compton

Regarding Lost Patience

2006-12-08T14:15:00.000-05:00

Donald Rumsfeld officially resigned today and suggested that America had lost patience with the war in Iraq.

He was close.

We have lost patience, but not with the war. We’ve lost patience with incompetence, bungling, lying and myopia. We’ve come to see that “staying the course” means doing the same things over and over again while expecting different results--which is the definition of insanity.

Too bad President Bush and Vice Dick Cheney still don’t get it. They are already busy trying to avoid most of the Iraq Study Group Report recommendations. Rather than defer to a non-partisan committee of some of the nation's most experienced foreign policy and strategic thinkers, they seem determined to rely upon their own broken judgment regardless of the cost.

But as any psychologist knows, a broken mind can’t fix itself. We have every reason to expect that an administration with such a pitiful and disastrous track-record lacks the ability to turn things around on its own.

Let’s hope the nation can stand two more years of their denial and intransigence. Because the way they are behaving, it doesn’t appear the Bush dead-enders intend to do anything differently. Getting rid of Rummy only shrank the inner circle of true believers.

- JT Compton

The Real Snobs

2006-11-27T15:05:00.000-05:00

Two weeks ago New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a piece entitled "The Heyday of Snobbery," arguing that the Democrats, in taking back control of Congress, were gloating with unprecedented force. Further, he claimed that popular culture acts as an enforcer of snobbery, noting that movies like Borat cater to liberal-elite audiences (in his words, those who shop at Whole Foods) by making fun of mainstream Americans. Neither could be further from the truth.

When it comes to snobbery, no other group comes close to the arrogance displayed by the Republicans after the election of Bush in 2000. And no sub-group of Republicans has a more troubling history of "holier-than-thou" than the religious right. Here's a letter I wrote to the Times in response to Brooks:

On the subject of snobbery, what could be more arrogant than believing, “My sacred book is the absolute truth against which all others are false?” What could be more judgmental than believing, “I will go to paradise but you will go to hell?” What could be more intolerant than believing, “It’s not enough to follow my own principles--you must be forced to follow them too?” I may feel a sense of pride when buying organic produce, perhaps even a sense of superiority. But this is a far cry from the grandiose conceit of the religious right, a group of super-snobs David Brooks conveniently fails to include in his rigged, unfair fight. Intolerance is truly intolerable, especially when it rests on blind faith and superstition.

Concerning Borat, I wonder if Brooks even saw it. His description bore scant resemblance to the movie I watched. In it, Sasha Baron Cohen's character made fun of almost everyone, beginning in--of all places--liberal New York. How, for example, did playing an anti-semitic prank on a bed-and-breakfast owned by a Jewish couple cater to the liberal sense of humor?

Brooks can't see that labels like "liberal elite" and "people who shop at Whole Foods" are at least as snobby and judgmental as the attitudes he is trying--and failing--to criticize.

Indeed, does David Brooks believe that people living in rural areas think and act with the same tolerance and acceptance as people living in cities and forced daily to interact with others of vastly different backgrounds, customs, languages and appearances? This is a question of social science, and its answer rests on observation and statistics. But given his description of Borat, I'm not confident a response from Brooks will include accurate observation.

- JT Compton

What Terrorists?

2006-11-20T15:47:00.000-05:00

They’re at it again. Reality-challenged conservatives are discussing our Iraq policy in terms of terrorists instead of insurgents. Ignoring consensus, conservative pundits spent weekend TV appearances insisting that the ongoing violence in Baghdad stems from foreign-born Al Qaeda fanatics instead of disaffected Iraqis.

This fiction serves the ultimate aim of keeping our forces in Iraq into the foreseeable future despite the fact that we are failing by almost every measure—security, stability, rebuilding and fence-mending.

The logic goes like this: If we set a timetable for withdrawal, the terrorists will simply wait until we're gone to take over the country and rejoice at their victory over the weak Americans.

But this logic rests on the flawed assumption that terrorists are responsible for the bulk of the violence in Iraq. The truth is, the vast majority of people doing the killing in Iraq are Iraqis. They're getting even for past grievances, projecting tribal power into the vacuum of actual power caused by an ineffective and quarreling coalition government, and lashing out at Americans they consider to be invaders.

The small Al Qaeda faction in Iraq actually owes its existence to our military presence. Once we leave, their rallying principle, the war against Western infidels, evaporates. They want us to stay so they can continue recruiting a new generation to replace the one destroyed in Afghanistan and to stoke the flames of theocratic hate and division. Our departure will turn the spotlight on them—also unwanted foreign invaders—and the people of Iraq will eventually kick them out, too.

So what does happen when we leave? Chaos and bloodshed, but not from Al Qaeda terrorists. From religio-ethnic tribal factions struggling for power. The magnitude of that violence will be a function of one thing—the ability of moderate Iraqis and their government to come together and reject widespread civil war.

Until we leave, we enable Iraqis to put off that ultimate reckoning. And meanwhile, Iraq slips further toward chaos and civil war anyway. So the sooner we leave, the greater the stability and energy remaining for Iraqis to face their future. The longer we stay, the more depleted and ravaged the country they must claim and revitalize on their own.

If we truly believe in freedom and responsibility, we should set a timetable for gradual withdrawal to force Iraqis to embrace both. Until then, Iraqis will not have true freedom, but will have our presence as an excuse to avoid the difficult and dangerous choices responsibility requires.

At this point, staying in Iraq only postpones the inevitable, at tremendous and tragic cost to us. But until conservatives admit that terrorists are not the problem in Iraq, we'll keep paying.

- JT Compton

Fundamentalist Threat

2006-11-14T14:48:00.000-05:00

Now that America has kicked the Republican party to the curb we can expect less legislation threatening our constitution, our liberties, our environment and our economy.

But a grave threat to progress and liberty remains--the cancer of fundamentalism.

Though many Islamic fundamentalists want to do us harm from without, certain Christian fundamentalists remain committed to destroying America from within.

For many fundamentalists, like Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus On The Family, the loss of Republican control of Congress won’t stop them from pushing their radical agenda on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

As David D. Kirkpatrick noted in the New York Times today, Dobson and other Evangelical Christians have become strong supporters of Israel, both politically and financially, because somewhere in the Bible it mentions something that can be interpreted to mean that a Second Coming of Jesus can only occur if Israel is safely in the hands of the Jews.

So despite the fact that Evangelicals blame the Jews for killing Jesus, they want to help Jews control Israel now...so the Jews can be sent to hell later when Jesus returns.

Notwithstanding the fact that much of this “theory” comes from the book of Revelations, which is a delusional, magical tome of blatant nonsense, it is both sad and horrifying that so much energy and passion are being directed toward such fantastical, abstract and wasteful goals.

Consider the case of the red cow. Apparently, another interpretation of some Biblical passage suggests that Jesus will return around the time that a red cow appears. So fundamentalists have been funding a bovine breeding team to try to come up with a red cow. Forget about Cancer, AIDS, Parkinsons--let’s spend millions to breed a red cow!

Behind the desire to usher in a Second Coming, fundamentalists hope to gain greater and greater control of the society surrounding them. Not content to live according to their own restrictions, they strive to force the rest of us to live by their mores, even if they have to scrap the constitution and democracy to do it.

But as long as preachers claim to be emissaries of the creator of the Universe, corruption is soon to follow. And as long as those same preachers claim that ancients books were written by the creator of the Universe, and are thus perfect and infallible, destruction and misery will eventually result.

For proof, just look at the Middle East. Terrorism based on religion is simply a cousin of tyranny based on religion. One uses physical violence while the other uses emotional and mental violence. Both are lamentable and antithetical to democracy and liberty. Both embody intolerance, arrogance and division.

Until people embrace a spirituality that isn’t predicated on ancient, static, fallible books, our laws, liberties and environment will remain in jeopardy. And until we Americans pluck the beam of literal religion from our own eyes, we can never hope to remove the splinter of fundamentalism from the eyes of anyone else in the world.

- JT Compton

Blowout

2006-11-08T21:20:00.000-05:00

Bitter spin from President Bush today couldn’t eclipse the stunning midterm elections, which became a 3-in-1 victory for Democrats:

The Dems control the House.

The Dems will likely control the Senate.

And Donald Rumsfeld is gone.

(Did you notice Bush's lie about Donald Rumsfeld? - He claimed that he waited until after the election to fire the Secretary of Defense to avoid affecting the outcome. For God's sake, just admit the election defeat and recent military editorials forced you into it.)

A sane, inclusive, pluralistic, science-believing centrist couldn’t ask for more that this historic result. But two important points need to be clarified.

Firstly, this election wasn’t only about Iraq and George Bush. As I’ve written before, people were angry at the culture of corruption in Washington--and exit polls proved it.

It was not lost on voters that the Republican-controlled Congress a) did nothing to oversee the executive branch, b) fostered a climate of lobbyist-fueled pork whose earmarks infected every spending bill, c) allowed agencies to be staffed with cronies who were inept or whose interests ran counter to the mission of those very same agencies, d) tried to bend or overlook ethics rules on a variety of fronts, e) went out of their way to exclude and belittle their Democratic counterparts, f) chose the politics of smear, spin and innuendo at the expense of honesty, g) spent their time on divisive and ultimately trivial issues instead of enacting meaningful legislation, h) spent more time campaigning back home than governing in Washington, and i) gave themselves regular, ample raises while denying any increase to the minimum wage earned by the poorest Americans.

Along with this lamentable mix, add the grinding, ongoing failure in Iraq, the disgraceful mishandling of Katrina, the endless immigration mess, the unwillingness to enact suggestions of the 9/11 commission, and dropping the ball in Afghanistan--all making us less safe.

No wonder the election was a blowout.

It was the corrupt GOP, stupid!

Secondly, this election was a cry for accountability. Many scared and shamed conservatives have been preemptively whining that the Democrats shouldn’t go on any witch hunts--“we’ve got to look forward instead of looking back.”

How absurd. When someone robs a bank and gets caught later, do we say, “forget about it, it was in the past, let’s look forward instead?” Of course not. We press charges.

People have to be held accountable for their crimes, mistakes and failed policies, whether military contractors who defrauded the government, spy agencies who have broken the law, or politicians who lied to the American people in order to pursue an otherwise untenable agenda.

Washington remains a mess. And the Democrats have an uphill battle to enact meaningful change in the face of a stubborn Bush Team, who already pledged to dig in their heels and go kicking and screaming in any direction other than their own. Bush and his cronies insist that they must “do the right thing” and “stick to their convictions” despite a broad consensus against them. They refuse to accept that their convictions are dangerously wrong and the broad consensus holds far greater wisdom than their delusional cadre of ideologues.

Sadly, it doesn’t appear a landslide will be enough to pierce the bubble of arrogance and denial surrounding the Bush Administration. But at least they no longer have Congress as a partner in crime. Things may not get better immediately, but they are far less likely to get any worse.

- JT Compton

Repress-The-Vote Republicans

2006-11-07T14:45:00.000-05:00

If you haven’t already, get out and vote!

And if you’re lucky, your vote may actually be counted.

Unless you plan to vote for a Republican candidate, you’re in the crosshairs of the Republican Repress-The-Vote Machine. While dirty tricks have been played by both parties over the centuries, Republicans have recently brought voting manipulation to a new low.

Whether requiring discriminatory ID’s at polling places, sending illegal notices to certain groups that they will be arrested if they try to vote, unleashing automated calling programs to annoy registered Democrats in the middle of the night, intimidating voters at the polls, challenging the registrations of entire precincts, or altering the vote counts in precincts under their control, the GOP has become the party of dirty voting.

What does it say about Republicans that they hold such a solid claim to the title? How has the GOP become the party of voter bullying and repression?

Could it be that their incessantly touted “morals and values” are a brazen sham? Could it be that they have little regard for ethics when it comes to staying in power? Could it be that they will stop at nothing--including debasing our cherished system of voting--to keep their radical and failing agenda from being thwarted? Their behavior over the last five years provides ample and conclusive evidence that the answer is “yes”.

Whether breaking the law to funnel campaign donations where they are not allowed, taking payments from lobbyists who then write laws that their politician lapdogs rubber-stamp, requiring government contractors to have no dealings with Democrats, enacting laws that their President is not bound to follow, filling legislation with massive earmarks that were never discussed in public--the Republican Party has run amok.

Hopefully, Americans will smack down the GOP at the polls today. But given the sleazy, disgusting tactics the desperate elephant has employed in these final hours of the election, the outcome is already suspect.

What a shame. And what a disgrace. Were I a Republican, I would feel deeply embarrassed and horrified that my party had sunk to such a pitiful and troubling low. Fortunately, I’m not. And I voted. I hope it counts.

- JT Compton

Electronic Voting Is A Disgrace

2006-11-02T23:18:00.000-05:00

In an era filled with important, fascinating and shocking feature documentaries (Enron, Inconvenient Truth, Fog of War, Control Room), perhaps the most important of them aired on HBO tonight, entitled “Hacking Democracy," made by Seattle grandmother Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting.

This is a work of precise and illuminating investigative reporting. And after watching it, if you don’t think our electoral process is in grave jeopardy - and thus our democracy - you might be better suited living in a Communist dictatorship.

Electronic voting fraud is a far greater threat to our democracy than any terrorist, and our voting system is clearly in shambles. For the same reason that the music industry got Napsterized and the movie industry operates in a state of digital piracy terror, electronic voting creates enormous digital vulnerabilities and opportunities for fraud. It’s simple - digital data is extremely easy to manipulate and change, without leaving any trail at all.

Hacking Democracy sheds essential light on the suspicious results of the 2004 Presidential election, showing exactly how elections might have been stolen in the past, and certainly will be in the future. It also exposes the irregularities, conflicts of interest and outright lies of voting-machine makers like Diebold. To say the film is shocking, disturbing and disgusting would be an understatement...

This film is downright incendiary.

Few things are more sacred to America than the concept of “one person, one vote.” For that principle to be jeopardized should horrify us all, regardless of our political leanings. Hacking Democracy should be an urgent call to arms.

First of all, we need much greater transparency when it comes to the inner workings of voting technology. Second, every election should have a verifiable paper trail. This may not flatter our modern sensibilities, but there is no just or effective alternative.

Anyone who deems a paper trail unnecessary has a lot to answer for. And if you happen to live in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, your leaders have a lot to answer for, too. They spent twenty-two million dollars on a Diebold system after being alerted to its grave system faults. Shame on them.

If states don’t replace their paperless, electronic systems, people will eventually take public office who don't deserve to be there. Sadly, they may already have. What could be more un-American?

- JT Compton

Secretary of Defensiveness

2006-10-27T21:26:00.000-04:00

The news conference held by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld yesterday was a surreal event. I kept wondering, “Will he ever pull his head out of his you-know-what and give a straight answer to a straight question?”

They should rename his position the Secretary of Defensiveness. Like a pissy little schoolboy, Rummy bristled at the pointed questions hurled at him by the press. His responses rarely went beyond tweaking, noodling, bobbing and spinning. And often, he flat-out refused to answer. Not because they were bad questions, but because any answer would have made him and the Bush team look bad.

When challenged on the deplorable and deteriorating situation in Iraq, he finally replied, “Honorable people are working on these things together”. As if that should give us comfort.

Rummy doesn’t grasp that most of the nation now regards him as dishonorable. With good reason, Americans have reached the sad conclusion that he and his team are evasive, untrustworthy and incompetent.

Rummy recently tried to "take responsibility" for the situation in Iraq, but his statements amounted to, Yes, I’m in charge of the war apparatus and take responsibility for being in charge, but refuse to acknowledge that horrific blunders and miscalculations were made. Whatever minor problems have occurred are the fault of rogue individuals, not me.

So much for President Bush’s promise to restore accountability to government.

Ever the Cheerleader, Rummy insisted that we will win in Iraq, whatever that now means. “The way to get there is in steps.” But he won’t say what new steps we are taking. Instead, we seem to be staying the course even though the administration has outlawed that phrase. Rather than adjust military and political strategy, Republicans merely want to adjust the language we use to talk about it.

But the most tragic aspect of Rumsfeld’s demeanor remains his unwillingness to answer tough questions with honesty and a seriousness befitting the gravity of the situation. He’ll joke, evade and get mad, but he won’t say or do anything to acknowledge that his team has really screwed things up, that likely hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result, and that Americans have good and right reason to be angry and upset.

Instead, Rummy just keeps bumbling on.

______________________

For a fascinating reminder of the horrors of war, the sacrifices made and the damage done by government lies and dishonesty, see the new movie “Flags Of Our Fathers,” directed by Clint Eastwood from the book by the same name.

It’s a deep, dark homage to our nation’s soldiers, telling three tales at once: The story of the battle of Iwo Jima including the infamous flag-raising atop Mount Suribachi, the story of the men who raised the infamous flag, and the story of the son of one of those men as he attempts to learn more about his father’s heroic past.

The film features amazing imagery, a beautiful score (by Eastwood!) and several extraordinary performances, especially the Ira Hayes character played brilliantly by Adam Beach. The best war movie since Saving Private Ryan.

- JT Compton

What's That Smell?

2006-10-24T18:56:00.000-04:00

Desperation. Do you smell it?

The Republican party is freaking out.

Faced with the strong possibility that the House of Representatives will fall to the Democrats, three of the six most competitive Senate races are also leaning Democrat, with two of the remaining three in a statistical dead heat.

Here are the signs of an imploding party:

Attack ads in Tennessee smearing Democratic challenger Harold Ford Jr., placed not by his Republican opponent Bob Corker, but by the RNC. Corker claims he doesn’t want the race-baiting ads to air, which means he is either lying or he has no pull with his own party. Either way it's a last-ditch disgrace.

President Bush claiming ‘We’ve never been stay the course, George!’ in an interview with George Stephanopolous. But of course, he used that phrase all the time, as dozens of video clips prove. Not that this is the first time Bush has lied, but this lie indicates how desperate he is to keep his party in power. Predictably, his apologists say his comment was just a stupid mistake--the type common among inept idiots? You decide.

President Bush and his military advisors hatching a plan for a "timeline of new security measures" in Iraq, tantamount to a timeline for withdrawal. Though he would never be honest enough to admit that he is doing what the Democrats have long been calling for, Bush’s hypocrisy is transparent and another indication of the mess he and his party are in.

Rush Limbaugh insulting Michael J. Fox, who starred in ads promoting Senatorial hopeful Democrat Claire McCaskill in Missouri. Disgraced drug-addict Limbaugh had the vile, tasteless nerve to accuse Fox of exaggerating his Parkinsons’ symptoms rather than address the content of Fox’s message. Limbaugh has no credible rationale for limiting stem-cell research, not unlike so many other conservatives including radical religious tool Senator Jim Talent, McCaskill's GOP opponent.

White House officials holding a "Talk Radio Summit" to try to strong-arm radio hosts into buying their failing agenda in Iraq. "No, it's working, really!"

Dishonest hypocrites like former GOP leader Dick Armey pretending that the five-year Republican spending binge has nothing to do with GOP values. But it has everything to do with their real agenda: to impose their mores and religion on the rest of us at any cost, including selling their souls to big business. For Armey to suggest "Republicans are spending like Democrats" denies the reality that Bill Clinton produced a surplus, and the Bush deficit is far beyond any deficit a Democrat ever ran up.

What a joke.

Republicans have become the party of Smear and Fear. And Republican operatives seem to be as comfortable lying as they are taking money from lobbyists in exchange for legislative favors. They can crow and wail about the Commie-loving, baby-eating, daughter-raping, Satan-worshipping Democrats, but their rhetoric only penetrates the minds of the most narrow, ignorant, hate-filled fanatics. The rest of us just aren’t falling for it.

- JT Compton

Wisdom Of The Dow

2006-10-19T18:26:00.000-04:00

From an objective standpoint, many American corporations are in good health. Though global competition is fierce--which puts pressure on pricing power--American companies have done a good job cutting costs, increasing productivity, employing technology and extending economies of scale. As a result, profits are consistent while jobs and wages remain somewhat stagnant.

But this situation is hardly recent. Indeed, this scenario has been in place for several years. So what accounts for the recent record set by the Dow Jones Industrial Average?

The run-up is a reflection of subjective factors. Namely, that for the first time in years investors are feeling optimistic. Not just about interest rates, China or the trade deficit, but about the future of our nation.

The apparent groundswell of disdain for Republican politicians and policies has many in the investment world betting that our government will soon be in better hands.

As a former trader, I learned again and again that markets love stability and hate uncertainty. The more certain and predictable the geo-political landscape, the less risk that an unknown or unforeseeable event will thwart the profit prospects of corporations.

Only months after the collapse of the Internet bubble, stock markets were hammered again by the 9-11 attacks and they’ve been struggling to recover ever since. Not only because traders feared more attacks, but because our so-called leaders sped us into a war against a sovereign nation that had not attacked us. The Iraq war was expensive from the start and we went it alone, without a meaningful coalition and in spite of heavy protest from most of the rest of the world.

The Iraq war was a boon to the defense industry, but a disaster for stability and certainty. The war kept us in the bad graces of our trading partners, fomented global hatred and distrust, created political and social turmoil in the Middle East and raised the likelihood of further terrorism.

Moreover, the extreme ideological policies of the Bush Administration kept our nation divided, made sound fiscal policy a distant memory and put our treasury into almost unimaginable debt.

Now, with mid-term elections approaching, Republicans are getting hammered by any number of ethics scandals, the quagmire in Iraq and blowback from issues like social security and immigration. It looks likely that Democrats will take back at least one house of Congress.

Rising stock prices are telling us that the future looks better than it did six months ago. Rather than two more years of pork-barrel legislation at home, a failed policy in Iraq and silence as a negotiating strategy with Iran and North Korea, traders are re-evaluating their risk premiums and buying. They are betting that positive change is in the wind. And they are probably right.

Given that the housing market is contracting and interest rates are likely range-bound, the stock market is the smart place to be. Especially if the GOP lose their lock on power.

- JT Compton

White House Frat Pack

2006-10-16T16:41:00.000-04:00

The Abramoff scandal continues to expand. Recent email disclosures suggest an even greater connection between convicted felon Jack Abramoff and the White House. Then White House staffer Ken Mehlman (now head of the RNC) apparently did direct favors for Abramoff clients in exchange for political contributions.

In one case, it appears Mehlman got a State Department employee fired for his efforts to improve working conditions in the Northern Mariana Islands--a US territory and Abramoff sweat-shop client.

In another case, it appears Mehlman got millions of tax dollars allocated to build on Native American land a jail that was previously deemed unnecessary by the government. The tribe was a big Abramoff client.

Whatever Jack Abramoff wanted, Ken Mehlman seemed to get for him--as long as Abramoff’s clients kept throwing money at Republican campaigns.

To truly understand the sleazy, corrupt nature of these operatives and their backroom deals, just read some of their emails. As Peter Wallsten of the LA Times reports:

When Justice Department officials relented and released the money for the jail, giddy Abramoff associates planned to host agency officials in a suite at a Dave Matthews concert.

"I have the suite filling up with DOJ staffers who just got our client $16 million," one wrote. Another replied that the agency officials deserve any reward they want, "opening day tickets, Skins v. Giants, oriental massages, hookers, whatever."

As a fourteen-year veteran of Wall Street trading floors, I can personally attest to the love wealthy Republican players have for hookers, strippers, limos and such. So it’s easy for me to imagine the kind of back-slapping, locker-room mentality that Mehlman, Abramoff and their associates cultivated and operated in.

Only when Republicans lose their lock on power will the pigs in Washington stop feeding at the public trough. And given the latest poll numbers, that day could come right soon. It won’t be soon enough.

- JT Compton

Silent "Diplomacy"

2006-10-12T18:05:00.000-04:00

We won’t negotiate with you until you first agree to our demands.

Have you noticed that President Bush’s childish and ineffective stance toward North Korea, Iran and any other perceived threat is virtually identical to the stance he takes toward his political opponents? --

We won’t let you participate in the policy making process until you first agree to our policies.

No wonder the legislative record of the last five years is abysmal. And have you noticed that this is similar to the stance he takes on dissent? --

We won’t consider you patriotic Americans until you first agree with our agenda and support our actions.

This stubborn, arrogant attitude pervades the Bush Administration. No wonder our country is so divided and our image so tarnished.

Healthy relations demand effective communication, whether with your neighbors or your enemies. But the policies of the Bush Administration make free, direct and open communication all but impossible.

No wonder North Korea has become such a huge problem, and no wonder Iran continues to thumb its nose at us. Without comprehensive, constructive engagement, diplomacy can't happen. And blustering, bullying and ignoring is not diplomacy, as much as Bush and his minions want it to be. In fact, their stance is antithetical to diplomacy.

Until we elect leaders capable of formulating complex solutions to complex problems, we will risk the further erosion of our security and our global standing. Those currently running the nation are clearly not competent to do the job. The best their simplistic, black-and-white minds have come up with is “the silent treatment.” Another good reason to throw the bums out.

- JT Compton

Throw The Bums Out

2006-10-09T14:37:00.000-04:00

Republicans remained on the defensive this weekend. Just when the GOP thought the Foley Fiasco might shift from boil to simmer, another Republican Congressman stepped forward to disclose that he knew of inappropriate contacts between Foley and Pages as far back as the year 2000. Which kept the story front-and-center.

Then, on Sunday’s Meet The Press, Bob Woodward revealed that Vice President Cheney called him recently to complain about being quoted confirming regular meetings between Bush and Henry Kissinger, an embarrassing disclosure. In tantrum mode, Cheney called Woodward’s use of the quote “bull s---” and hung up.

Adding to Republican woes, one of Karl Rove’s staff resigned Friday because of numerous gifts she accepted from criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff. This on the heels of a bipartisan report that the White House had over 400 contacts with Abramoff and accepted upwards of $25,000 in gifts and freebies.

The news was made more significant because PBS ran its two-hour Moyers documentary about the Abramoff and DeLay scandal throughout the weekend. It painted an absolutely devastating and horrifying picture of the sleazy, crooked and unrepentant participants, and is sending shock waves through the corridors of power in Washington.

Even hardened politicos can’t believe how brazen, unethical and corrupt the pay-for-play system of lobbying became under DeLay. Nor can they believe how hypocritical and manipulative blowhards like greedy Ralph Reed turned out to be. To hear Tom DeLay declare that he wanted people to see “Jesus in his mugshot” was at once chilling and disgusting. When I look at DeLay, Abramoff, Reed, Ney and their acolytes, I see greed, lies and corruption, not Christ. They are, if anything, Satanic.

A headline this morning read “GOP Hit by Wave of Political Bad News.” What rubbish. The bad news isn’t some external force hitting the Republican party. It’s the direct result of the party’s arrogance, greed, incompetence and lust for power at any price. The GOP’s wounds are purely self inflicted. And the sooner the wounded beast retreats to heal itself, the sooner others can begin to undo the damage done to our nation during the last five awful years.

- JT Compton

Righteous Wrongs

2006-10-04T22:11:00.000-04:00

The recent resignation of Florida GOP Congressman Foley for sending sexually suggestive communications to minors is an embarrassment to Republicans. The “party of values” turns out to have no corner on the virtue market at all. Indeed, this seedy episode adds yet another chapter to the growing epic of Republican ethics scandals, proving the age-old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Along the same lines, PBS is running an extraordinary documentary by renowned journalist Bill Moyers on the lobbying scandals affecting Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay, Grover Nordquist, Ralph Reed, and others.

The show details just how morally bankrupt, arrogant, deceptive and greedy this gang of suited thugs were. It’s an object lesson in how our system of government can be corrupted by people who use religious rhetoric to manipulate and control others.

Both the Foley Fiasco and the Abramoff/DeLay Debacle demonstrate a sound principle of human conduct:

The more emphatically pious, religious, faithful and moral a person or party claims to be, the more likely they are to be hiding dysfunction, intolerance, bigotry, greed, anger, insecurity, confusion, repression, hypocrisy and/or sleaze.

When a person or party screams “WE ARE THE MOST VIRTUOUS,” they are almost certainly not.

Remember the infamous homophobia study? The most avowed gay-hating test subjects were the ones most aroused by homosexual images! It’s the same principle.

Extreme or absolute rhetoric, whether religious or cultural or otherwise, has been used to manipulate people through the ages. And our current crop of “Christian Right” politicians have done a great job recently of revealing who they really are. Neither Christian nor right.

- JT Compton

Reason To Be Upset

2006-09-29T17:11:00.000-04:00

Republican operatives and pundits just can’t understand why the rest of us are so upset. Hands to their cheeks and mouths agog they recoil, wide-eyed, whenever they confront the rage that has built up over the last five years, calling it “unseemly,” “immature” and “over the top.”

After all, what could Moderates, Independents and Democrats be so worked up about??

When Bill Clinton raised his pitch and got in Fox reporter Chris Wallace’s face after being asked a loaded question, Republicans responded as if Clinton has gone berserk and leapt out of his chair, arms flailing, mouth frothing.

Their playbook response is to trivialize and dismiss such anger, explaining that the perpetrator “just hates George Bush.” For no reason--they just hate him.

Well I don’t know George Bush and I don’t hate him. He’s probably a nice guy to spend an afternoon flying around the Gulf Coast with.

But I hate the things he and his incompetent team have done. And I have good reason to be outraged and appalled by what has gone on in this country of late.

President Bush and the GOP built their success on phrases like “Family Values” and “Party of Values.” The moralizing was so thick and constant you might have mistaken them for Puritans. But the goody-two-shoes Republicans have shown us their true values. As the saying goes, "You are what you do". Thus, by their actions, they clearly value:

• Torture
• Diminished civil rights
• Restricted liberties
• Government intrusion
• Profligate spending
• Favors for the rich
• Massive deficits
• Rampant cronyism
• Secrecy and backroom deals
• Unchecked pollution
• Environmental destruction
• Influence peddling
• Diplomatic bullying
• Character assassination

Furthermore, they’ve succeeded at virtually nothing (unless you’re a wealthy taxpayer). And they’ve turned most everything they’ve touched into a disaster, or worse, a tragedy.

So the next time rational, reality-based citizens get angry in a public forum, it’s not because they “hate Bush.” It’s because his administration and congressional enablers have made a big, fat, stinking mess of the things the rest of us cherish.

Not a small mess, not a trivial mess, but a significant, disastrous, harmful alteration in the direction and fabric of our nation. If that’s not worth getting upset about, I don’t know what is.

- JT Compton

Duh

2006-09-26T03:19:00.000-04:00

Leaked sections of a recent National Intelligence Estimate told reality-based Americans what they already knew--our invasion and occupation of Iraq has clearly and substantially increased the scope and threat of terrorism.

That damning assessment coincided with a hearing conducted by Congressional Democrats frustrated by the refusal of Republicans to properly oversee the executive branch. The hearing featured retired military leaders, many of whom served on the ground in Iraq, discussing the incompetence of our civilian leadership.

Retired General Batiste, former commander of the Army’s 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, put the blame for our failings squarely on Donald Rumsfeld. As the occupation commenced, according to Batiste, Rummy threatened to fire the next person who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq.

Apparently, Rummy and his neo-con posse were so taken by their own “greeted-as-liberators” B.S. that they not only failed to plan, but shamed and bullied anyone who had the audacity to second guess their so-called strategy by suggesting any post-war plan.

That Donald Rumsfeld remains in office is a testament to the monumental incompetence of the entire Bush Administration and demonstrates that they are incapable of grasping and acknowledging their failures, much less taking responsibility for them.

White House Homeland Security Advisor Fran Townsend, interviewed today by Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, was a showcase of the current Bush team’s twisted, immoral logic.

When asked about President Clinton’s assertion that he did everything he could to get Bin Laden, Townsend said that Clinton’s was a “legalistic, evidentiary type of approach, where as we know President Bush has not taken that approach…”. Yes, we know that neither Bush nor his Attorney General Gonzalez seem to care about evidence or legalistic principles. Those they suspect of wrongdoing are simply prejudged to be guilty and denied due process.

When asked whether Iraq has created more terrorists, Townsend revealed that “we know that if the Jihadists don’t win in the war in Iraq, they face ultimate defeat. And that’s why it’s good for us to stay.” In other words, if we kill every last terrorist in Iraq, Al Qaeda will simply dry up and blow away. Really?

Except that for every terrorist we kill, three more spring up to replace them, and Al Qaeda has already metastasized into countless cancerous cells operating autonomously around the world. But if recent history is a guide, Townsend will likely be among the last to grasp or admit these inconvenient facts--facts that annihilate her Homeland Security fantasy.

Townsend ultimately described the Jihad mentality as one that “uses violence as a means to achieve its end.” But so does the Bush Administration. Frightened by the thought of actual diplomacy, Bush and his wimp-turned-bully cabinet have no choice but to bomb and invade countries that hold strategic importance. So by Townsend’s definition, our President’s mentality is not much different from a Jihadi.

And until we change that mentality from the top down, we will continue to project our power in ways that damage our credibility, create resentment and terror, produce untold suffering, and garner short-term political gain at the expense of long-term American prosperity and security. Duh.

- JT Compton

All Talk, No Walk

2006-09-19T13:35:00.000-04:00

Today’s speech at the UN by President Bush was both wonderful and tragic. Wonderful in the lofty ideals, bold visions and provocative suggestions it offered, and tragic in terms of how poorly and incompetently his administration has acted to make such rhetoric a reality.

Bush claimed that a lasting peace between the sovereign nations of Israel and Palestine was one of his greatest priorities. Yet his administration has done virtually nothing, and certainly less than any recent presidency, to broker that peace.

He noted that genocide was occurring in Darfur, urging the UN to intercede, yet his administration has done little more than provide a few humanitarian-aid dollars.

Most bizarrely, he stated that “Freedom cannot be imposed, it must be chosen.” But his occupation of Iraq was a blatant and unambiguous attempt to impose freedom. How does he square this hypocrisy?

He doesn’t, of course. He just keeps reading speeches written by talented, ideological speechwriters while his blind, inept, dishonest, unethical, misguided advisors and officials continue to screw up every mission, botch every policy initiative and smear every opponent they come across.

Bush talks the talk, but he can’t even crawl the crawl.

Hopefully, voters this November will ignore the rainbow speeches and focus on the dark results. By voting against Bush's Republican enablers, the nation may just be able to change its dismal and worsening course.

- JT Compton

The Path To Tucker’s Masculinization

2006-09-13T21:30:00.000-04:00

(The following Docu-drama uses facts from Wikipedia to dramatize the events that led Tucker Carlson to stop wearing bow-ties.)

On April 1, 2006, a producer of MSNBC’s conservative talk show "The Situation with Tucker Carlson" confronted the show’s WASPy namesake:

MSNBC Producer: Let’s face it, Tucker, your ratings suck. Turns out Paul Begala was the guy we should have hired, but we didn’t realize the Conservative movement would crater so badly.

Tucker Carlson: Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove...who knew such capable, peace-loving, honest guys would let the effete, liberal intellectuals on the coasts get the best of them?

MSNBC: Yes, well, we need to talk about that.

Tucker: About what??

MSNBC: Tucker, you don’t seem to grasp that you embody the traits of the people you always demean and stereotype.

Tucker: What are you talking about? What traits?

MSNBC: Well, let’s take effete. I just looked it up in Websters. It means “soft or decadent as a result of over-refinement of living conditions or laxity of mental or moral discipline.”

Tucker: Really?

MSNBC: Yes, and your presentation screams over-refinement and softness and mental laxity.

Tucker: Is it that obvious?

MSNBC: I’m afraid it is. Hell, your middle name is Swanson, as in Swanson frozen foods. And even worse, nobody on television today looks more like a stereotypical intellectual.

Tucker: But I...I...I never even graduated from college!

MSNBC: You went to an elite private prep school in New England for God’s sake! And sure, you bailed from college in your fourth year, but it was Trinity College in Connecticut. It doesn’t get any preppier than that.

Tucker: Nobody knows. I've never mentioned it on the air, and please don’t tell any of the staff--

MSNBC: Viewers know you work in liberal, blue-state New York. If word gets out that you were born in San Francisco, it could be devastating.

Tucker: But I’m not gay. I swear. I have a wife and kids! I just bought a $4million second home in the District of Columbia!

MSNBC: Jesus, don’t mention that either! No matter what, never draw attention to the fact that the elite conservative ruling class has a ton of money and nothing in common with average Americans.

Tucker: Right. By the way, I’ve always planned on living in the Midwest someday, I swear.

MSNBC: I hate to say it, but you’re getting a reputation as a priss, a brie eater, a quiche lover, a cappuccino drinker, a prig, a weasel, a limp-wristed Yuppie--

Tucker: But I try so hard to talk tough. I always call people wimps and whiners and ghouls. Crime victims should suck it up, no mercy for perpetrators, psychology is a crock, every lawsuit is frivolous, global warming is baloney. I’m so manly, don’t you think?

MSNBC: More like...so deluded. Were you teased as a child?

Tucker: Yes. Those bastards. So?

MSNBC: We have to make big changes. For starters, we have to make you meaner.

Tucker: Like, Coulter-mean?

MSNBC: A few notches down. You don’t want to piss off the 9/11 widows. But insult your guests, stereotype them, interrupt them, ignore their logic.

Tucker: I already do that.

MSNBC: Well...do it more. Do it louder.

Tucker: What else?

MSNBC: This is going to hurt, but you have to get rid of those bow ties.

Tucker: Screw you! That’s outrageous. It’s my signature.

MSNBC: Only ivory-tower academics and gay decorators wear bow ties. Name a single regular-guy type who wears one?

Tucker: G. Gordon Libby.

MSNBC: Who is regularly mistaken for a member of the Village People. You’ve proven my point.

Tucker: But without the bow ties, I’ll just be another pale, sarcastic pseudo-conservative whose positions are wildly conflicted and unsupportable by reason. I’ll be another O’Reilly. God, I feel like crying.

MSNBC: Either get rid of the bow ties or get ready for cancellation. Nobody wants to watch a conservative talk-show hosted by a fussy New England elitist.

Tucker: Okay, okay. I’ll get rid of them. I never want to go back to pitching shows--it was hell on my arches, and my pedicures never took. But I still think my audience sees me as a tough, swarthy military type. A playground bully who kicks butt and never gets shouted down. A virtuous crusader--

MSNBC: Just shut up and do it.

Tucker: Yes ma’am.

Slow, Grinding Defeat

2006-09-06T14:48:00.000-04:00

George Bush is angry.

As his voice and demeanor evidenced during his third speech in as many days (his latest Defending My Indefensible Policies Tour), Bush can neither accept nor grasp why the American people still don’t “get it”.

Why don’t they understand that any Muslim we capture and detain must be presumed guilty? Why don’t they understand that those men must be “questioned” (tortured) in order to keep us safe? Why don’t they understand that those men must be detained indefinitely and deprived of any access to justice? The justification--that a few of those we have captured have actually given us important information.

Why don’t the American people get it? Why don’t they believe that we can eventually kill every terrorist currently alive? Why don’t they believe that we can achieve total victory? Why don’t they view this struggle in the same light as World War II? Why do they care so much about their own civil liberties? Why don’t they trust us to spy on them? Why don’t they trust us to keep them safe? Why don’t they trust us to respond to disaster? Why don’t they trust us to steward the environment? Why have they turned on me and the Republican party?

Yes--as his speeches and tone demonstrate, our President is that stupid.

But the American public is not. Fearful, perhaps. Cautious, certainly. But not deluded enough to see through his latest round of propaganda.

For example, the President claimed today that he signed into law the Detainee Treatment Act, proving that he does not support torture. Yet he failed to mention that his own signing statement reserved for him the option of ignoring the law as he saw fit! Americans are not too simple to catch that hypocritical deception.

The public understands that spin and speeches and fearmongering don’t compare to the facts, whether on the ground in Iraq or in the rubble of the Ninth Ward or in Presidential signing statements.

We have been losing the “War” in Iraq for several years now. The proof is simply the fact that we cannot provide security to the citizens of that country or our troops. Winning would include an increasing degree of security, and losing would include a decreasing degree of security. Thus we are losing and losing badly.

So when Bush and his party talk about “Staying the Course,” they are talking about staying the course of failure. They are talking about sticking with a loser. They want to keep the nation on the slow, grinding path of defeat.

When Bush, Rumsfeld and Rice compare our occupation to WWII or the Civil War or any other conflict, they insult our intelligence and our motives. It has become crystal clear to the rest of us that war is neither an effective nor moral response to terrorism.

It has also become clear that we have failed our own Gulf Coast citizens, most of whose shattered lives remain in limbo thanks to the inaction, ineptitude and incompetence of the Federal response.

The increasingly desperate rhetoric of the blind, deaf and dumb Bush Administration will do nothing to quell the legitimate anger of the public. This November, the voters are poised to take America in a new direction.

Idiot Brigade

2006-08-30T01:35:00.000-04:00

I'm on vacation at the moment in Alaska, but felt compelled to make a quick entry. An interview of President Bush by Brian Willams of NBC this week prompted me to action.

In it, Bush declared his usual steadfast confidence that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. But when faced with the fact that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, a red-faced, shrugging Bush shot back that Saddam was part of the terrorism problem.

The dwindling Americans who still believe Bush's half-baked and disproven rhetoric are the only ones not utterly embarrassed by such preposterous Presidential responses.

Bush made this idiotic statement in New Orleans, a year after he and his pathetic team of cronies botched the Katrina Hurricane response and left the corpse of the dead city of New Orleans to rot. But Bush kept the tired catchphrases and hollow promises flying.

Giving Williams an earnest earful, Bush spoke about his commitment to rebuilding, about how the people of Louisiana were in his heart, and how he would come through.

Oh yeah? When?

It's been a year and the situation has gone from complete disaster to ongoing disaster. Only a quarter of the Big Easy's residents have returned home, the others are displaced and unable to return, and much of the flood-ravaged area is still a wasteland. The Bush timetable seems less like a commitment than a whitewash.

And speaking of incompetence, Donald Rumsfeld went spewing at the mouth today about how critics of the Bush administration may not have learned the lessons of history, implying that the situation in Iraq was like Nazi Germany under Hitler.

But Rumsfeld is incapable of seeing the broader lessons of history--that when a nation begins to compromise its values (torture, invasion of privacy) to face a threat (Osama) or a perceived threat (Saddam), it starts down the slippery slope of fascism itself.

Indeed, the black-and-white, arrogant, judgmental, extreme, good-versus-evil propaganda pouring from Bush and his handlers after 9/11 have a much greater resemblance to those we claim to oppose (Islamic Extremists) than the giants of our own history, like Lincoln, Kennedy and King.

History is already looking back on Rummy and Bush with great disdain, and the only question left to answer is how big a disaster will they leave behind.

That they are incapable of seeing or admitting their errors and shortcomings is only an incremental addition to a far greater tragedy.

And every time they get on television and say stupid things, they push more voters into the arms of reason, progress, accountability and change.

Trash-Talking Fear-Mongers

2006-08-16T02:28:00.000-04:00

It’s been a rough week for Republican operatives. They just can’t seem to hold back the bile, dishonesty and spin that flows whenever they open their mouths.

Potential GOP Presidential candidate George Allen greeted a worker from a rival campaign with racial epithets, using angry and demeaning language in front of a gathered crowd in Virginia. Though he apologized for the slur, Allen’s tone was mean, crude and humorless--not exactly a Presidential performance.

And Vice President Dick Cheney crawled out of his dark hole this week to stoke the embers of fear, suggesting that supporters of Connecticut Democrat Ned Lamont were supporters of al Qaeda. In the past, a spineless press might have looked the other way, but with the administration’s Iraq policy in shreds, the press finally described Cheney’s comments for what they were--hyperbolic, insulting, divisive and manipulative. What took them so long?

Media neo-con Mort Zuckerman’s latest op-ed in US News echoed the failed policies Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, Libby, Rove and others. Has he learned nothing? He stated:

“Israel must continue to press its attack on Hezbollah until the terrorist threat is removed.”

Just like we must continue the war on terror until the terror threat is "removed"? Which is to say, never. Trying to kill every terrorist is a ridiculous and impossible goal. If Israel wants to feel completely and perfectly safe from Hezbollah, they will need to kill every Muslim in Lebanon. Somehow, I suspect ethnic cleansing isn’t a policy they want to pursue. How about you, Mort?

But perhaps the largest foot inserted into the biggest mouth belonged to Ken Mehlman, chairman of the RNC. On Meet The Press last weekend, the subject of November elections prompted Mehlman to declare:

“...the fundamental question Americans are going to have to answer is, “Do you believe we’re at war?”

Duh. Everybody believes we’re at war. But many Americans don't believe the Bush team is still at war with Osama Bin Laden. Instead, that war has been sidetracked by Cheney and others for deeper, more sinister purposes in oil-rich Iraq, which had little to do with jihad terrorism before we invaded.

Regarding the string of misjudgments in Iraq, Mehlman noted that:

“...we face a movement, not a country. It’s harder to beat a movement.”

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to beat a movement with bombs. You can only undermine it with public support and credibility. Ooops. Mehlman’s observation is correct, but the Bush policy response has been entirely wrong.

That doesn’t matter now, contends Mehlman, playing the 9/11 card:

“We know that 9/11 taught us how dangerous it was when you had a failed state in Afghanistan. Imagine a failed state on the second-largest oil reserves in the world.”

We don’t need to imagine. Despite our troops, Iraq is a failed state! Bush's miscalculations and incompetence caused Iraq to fail. And now the same Republicans who screwed it up want us to trust them to clean it up. Come on, Ken. We’re just not that stupid.

Or are we? Perhaps the RNC slogan-of-the-week will undo all the blunders, scandals and misjudgments, inspiring voters to support Republicans again. Can you say “Adapting To Win”? Mehlman can:

“The choice in this election is not between “Stay the course” and “Cut and run,” it’s between “Win by adapting” and “Cut and run.”...The fact is, before the successful Iraqi elections, the number of troops went up from 137,000 to 167,000. That’s adapting to win!”

If by winning Mehlman means fostering anarchy, chaos, torture, kidnappings, executions, assassinations, reprisals and death squads, then we are winning big in Iraq.

But word-games can’t whitewash a catastrophe, and Mehlman’s exhausted, baggy-eyed face tells us everything we need to know about the challenges Republicans face in the upcoming elections. "Adapting" is a hollow claim, and character assassination has lost its traction. The GOP has little left to stand on but tired slogans and the thread-bare assertion that Democrats “don’t stand for anything.”

As long as Democrats don’t stand for dishonesty, incompetence, arrogance, cronyism, favoritism, pay-for-play, narrowness, denial, division and stubbornness, they will likely break the Republican lock on power in Washington. And fortunately, Democrats stand for a lot more than Mehlman and his angry bosses care to acknowlege. When they finally break that lock, a lot of things should change for the better.

White House: Elder Bush Caused 9/11

2006-08-09T20:13:00.000-04:00

The White House today accused President George H. W. Bush of bringing on 9/11. Or at least, that’s what the twisted logic of White House spokesman Tony Snow implied.

Snow explained that by "walking away" from Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991--a decision made by then-President Bush--we emboldened Bin Laden to come after us because he saw us as weak. And if we exit Iraq now, Snow argued, we will send the same message to Bin Laden again.

What intellectual nonsense. Like Bin Laden isn’t coming after us already?

And Ken Mehlman, the embodiment of GOP spin, distortion and evasion, wouldn’t even deny the implication that Republican leaders, including Ronald Reagan and his withdrawl of Marines from Beirut, have sent the wrong message to terrorists in the past. Talking to Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s Hardball, Mehlman changed the subject, as he did with many of Matthew’s other tough questions.

Republicans desperately want the American public to believe that our presence in Iraq still holds some valuable purpose. But voters know better.

And that’s what the nomination of Ned Lamont to the Democratic Senate ticket in Connecticut demonstrates. The public is way out in front of the GOP, and Joe Lieberman, too. Loser Lieberman today tried to paint Lamont as “far out of the mainstream,” which is exactly wrong. By supporting Bush and his disastrous policies, Lieberman demonstrated that he was way outside the mainstream, and voters punished him for it.

The more Republicans try to brand Democrats as hippie Communist peaceniks and America haters, the more they offend the conclusions already made by the general public--that Iraq was a blunder, our occupation has been a disaster, our safety is diminished and none of the GOP “leaders” have the guts to change course.

Ken Mehlman constantly says that Democrats and Liberals love to “blame America”. But in fact, along with many Independents and even some Republicans, they love to blame Bush and the Republicans because the blame is well earned. The GOP has made a big, fat, stinking mess of things.

The stupidity and hollowness of the current Republican battle-cry testifies to their desperation and policy bankruptcy. They cannot concede their mistakes or they will lose their newfound power. And lose it they should.

Our Tolerance For Failure

2006-08-08T02:01:00.000-04:00

The highlight of last week’s (8/3) Senate Armed Services Committee meeting was not Hillary Clinton’s indictment of Donald Rumsfeld. Instead, it was a statement made by Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton.

Questioning the witnesses--Donald Rumsfeld, Peter Pace and John Abizaid--on why so many Americans are against the occupation of Iraq, Dayton elegantly reframed the issue:

“It isn’t their will--the will of the American people--that’s being tested. It’s their tolerance for failure.”

And many of those failures were on display at the hearing, including the inability of civilian leaders to grasp realities on the ground. When Senator Clinton blamed our inability to secure Iraq (its infrastructure and weapons stockpiles) on inadequate troop levels, an incredulous Rummy responded:

“You said the number of troops were wrong. Well, I guess history will make a judgment on that.”

Sorry, Rummy. History already has. You blew it and the whole world knows.

But Rummy wasn’t finished. He went on a tirade about the viciousness of our enemy, describing their side as barbaric and lawless while our “side puts their men and women at risk in uniform and obeys the laws of war.”

Sorry again, Rummy. We haven't obeyed the laws of war, and your administration is still looking for ways to circumvent those rules.

Rummy urged that “we should strive to think through how our words will be interpreted by our troops, by the people of Afghanistan and Iraq...and we should consider how our words can be used by our deadly enemy.”

But Rummy and the Bush team have done little to think through how their actions and mistakes will be used by our deadly enemy. Actions like torture, indefinite detention, murder, rendition, pitifully incompetent planning and a failed reconstruction. Perhaps nobody ever told the Secretary that actions speak louder than words.

When confronted with examples of incompetence, Rummy replied that there were “an awful lot of talented people engaged in this.” But he didn't explain how that excused the horrific miscalculations, faulty assumptions and bad policies the invasion suffered.

One of those supposedly talented people, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Peter Pace, tried to clarify our mission in Iraq: “To help provide enough security inside of Iraq for the Iraqi government to provide governance and economic opportunity for their citizens.”

No wonder so many Senators are concerned. By Pace's definition, we've been failing in Iraq from the start, and the trend-line has steepened downward. How does Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice sum up the situation? From a recent CNN interview:

“Well, I think the problem is that everybody takes a snapshot every day of how we're doing in what is a huge and historical transformation...But I would be surprised, if you look back on the other big historical transformations that the world has been through, that people didn't do the same thing. I think they probably took snapshots that now, in retrospect, when you look back on them, look pretty shortsighted.”

Sadly, Condi misses the fact that when you put all those snapshots in a line, they form a time series--a video--of what’s been happening, and that video is an appalling testament to a long, slow, downward slide.

Asked by CNN’s David Gregory, “when does staying the course become less a strategy and more of a copout?”, Rice responded:

“David, we've just begun the Baghdad security plan. Malaki has only been in office several weeks.”

Except that we’ve occupied Baghdad and Iraq for almost three-and-a-half years and have never been able to maintain order. Indeed, according to General Abizaid, "I believe that the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I've seen it, in Baghdad in particular, and that if not stopped it is possible that Iraq could move toward civil war."

Condi and Rummy want us to believe that a sustained, growing failure will somehow be reversed by the same people whose ineptitude made the failure inevitable.

Until they stop drinking the White House Kool-Aid, they won’t be able to change course. But to a brittle, dispirited and besieged administration, change might be impossible. At this political moment, a course correction might only confirm what so many have alleged--that the Bush team made a strategic blunder of historic proportions, executed that strategy with total incompetence and deserve to be shown the political door.

How much longer will the American public tolerate their failure?

Go Ned Lamont

2006-08-02T12:56:00.000-04:00

As Connecticut closes in on Primary Day, Senator Joe Lieberman continues to pout and spout. Calling in his political chips, Senator Joe brought a swarm of other Senators and dignitaries to rallies this week, trying claw his way back to even with Ned Lamont, his poll-leading Democratic challenger.

Poor Joe. He’s “in a battle.” And his frowny face shows it. Joe just can’t understand why voters seem to be turning against him. The Christian Science Monitor says the race is about “the future of the Democratic party.” They contend that Lieberman’s stance on Iraq places him in the crosshairs of the radical left who will gain power if they can defeat a centrist like Joe, jeopardizing the prospects of other centrists like Hilary Clinton.

I disagree. Everybody knows Joe is a conservative. The Connecticut race is about honesty and competence. And depending on how his actions are interpreted, Joe Lieberman is either deceptive or incompetent. Voters care less about his support for a continuing presence in Iraq, but they care a lot about a Democrat who has not only failed to stand up to the worst President in our nation’s history, but actually embraces the President’s dishonest and divisive agenda. Said Lieberman:

“It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be commander in chief for three more critical years and that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”

Spoken like a true Republican, and a fascist Republican at that.

Either Senator Joe has turned his back on Democratic principles to curry favor with conservative voters or he is incapable of understanding the critical role dissent plays when a Republican President and Republican Congress make an absoute disaster out of virtually everything they touch. Democrats didn't undermine Presidential credibility--Bush and his spineless GOP Congress did it themselves.

Does Joe not care that our Constitution has been trashed? Does he not care that our international standing is in tatters? Does he not care that the environment has been denuded by sell-to-the-highest-bidder Republicans? Does he not care that Federal Agencies are staffed with inept cronies? Does he not care that only the wealthy have benefitted from tax cuts and the rest have been left behind? Does he not care that our health care system is a disaster? Does he not care that legislation is for sale? Does he not care that the Supreme Court has been re-staffed by radical ideologues?

Senator Joe’s track record is as abysmal as the Republicans he sucks up to. And he will likely pay. Nobody wants to be represented by an idiot, a liar or a laughing stock.

Myths of the Embryofascists

2006-07-31T19:25:00.000-04:00

Nobody likes abortion. And nobody wants to encourage reckless sex. Yet polls in South Dakota show that, given the chance, voters would reject the abortion ban passed recently by their own State Legislators. The public understands that a woman’s right to an abortion must be maintained, while conservative politicians prefer to posture and make law based on common superstitions rather than medical science and reason.

We can only hope that the FDA will soon allow pharmacies to sell the “morning after” contraceptive pill without a prescription. At least that would remove from the equation pharmacists who object to birth-control, since they won’t actually have to fill the prescription anymore.

In all the debate about stem-cell research, contraception and first-trimester abortion, nobody has made a convincing argument for why a tiny bundle of cells should have more rights than--or equal rights to--a grown woman.

The response to that question usually comes in theological terms, or in terms so vague and flimsy as to be meaningless.

We need to support a culture of life.

So why does the “life” of a bundle of cells take precedence over the life of a grown woman? Why isn’t supporting a woman's health and liberty included in supporting a culture of life? Are women not alive?

Abortion is murder.

Not according to law or common sense. Only a person can be murdered, and an embryo doesn’t come close to meeting the definition of personhood. In fact, my dog is more of a person than an embryo.

We need to uphold and protect the rights of the unborn.

But why should “the unborn” have greater rights than their already-born mothers? Shouldn't the rights of the born outweigh the rights of the unborn?

Nascent human life is equal to human life.

Then why do we have a different name and category for it? Clearly, nascent human life is not yet human life. So why should nascent human life have greater rights than the actual human mother carrying that life?

The Bible says abortion is wrong.

Not my bible. If your bible says it's wrong, don’t have one.

As long as radical religions focus on the quantity of life, rather than the quality of life, we will need to resist the bizarre, illogical and indefensible notion that small bundles of cells have some transcendent, magical value beyond the value of living, breathing, thinking, conscious women.

And just because we allow something doesn’t mean we encourage it.

Allowing abortion while encouraging responsible behavior requires more than a rigid, black-and-white worldview. It requires effort, tolerance and compassion. But too many fanatics want to spend their energy glorifying a small bundle of cells instead of doing the difficult work of understanding teen pregnancy, accepting human sexuality and tolerating a wide range of mores, values and liberties. Which is a far greater shame than the tragedy of abortion.

Tyranny of the Embryofascists

2006-07-28T01:23:00.000-04:00

Before Republicans controlled all three branches of Government, remember the lip service given to States Rights? Every conservative pundit, radio host and politician couldn’t stop yammering about how the big, bad Federal Government was meddling in local issues, and how individual States were granted by the Constitution a right to self determination in the broadest sense.

Local voters, they claimed, should have the final say on matters of social import, and virtually every cause championed by Conservatives was linked to this Federalist principle. After all, so-called "activist judges" were forcing people to tolerate liberties (abortion, contraception, homosexuality, mixed marriage, integration, etc.) that their town or county might otherwise vote against.

It was all about little guys—the people put upon by the government—having greater control over their communities.

But five years into the Conservative Catastrophe, we see the issue of States Rights for what it really was and is—a big, fat lie.

Simply examine recent Republican-generated legislation to see the proof. States don’t get to determine who can assist pregnant teens—the Federal Government will. States won’t get to place special restrictions on automobile emissions or standards—only the Government can. States won’t get to designate who can or cannot get married—the Federal Government will. Similar examples are manifold.

Even in areas that have traditionally been the territory of Federal law, Conservatives are imposing their superstitions and mores in every way they can. The President recently declared that using frozen embryos for stem cell research (instead of throwing them away) was "murder". And despite the fact that most Americans disagree, he and his party remain eager to tell us all what we should and should not do.

When they were a minority party, Republicans played the self-determination card because it energized the voting base. But now that they control Congress, they have discarded States Rights and embraced their true agenda—restrictive Federal Legislation.

Conservatism, it turns out, has little to do with true liberty or democracy and everything to do with imposing a radical version of morality on the rest of us.

Fox Spews

2006-07-26T14:35:00.000-04:00

On the recent Fox "News" segment Weekend Report, host Brian Wilson showed a clip of an interview with Florida Congressman Robert Wexler by Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report. But Fox didn't tell viewers they had re-edited the interview to alter its context and paint Wexler in a bad light.

Here is an excellent YouTube diagnosis of the Fox smear. And here is the letter I shot off to Weekend Report:

Your editing of the Colbert Report's interview with Congressman Wexler was misleading and dishonest. You reported it as news, not as some kind of "wink, wink" joke. So now your smear of Wexler has infected the thinking of many of your viewers. Which is just what you probably set out to accomplish.

Some people know that the Colbert Report is fake news. But most of your viewers have yet to grasp that Fox is fake news. You don't need journalistic ethics because you're not journalists. You're an arm of the Republican Party and a mouthpiece for failed conservative policies. You're partisans pretending to be reporters.

Until your kind of disgraceful spin, distortion and dishonesty is taken off the air, America will remain polarized and misinformed.

What a shame that you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Peace Can't Be Imposed

2006-07-25T02:11:00.000-04:00

According to some observers, all strife and conflict in the Middle East can be traced to the subjugation of Palestine by Israel, even though many groups, including Hezbollah, may be using the “illegal occupation” of Palestine as a pretext to impose their vision of Islamic theocracy on a wider Arab populace.

The recent war between Israel and Hezbollah has a lot of people yearning for and talking about peace. And to be sure, finding a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would be an enormous step forward toward peace.

Unfortunately, all parties to the problem--including terrorists, states and occupiers--have forgotten the lessons of history.

Using violence to combat injustice never works. It undermines the morality of the victim and creates further injustice.

And using violence to impose peace never works. It creates suffering and resentment, which produces more violence in the form of revenge or retribution.

Among the Arabs and the Jews, where are the Gandhis? Among American Conservatives, where are the Martin Luther Kings?

Whatever became of non-violent protest?

History demonstrates that the non-violent protests of the Civil Rights Movement worked. The non-violent protests against Dictator Ferdinand Marcos ushered in a cultural revolution in the Philippines without a single shot being fired. Peaceful resistance delivered India from Colonialism.

By contrast, injustices in Northern Ireland were countered by violence and decades of brutality ensued. Injustices in Yugoslavia were countered by violence and a flood of death and human suffering ensued.

The legitimate injustices suffered by Arabs will remain overshadowed as long as terrorism is their culturally sanctioned response. The legitimate grievances of Israelis will be tarnished as long as the Israeli Military acts like an iron fist. The peaceful fantasies of the United States will remain frustrated as long as military force is our preferred strategy for conflict resolution.

Violence begets violence.

If peace is our aim, we must demonstrate peace. Dropping “smart bombs” is antithetical to peace.

If peace is the aim of Israelis, they must choose peace in spite of terrorism.

If peace is the aim of Arabs, they must choose peace in spite of injustice.

Any interpretation of religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) that advocates violence is a twisted desecration of all that is holy, both indefensible and illegitimate. Non-violent protest, on the other hand, is a supremely powerful spiritual expression.

Choosing non-violent protest takes far greater courage than picking up a gun. It also requires faith that the desired outcome is worth enormous risk and sacrifice.

Only when courageous people protest in a peaceful, persistent and dignified way will the conditions for true, lasting peace arise.

Presidential Posturing

2006-07-20T14:44:00.000-04:00

It was a week of firsts for President Bush. Despite signing a non-stop flood of pork-filled spending bills and laws that he may or may not choose to follow, Bush issued the first veto of his Presidency, knocking down legislation aiming to use discarded embryos from fertility clinics to harvest additional stem cell lines for federally funded research.

According to Dubya, he will not endorse “murder.” Of course, he didn’t explain how his veto squared with the fact that the embryos will be destroyed anyway, and that we might as well get some benefit from them.

But logic, common sense and reason have never held sway over the religious superstitions of Bush and his radical right backers, or the need to posture and motivate the base in an election year.

Also, President Bush finally addressed the NAACP for the first time as President. It only took him five years.

Looking red-faced and embarrassed, Bush shouted his speech to the crowd as if his passion (anger) might overshadow the torrent of spin coming from his mouth.

He expressed sadness that “many African Americans distrust my political party.” But he didn’t mention all the good reasons for that distrust.

Instead, he extolled the virtues of his effort to increase home-ownership. Too bad those gains have been more-than-offset by stagnant wages, skyrocketing energy costs and ever-increasing property taxes.

He also touted his No Child Left Behind legislation as a gift to African Americans. He forgot to mention that he failed to fund it properly, and that educators across the nation consider it a disaster.

But Bush outdid himself by conjuring the ghost of fellow Republican Abraham Lincoln, as if the liberal Lincoln had anything in common with today’s Republican party or Bush's elitist policies. It’s a well known, if seldom mentioned, reality that the Republican Party is currently the party-of-choice for racists, rednecks, Klansmen and white supremacists in America, but I’m sure that little fact is not lost on the African American community.

The Bush visit was motivated not by an earnest desire to connect with people he wants to help, but rather to bolster his sagging poll numbers and help his crippled party in the November elections.

African Americans, like most other Americans, have been left behind by the Bush economy, which has created historic income disparities between the wealthy and the rest of us. And his “darn-it, why don’t you like me?” speech is unlikely to change his standing within that community.

People are sick of hearing Bush talk. They only care about what he does or, more commonly, fails to do.

Robert Novak's Faulty Memory

2006-07-18T13:39:00.000-04:00

Robert Novak is either a liar or an idiot. You be the judge.

Journalist Novak penned the now-infamous 2003 article criticizing Joe Wilson and outing his CIA wife, Valerie Plame.

When asked in 2003 by Newsweek about the source of his story and the identity of Plame, Novak replied:

“I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me. They thought it was significant, they gave me the name and I used it.”

Later that year on Meet The Press, Novak clarified his statement to Tim Russert:

“What I meant was that the senior official had given me her name.”

This scenario was supplemented by CIA employee Bill Harlow, whose Grand Jury testimony was summed up by the Washington Post:

“[Harlow] warned Novak ... that Wilson’s wife had not authorized the mission and that if he did write about it, her name should not be revealed. Harlow said that after Novak’s call, he checked Plame’s status and confirmed that she was an undercover operative. He said he called Novak back to repeat that story Novak had related to him was wrong and that Plame’s name should not be used. But he did not tell Novak directly that she was undercover because that was classified.”

Now, three years later, Novak is denying it all. On the 7/16/06 telecast of Meet The Press, Novak said of his earlier statement to Newsweek:

“That was a misstatement on my part.”

And of his clearheaded response to Russert in 2003:

“Well, that, that was just—that’s just a misstatement on my part.”

And of Harlow’s testimony to the Grand Jury about what he said to Novak:

“He didn’t say that. He never said that. Now he may—he may, he may think he said it, but he, he never—he never said that to me.”

Novak wants us to believe that his earlier, sober responses to direct, unambiguous questions were entirely incorrect despite the fact that he had just printed the story and the material was fresh in his mind. He also wants us to believe that testimony--consistent with and confirming his original statements--was just flat wrong.

So now, Novak is right and everybody else is wrong.

Journalists live and die by the veracity of their stories, by their ability to get the details of a story right. But three years after the fact, Novak’s story has mysteriously taken a 180 degree turn.

He’s either a crappy journalist, or a down-and-dirty liar. Or both.

Ann Coulter's Pimps

2006-07-16T15:15:00.000-04:00

Below is an email I wrote to MSNBC's Hardball last Thursday (via the address hardball@msnbc.com). If you are as disgusted as I am by pseudo-commentator Ann "Smearfest" Coulter, I encourage you to fire off an email everytime her smug, angry face invades your TV screen, and of course, change the channel...

Dear Softball,

I just turned the channel to CNN when I saw the face of Ann Coulter on your show.

She is an expert on nothing but anger, intolerance, sensationalism and spin. She is a first-class media whore, and you seem determined to be her pimp.

Stop putting an impostor on the air and start being journalists. We need real commentary on "news" channels, not her garbage. Disgusting...

JT Compton

Ed Rogers, Deluded GOP Hypocrite

2006-07-13T15:05:00.000-04:00

Everything dishonest, hypocritical and disgusting about the Republican party seems embodied in Ed Rogers, GOP strategist and former presidential advisor.

On Hardball yesterday, Rogers claimed that Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and the Bush team were completely innocent of any wrongdoing in the Valerie Plame leak. “It‘s a kidney stone. It‘s just over. It‘s just over.”

The way Rogers sees it, “In this case, it has been proven affirmatively that no one disclosed any information that as a matter of law shouldn‘t be disclosed. And that‘s what this was about.”

No. Actually, Fitzgerald found insufficient evidence to indict Rove for perjury or obstruction of justice--after giving Rove five chances to get his story straight in front of a grand jury.

Rogers also stated, “It‘s now been proven that [illegal disclosure] didn‘t happen. Let‘s move on.”

Once again wrong. Nothing has been proven. Just because a prosecutor can’t indict doesn’t prove that nothing bad or illegal happened. No judge, jury or prosecutor has ever concluded that no wrongdoing occurred in any aspect of this case.

Rogers went on to say, “The whistleblower in this case, Ambassador Wilson who you‘re talking about, did not tell the truth.”

What crazy dope is Rogers smoking? Again, he ignores facts in favor of fantasy. It is an indisputable fact that Joe Wilson told the truth about the only relevant issue--there were no nuclear materials going from Niger to Iraq.

Recall that in the last two election cycles Republicans were screaming and shouting, “We are the party of values, we are the people of faith. We are going to restore ethics to Washington.” When it came to Bill Clinton, even though he was never found guilty of a crime Republicans whined and moaned that his tryst with Monica Lewinsky was immoral, unethical and disgraceful.

Now those very same whiners, represented by Ed Rogers, claim that because Rove will never be charged with a crime his lily-white hands are clean and pure as the driven snow. So much for restoring ethics to Washington.

Perhaps it doesn’t occur to Rogers and the GOP that the outing of Plame, while never leading to an arrest for illegal disclosure, is every bit as immoral, unethical and disgraceful as anything Bill Clinton ever did. And the evidence overwhelmingly confirms that the Bush team was responsible for the smear campaign that tarnished Joe Wilson and blew the cover of his CIA wife.

Did the White House break the letter of the law? We may never know. But we know enough to say that the conduct of Cheney, Rove, Libby and others was unethical, immoral and disgraceful. To suggest otherwise is to ignore the facts and discard reason, something Ed Rogers and his party seem happy to do.

Frist The Fool

2006-07-12T13:39:00.000-04:00

Senator Bill Frist is about to unveil his GOP strategy for the November elections. Rather than focus on social issues like gay marriage, abortion and stem cells, Frist wants to tout the GOP's successes since 1994.

It's hard to imagine a better strategy for GOP failure.

His stroll down memory lane will highlight welfare reform, lower taxes and an "economic boom". But these items do much more to illustrate Republican incompetence and sloth than success.

Take welfare reform, something the GOP long desired. It occurred because Bill Clinton had the political vision to make it happen despite protests from his own party, not because of Republican savvy. And it happened a long time ago.

Lowering taxes (for the rich) might have been a good idea in peacetime, but it's a staggering mistake in the midst of a costly war, a massive deficit and a historic trade gap. We haven't begun to pay for this blunder yet, but it will hurt.

And the "economic boom" Frist flaunts has only touched wealthy CEOs, corporate executives and lobbyists. The rest of America has been battered by job losses and downscaling, stagnant wages, rising local taxes, towering medical expenses and soaring energy costs.

That these are the three main accomplishments of the GOP since 1994 is wildly shameful and indicates a party full of rhetoric but devoid of ability and empty of substance.

To be fair, Frist left out certain other GOP accomplishments like appointing radical judges, massively increasing faith-based government grants, staffing federal agencies with corporate lobbyists, filling legislation with irresponsible pork, gutting rules that protect the environment and keeping voting irregularities off the agenda. But those might make him and his party look bad.

Indeed, like the Presidency of George W. Bush, the GOP record is an utter disgrace and Frist's plan will do nothing but shine a bright light on it.

Democrats and Independents should be ecstatic.

Presidential Propaganda

2006-07-07T11:32:00.000-04:00

In Chicago today, President Bush gave the same speech he’s given for the last five years, hoping to shift public sentiment about his Staying The Course of Failure policy in Iraq.

The central rationale for staying in Iraq, according to the President, is to keep the terrorists from pushing us out and using Iraq as a base for training and staging more terrorist acts.

But the President and his incompetent advisors fail to grasp that the terrorists want us to stay in Iraq because our occupation bolsters their central claim that we are trying to control the region’s oil reserves. This claim has been responsible for recruiting more suicide bombers than all other rationales combined.

The best thing we could do would be to withdraw completely, including closing our newly built mega-bases, thus removing the centerpiece of the terrorist grievance against us. Iraq will ultimately flush the foreign fighters from its midst.

Will Iraq keep itself from civil war? It’s already engaged in a civil war, and our troop strength and policy set is inadequate to stop it. So our presence there is no longer serving a purpose. It is, in fact, playing into the hands of terrorists.

The President also said that we have made progress in moving toward energy independence, calling it a "full blown strategy." Is he making some kind of grotesque joke? Apparently, he feels that mentioning something in a state of the union address means that the problem is solved.

Additional refinery capacity won't wean us from our addiction to oil, nor will throwing a few million dollars at new battery technology. Bush has still done nothing about mileage standards, nor put into place any large scale or comprehensive program to develop a revolutionary (as opposed to evolutionary) approach. His propaganda on this issue is shameful.

Bush finally declared, "You win elections by believing something. You win elections by having a policy that actually accomplishes something." But he didn't explain how a President wins by believing something that is false, wrongheaded, superstitous, dysfunctional or downright abhorrent.

Bush believes in torture, deception, unfettered wiretapping, government secrecy, preemptive war, selective leaking, corporate greed, helping the wealthy, no accountability, mixing religion with government and unchecked Presidential power.

By any reckoning, his administration has accomplished nothing positive (unless, of course, you are extremely wealthy). Our jobless recovery is built on a horrifying mountain of debt. Our prescription drug policy is a wasteful, deceptive sham. Our No Child Left Behind policy has been a disaster.

No amount of speechifying can overcome these failures. Indeed, every time Bush opens his mouth, he confirms what most Americans have concluded. That he is a failed President incapable of changing course.

What Values?

2006-06-30T13:17:00.000-04:00

Responding to the Supreme Court Decision on Guantanamo tribunals, President Bush stated that he will continue to do everything in his power to protect the American people.

But what ever happened to protecting American liberties and values?

For years, Radical Right Republicans have been screeching “Family Values” and pointing fingers at the immoral “Liberal Elite.” Bibles in hand, they assert that they alone possess the moral high-ground. But their actions demonstrate the opposite...

Bush urges others to follow the law, but scorns it to suit his purposes. Alberto Gonzales, in charge of enforcing the laws, has become the President’s Chief Enabler when it comes to deciding which laws to follow and which to reject. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have orchestrated a top-down policy of prisoner treatment that goes against everything our nation says it stands for--dignity, human rights, justice. And leaking is a crime against our nation…unless it’s the President’s inner circle doing the leaking. Supporters of Bush, including smirking, arrogant Ralph Reed, are less pious Christians than greedy, money-grubbing con men.

The Executive Branch seems to know no bounds when it comes to hypocrisy.

They’ve lost sight of the principles that made our nation great, principles that we want to export to the rest of the world. Innocent until proven guilty. Facing your accuser. Due process. Transparency. Accountability. Open-mindedness.

Conservatives speak as if they have already determined the guilt of those we have detained in Guantanamo and elsewhere, yet in case after case we discover that we have rounded up scores of innocent people whose lives have been forever damaged by torture and lengthy detention.

I would rather be less safe and have our nation’s principles preserved than have the blood of torture on my hands or the injustice of indefinite detention without recourse on my conscience.

Lt. Commander Charles Swift, lawyer for Guantanamo detainee Salim Ahmed, spoke to Chris Matthews of Hardball yesterday. When asked about the crux of the Supreme Court’s decision, he put it perfectly:

It‘s how we conduct ourselves. It has to do where if we say that our opponent can cause us not to follow the rules anymore, then we‘ve lost who we are. We‘re the good guys. We‘re the guys who follow the rule and the people we fight are the bad guys and we show that every day when we follow the rules, regardless of what they do. It‘s what sets us apart. It‘s what makes us great and in my mind, it‘s what makes us undefeatable, ultimately.

These are the rules--the principles--that matter to me. The principles that seem to matter to conservatives--vengeance, injustice, retribution, secrecy, prejudgment, preemption, propaganda, torture--are what used to be called vices.

Washington Flood...Of Incompetence

2006-06-27T02:39:00.000-04:00

I haven’t written anything in almost a week because I don’t know where to begin. President Bush and the GOP have made a mess of so many important things...

Iraq

Like a circle of toddlers at nap time, Republican Senators whined and pouted last week about two Democrat-proposed timetables for withdrawal of troops from Iraq, one date-certain, the other open-ended.

But the moment Republicans took a break from shouting “Cut And Run, Cut And Run”, General Casey, the top military commander in Iraq, announced...a tentative timetable for withdrawal!

President Bush stumbled into the fray by stating that, unlike the Democrats, Casey’s plan will be “aimed toward achieving victory.” The subtext being that the Democrats are wimps and only withdraw in defeat, while withdrawals orchestrated by military brass are somehow more noble and likely to be characterized as victory.

Of course, neither Bush nor his spineless party articulated what their notion of “victory” might look like. It seems to include chaos, kidnappings, torture, beheadings, assassinations and civil war, which is a mighty strange, if not grotesquely inadequate and dishonest, definition.

And speaking of dishonest, Bush told graduating cadets at West Point that “the war began on my watch but it’s going to end on your watch.” But not if General Casey and the GOP incumbents have their way. Their noble, victorious withdrawals from Iraq are already being timed to coincide with the election cycle. Casey’s plan calls for the first large shipment of troops to arrive home beginning this September. How convenient.

The Environment

The HBO series Real Sports did a piece this week concerning the epidemic rise among young Americans of asthma, directly attributable to power plants polluting at levels that used to be illegal. The show highlighted how the Bush Administration gutted parts of the Clean Air Act and vacated lawsuits that were well on their way to forcing huge polluters to clean their emissions. That’s right, folks--Bush and the GOP just walked away from enforcing the laws, then changed the laws, all in favor of the power companies.

This is old news, but in light of the headline this week from scientists that the earth is at its warmest point in at least 400 years, the story was heartbreaking in an entirely new way.

Republican greed-whores argued that enforcing the laws would have made energy costs higher. But what they really meant was that the lawsuits would have forced their CEO buddies to buy seventy foot yachts instead of the ninety footers. Those plants were quite profitable--at the expense of our nation’s children. It’s a crying shame, and the executives of that industry should be disgusted by their own greed and toxic callousness.

Liberty

The New York Times disclosed last week that the government has been recording and analyzing every wire transfer of every person on the planet. Bush and Cheney were screaming mad at the story, not because it harmed our war on terrorism--it didn’t--but because it was yet another high-profile instance of executive-branch excess and potential illegality. Of damning importance was the fact that Congress was notified of the program only after it was in jeopardy of being exposed by the media.

The spying came as a surprise to most Americans, but the terrorists have known about it for some time--wire transfer traffic among Islamofascists has steadily fallen since the program started because terrorists eventually caught on. “We’re no longer using phones, beepers, smoke-signals...and still we’re getting caught. Duh, it was those wire transfers through Pakistan!”

Wages

Congress recently voted to give itself decent pay raises (in line with inflation) while almost simultaneously voting, for the ninth straight year, to leave the minimum wage where it is. It was their formalized way of saying “f-you” to blue-collar Americans, who should be happy to live in a country where they can buy a lottery ticket giving them the same chance of lifting their economic fortunes as they have through hard work. In other words, virtually none.

If anybody out there still thinks that the Republicans in Washington care about anybody but corporate executives, I’d be happy to laugh loudly in their face. Never in my lifetime have I seen a more brazen group of political pirates than the greedy, money-soaked corporate puppets running Congress.

I’ll leave these other items for later: massive voting fraud in Ohio during the ’04 election; the essential Voting Rights Act renewal being delayed by the meddling GOP; FEMA being bilked out of billions of Katrina dollars; the swing vote on the Supreme Court now seems to be Radical Right Posterboy Samuel Alito; what a pitiful mess.

Staying The Course Of Failure

2006-06-20T15:36:00.000-04:00

Vice President Dick Cheney crawled from the shadow of his bunker this week to throw a few pearls of wisdom to the little people. But when asked about his now-famous “Last Throes” comment, a stone-faced Cheney tersely confessed, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we’ve encountered [in Iraq].”

Anybody in Cheney’s small circle of radical neo-con friends, that is. But a long list of politicians, analysts and intelligence officers did. And they were ignored. That’s the tragedy of the Iraq invasion, and the reason Cheney and his assistant, President Bush, are now considered dangerously incompetent and no longer trusted by the public to administer foreign policy.

But these realities don't keep Republican lawmakers from clinging to the pseudo-strategy of “Staying The Course” in Iraq. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, they insist that we should be patient, citing the killing of terrorist Zarqawi as a sure sign of progress. Which is like deciding to stay in a burning house because you find a ten-dollar bill on the floor.

From all first-hand accounts, Iraq continues to disintegrate. By any measure--IED explosions, civilian deaths, gas lines, electric service--life in Iraq is getting worse, not better. Growth in the ranks of Iraqi security forces has been offset by a splintering of militia factions along sectarian lines, producing torture and death squads with ethnic cleansing as their objective.

Average Americans understand that a few new school houses and a few more minutes of rationed electricity have no value in a community where kidnapping, rape, torture and indiscriminate death stalk every street, where people are caught between car bombs and so-called smart bombs on a daily basis.

Americans are also beginning to understand that open-ended occupation emboldens terrorists and empowers their recruiters, whereas deadlines motivate citizens in Iraq’s political center to establish control of their country. Iraq has faced numerous deadlines--to form a constitution, to hold elections, to form a cabinet--and they have been modestly effective.

So when Cheney, Rove and Bush bash deadlines, remember their track record and imagine how much better our nation and world would be if we had done the opposite. “Staying The Course” is no different. It is a course of continuing failure, stagnation and waste, and its supporters care more about staying in office than facing the reality of their party's mistakes.

By contrast, deadlines are the course of motivation and encourage the fleeting possibility of peaceful Iraqi self-determination.

Coulter Conservatism

2006-06-15T18:36:00.000-04:00

The moment Karl Rove knew he was not going to be charged with a crime he went back to doing what he does best. Smearing—or Coultering—his opponents. At a recent event, Rove declared that if Jack Murtha had his way, terrorist Al Zarqawi would never have been captured. But Rove conveniently missed the bigger point:

If Kerry or Gore had been President they wouldn’t have created the mess that gave rise to Zarqawi.

The Bush invasion of Iraq made Zarqawi the terrorist he was, and jump started a new Queda cell in the mismanaged turmoil of Iraq. But Rove won’t take responsibility for that any more than he will take responsibility for leaking a CIA operative’s name to journalist Matt Cooper.

In a TV interview, RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman felt emboldened to ask critics if they "owe Karl Rove an apology?" Only after Rove apologizes for leaking. In other words, when hell freezes over. Apparently, according to Bush, if it isn’t against the law, it can’t be bad. Or immoral or unethical. Those are his so-called values.

But Rove wasn’t finished. At the same age soft, saggy Karl Rove was turning the College Republicans into a hate organization, John Kerry and John Murtha were dodging bullets and winning medals on the front lines of war. Now Rove has the disgusting audacity to denigrate their service by suggesting that "they may be with you for the first shots. But they're not going . . . to be with you for the tough battles."

Rove failed to mention that neither he nor his buddies Dick and Dubya have ever served in a war. They won't even be with you for the first shots! Rove and Cheney aren’t warriors, they are garden-variety nerds. Cheney can’t even handle a gun properly. And in college, Bush wasn’t an athlete--he was a cheerleader. Not that there is anything wrong with being a nerd or a cheerleader. It’s just wrong to pretend that you’re a tough guy, and slander and smear true heroes, when you are neither. Unindicted...and unethical.

Rove wasn’t the only conservative making hypocritical, idiotic statements this week. In a recent interview, Conservative David Horowitz declared that "you cannot support the troops and not support the war." Well David, speak for yourself. Most of the rest of us apparently have a greater flexibility of mind, depth of sense and a grasp of basic logic than you do. You might as well have said, "you can’t support the GOP and not support Jack Abramoff."

In today’s Congresional war debate, Georgia Rep Charlie Norwood asked "do we have the will to win?" But he and his Republican colleagues have never had the backbone to ask, much less answer, a more fundamental question:

Do we have the will to confront the mistakes and incompetence that got us into an unnecessary war, and hold those responsible to account.

Also, Ann Coulter remained on the airwaves this week, trying to claw her way back to the land of sanity by criticizing Democrats for using tragedy victims and limbless war veterans as spokespeople. But her statement reveals an ugly truth:

Because Republicans "argue" by slandering, smearing and assassinating character, the Democrats have been forced to speak through people whose character is more virtuous than the scum who attack them.

Perhaps Ann should do what so many 9/11 widows have done. Create a charitable foundation for the betterment of the world. Then again, do we really need the Ann Coulter Foundation for Anger, Hatred, Hypocrisy, Inaccuracy, Exaggeration, Superstition and Intolerance?

Bloggers, the Fifth Estate

2006-06-12T15:42:00.000-04:00

In theory, each of the three branches of the Federal Government hold a check and/or balance on the other two. The executive branch is like a rock, the judiciary like paper and the Congress like scissors. But since the near-election of George Bush as President, the executive branch has expanded to the size of a boulder, impossible for the judiciary to cover or the GOP-controlled Congress to cut.

For example, despite a non-stop stream of executive branch abuses, scandals and unprecedented constitutional re-interpretations, nothing of substance has been done by Congress to mitigate the President’s power grab or hold his team accountable for any number of grotesque strategic blunders. In short, Republican office-holders remain absolutely terrified of losing their newfound power. Incapable of providing meaningful oversight, they are willing to let Dick Cheney and other mean-spirited Bush thugs reinterpret the entire political dynamic, even when it forces them to support positions in direct opposition to their values--policies they secretly despise.

Enter the fourth estate. In theory the final check and balance on political power should be the media. Yet many huge stories in the past five years have been altogether avoided by televised media and given insignificant coverage by print media. The case for invading Iraq tops the list. Rather than question the President’s so-called-facts and risk being labeled unpatriotic (by the very same “fact” creators), the media meekly accepted administration statements. And on the rare occasions when media members criticized, GOP operatives bullied and smeared until the criticism went away.

Recently, the media shied away from the issue of global warming, focusing instead on Al Gore’s potential political comeback rather than his rock-solid data showing our planet is in deep trouble. This should be the biggest story in our lifetimes, but it barely hits the media radar. Why?

A mountain of evidence has been compiled, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others, demonstrating vast and unexplainable 2004 voting irregularities in Ohio favoring the Republican ticket. If true, it should be the second biggest story of a lifetime, but the mainstream media remain unwilling to cover any story requiring complex analysis or risking political upheaval. Why?

Republicans slipped an item into a recent bill authorizing bases in Iraq staffed by at least fifty-thousand soldiers for at least the next ten years. Where is the story in the media? So much for standing down while the Iraqis stand up.

Anyone still puzzled by the explosive growth of the blogosphere should go back to kindergarten and start over. It has become exceedingly clear that blogs are a reflexive attempt by citizens to highlight important issues and draw conclusions about information that mainstream media are too cowed or frightened to touch.

In a recent NY Times column “Bloggers Double Down,” Maureen Dowd wonders whether bloggers are just media outsiders hoping for a seat inside. But she fails to address the core of their movement. Bloggers dream of restoring the mainstream media to what it used to be: a effort to find facts and draw conclusions, wherever that may lead. Many bloggers have neither the desire nor the training to be journalists, but they can draw conclusions as well as any editorialist. And, thanks to the internet, they have access to the same information as any newsroom.

When the mainstream media refuses to call intentional dishonesty “a lie,” something stinks. When huge stories are ignored because they might be controversial, depressing or turn off corporate sponsors, something is rotten at the core of the media enterprise. When a story always has two sides, as if facts are always purely subjective, something vital has been lost.

Blogs fill the interpretive void left by an inept, scared, profit-focused media. And given the incompetence of the Bush Administration, the failures of congressional oversight and ever-expanding Republican party scandals, bloggers are becoming an essential fifth estate.

Ann Coulter, Media Whore

2006-06-07T12:55:00.000-04:00

Ann Coulter is the most vile, offensive media whore in America today. It's been said by her friends that she is actually a normal, balanced person in private, and that her public persona is a schtick. But whether contrived or authentic, her opinions and persona are thoroughly repulsive and intellectually bankrupt.

Treated by the media as a legitimate commentator and pundit, she is neither. Indeed, she is simply a hate-filled, bile-spewing, stereotyping sensationalist. Her opinions never visit the land of balance nor reason, but she earns millions selling books based on hyperbolic slurs and outrageous insults.

Her most recent, accusing the outspoken 9/11 widows of “enjoying their husband’s deaths,” is yet another in a long line of disgusting, shock-value garbage. More lamentable than her statements, however, are the people who believe her. According to MSNBC, 24% of poll respondents say her comments do not go too far.

I never take her deluded ramblings seriously, but trying to grasp the mentality of those who do is truly horrifying. They represent everything I loathe about humanity, and lately, about the Republican party--the party of my favorite President, liberal Abraham Lincoln.

Who are these people? The same medieval morons who think Global Warming is a lie, who think Iraq was responsible for 9/11, who think Hillary murdered Vincent Foster, who think the Bible is infallible, who think the End Days are coming soon, who think contraception is evil, who think marriage is unchanging, and who think George Bush is doing an “excellent” job. In other words, Ann Coulter’s base.

Whether out of dumb luck or calculation, Coulter doesn’t hesitate to smear, insult and offend anyone in order to sell books to a small segment of Americans who live to be angry, intolerant, arrogant, divisive, narrow-minded haters. And I'm sure her latest outrageous statements will only help her sales.

Ann Coulter will continue to operate behind the facade of legitimacy until televised media stop giving her a platform to spew her hatred. That the media has access to thousands of balanced, rational commentators on both sides of any issue makes their periodic choice of Coulter an indication that they are less journalists than tabloids. And that’s yet another disgrace.

Haters, Dividers, Republicans

2006-06-05T16:10:00.000-04:00

The politics of bigotry is alive and well among intolerant conservatives. Topping a recent Worst President Ever poll, George Bush threw his Gay Marriage Amendment life-preserver into the political water today to try to save his sinking party, giving an angry and divisive speech supporting the Amendment. By stoking hatred and division in an election cycle, Republican spinmeisters hope to stave off in November a mass defection of voters horrified by the long list of failures and scandals produced by Bush and his inept cronies.

But confronted with this filthy strategy, White House Spokesman Tony Snow lied through his newly whitened teeth, saying that the Amendment timing had nothing to do with politics. He obviously thinks his audience is retarded.

In today's speech, Bush repeatedly used the tired Republican spook phrase “activist judges”, blaming them for overturning state laws prohibiting gay marriage (that, in fact, go clearly against the spirit of the constitution and our nation’s history of civil liberty). There was nothing arbitrary about the judges actions, as Bush cynically suggested.

And Bush kept angrily insisting that marriage is the most “enduring and important human institution.” If so, then why not an amendment to prevent divorce? Why not attack people who bear children out of wedlock? Because this Amendment isn’t about marriage. It’s about people’s fear and hatred of gays. Period.

Slavery was a fundamental and enduring part of human life for centuries, until we decided it was unjust and violated the spirit of our nation's founding documents. But that truth is irrelevant if you believe the lie that sexual orientation is a matter of choice.

The fact is, marriage has been redefined constantly. For the majority of the last two thousand years, marriages in the West were arranged, not the product of romantic love. For centuries, and within the last hundred years, middle-aged men were often encouraged to marry fourteen-year-old (or younger) girls. Brides could be traded by families like chattel. In most of the rest of the world today, marriages are still arranged. And many parts of the world still encourage plural marriage. There is nothing unchanging about it. To suggest so is a distorting, manipulative lie that plays to our most base fears and prejudices--fear of the unknown, of the other, of change.

When I listen to Bush twist and turn his way through this issue, here’s what I hear:

Humans should be treated with respect and reverence. Our humanity is the most fundamental aspect of our lives. And while I harbor no ill will towards gays, they don’t deserve to be considered human. For two thousand years, humanity has been doing just fine, but now gays want to tear down the definition of what is means to be human. In order to protect the health of humanity, we have to protect what it means to be human. Despite the fact that study after study show that gays are predominantly born gay, they should decide to ignore their genes and fundamental urges and stop being gay. In which case, they would become human. But activist judges, using their demonic “logic” and “reason” and “sense of justice,” want to pretend that gays are human, and we must stop them. Sure, gays can continue to live among us without being killed…for the most part. But we, the people, need to stop evil judges from undermining the structure of humanity, because our superstitions require us to. I know, with all humility, that God really wants us to exclude gays from humanity. He made them gay as a way to perfect our intolerance and hatred. And we must pass this amendment to prove that we are worthy. Our society and political offices depend on it.

What a sad, narrow, divisive, hate-filled position.

LATE ADDITION:

MSNBC Host Tucker Carlson tonight pleaded for Democrats and Republicans to come together and discuss banning gay marriage. "Isn't it time for an open discussion?" he asked, his anger barely masked by a veneer of phony earnestness. But when his gay guest countered that we should instead have a discussion about divorce, since Republican Senator George Allen--a big opponent of gay marriage--is a divorcee, Tucker blew his lid, enraged that the guest would be so cruel to Allen.

Tucker was angry because his guest had so clearly exposed the ridiculous hypocrisy of Allen and Tucker's conservative gay-baiting. And Tucker's wide-eyed denial that the Marrige Amendment is pure politics smells of posturing and intellectual dishonesty. It has never escaped my attention that Tucker Carlson is the picture of what conservatives claim to loathe--an elite, bow-tie-wearing dandy, straight from prep school/Ivy League central casting. That an old woman could probably beat him at arm-wrestling makes taking "tough" stands all the more imperative for Tucker, whose childhood must have been filled with teasing and slurs. He should stop the phony tough-guy pose, the manufactured outrage and the fiction of objectivity and start learning how to be honest to his viewers.

Al Gore - Presidential, Patriotic and Prophetic

2006-05-30T18:07:00.000-04:00

Watching the horrifying new documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” based on a slide show Al Gore has given hundreds of times around the globe, I had two distinct impressions.

One, that Global Warming is not only a very real and scientifically proven phenomenon, but also a catastrophic freight train heading directly at us. Any child who can multiply and divide has to come to the same conclusion. And the conclusion is neither hyperbole nor overstatement.

Indeed, despite sniping from media morons (like John Tierney of the New York Times) who focus on the fact that Al Gore doesn't have the same screen impact as, say, Tom Cruise, or that the film has too much information and not enough entertainment (ooops--they forgot it was a documentary, not a thriller), the basic, scientifically undisputed facts are astonishing.

Global temperature has proven to be a function of, and determined by, carbon levels in the atmosphere. And the fact that carbon levels are currently multiples higher than they have been in many hundreds of thousands of years is an indication that global temperatures are going to continue rising beyond historical precedent--with absolutely devastating consequences.

After watching the film and reading the evidence, anyone who doesn’t agree that we are facing a global emergency of Biblical proportions is just plain stupid, ignorant, deluded or in denial. If anyone disagrees, I challenge them to point to ANY robust, peer-reviewed study that contradicts the research presented in the film. Otherwise, we all need to act quickly if we want to save the planet as we know it and prevent a flood of human misery and suffering.

The film, which details Vice President Gore’s background and adolescence, also provoked the sad realization that our nation would have been so much better off with President Al Gore.

While President Bush is incapable of speaking proper English, stumbles over words, and doesn’t seem to understand the simplest concepts, Al Gore is thoughtful, articulate, passionate and engaging. While Bush can barely parrot the talking points of his handlers, Gore is a solid extemporaneous speaker. I’m not sure if Bush is stupid, but he is surely, at best, a mediocre intellect. And his team has proven themselves incompetent, dishonest, corrupt, hypocritical, greedy, arrogant and destructive.

Sure, Bush has a great smile and can tell (his handler’s prefabricated) jokes with great effect, but it’s impossible to imagine him getting passionate or involved with any cause beyond his tiny set of oil friends or his ranch. He has neither the range nor the depth. Gore clearly has both. He would make an excellent foreign policy negotiator, perhaps the best steward of the environment in a generation, and hold accountable the same corporate interests that have the hapless Bush team in their pockets.

Looking back, it’s heartbreaking to imagine the wars, scandals, constitutional crises and policy failures that would have been avoided if the Supreme Court hadn’t given the victory to Bush.

Some would suggest that we shouldn’t look back, we should look ahead. But if we look ahead with the same idiots that got us into our current messes, we won’t fix anything. We have to look back and accept that the gross negligence, mismanagement and ineptitude of our current leaders disqualify them from being a part of any solution. Duh.

Al Gore would have surely avoided many of our current problems. Those who claim there is no real difference between the two political parties should have their heads examined. In terms of outcomes, our lives and our nation would be in a very different place, heading in a very different direction, if Al Gore were President. But thanks to this film, Gore may have a greater, more positive impact on our lives and future than we will ever get from eight years of the Bush disaster.

Barbaro and the Mighty Buck

2006-05-23T14:46:00.000-04:00

It’s easy to look at a racehorse and see grace, dignity and athleticism. But those traits are in short supply when it comes to the horseracing industry.

The devastating injury at the Preakness to Kentucky Derby winner and race favorite Barbaro cast new light on a world that has always been, at bottom, seedy.

While Triple Crown venues feature wealthy horse-owners and dandy wannabes dressed in tuxedos and fancy hats, the racing world is really just another facet of the gaming industry. Indeed, there are few places in America more disgusting and depressing than an OTB (off track betting) outlet. Welcome to the daily business of racing.

On most nights, horse tracks and their betting outlets serve as grubby, low-rent destinations for degenerate gamblers, desperate down-and-outers and fraternity brothers on slumming road trips. And on any given week across the nation, thousands of horses race, many of whom are neither loved nor cared for the way Barbaro seems to be.

Horses are a business. They don't freely decide to join with human companions to win glory against others. Sure, they live to run, but they don't live to push themselves to the limits of their endurance or structural integrity. And as racehorses are selectively bred for greater speed and strength, breakdowns like the one Barbaro suffered are becoming commonplace.

As such, horseracing is yet another disgusting example of people using animals to try to make a buck. I would never stop anyone from racing horses. I would simply state that horseracing is a disgusting, disgraceful enterprise that should be shunned.

I have no respect for the wealthy egomaniacs who push their little corporate jets and Bentleys and horsies around the world to prop up their social status, nor do I have any interest in joining the swilling, drunken hoards stuffing themselves into centerfields to pretend to care about nationally televised races while they try to hook up or throw up. I can hang with that crowd on any given Spring weekend in Daytona or Cancun.

A pig wearing Christian Dior is still a pig. And while I’m happy to say a prayer for Barbaro, I refuse to see horseracing and breeding as anything but using animals for greed and status. There is nothing dignified or noble about it.

Pat Robertson's God Problem

2006-05-19T11:48:00.000-04:00

American Mullah Pat Robertson disclosed recently that God told him 2006 will be a bad year for storms in the United States. Duh.

Of course, I don’t believe God spoke to Robertson. Not because Pat is a bigoted, intolerant, arrogant, superstitious loon. But because God told me he didn’t...

JT, I’ve never said a word to Pat Robertson. He’s a hostage taker, and the minute I open my mouth I won’t be able to shut him up. Besides, I never speak to Christians. Look what they’ve done to Jesus, turning him into an excuse for violence and hatred. And those awful portraits of him with pale skin and a morbid stare. Even worse, they claim I wrote the Bible. I mean, you’d think an omnipotent deity could do better than that creepy hodgepodge. Stoning people on the Sabbath? Me? Come on. And the guy who came up with Revelations was tripping on Sumerian peyote, in case you hadn’t already guessed.

Try to remember that Earth is a little speck of dust in my universe. I’ve created billions of galaxies, and billions of life-supporting planets in each galaxy. It’s a big challenge to keep track of. For example, there are eighty-six million genocides occurring at the moment. The one on planet Optrodus is particularly awful because it involves genetically targeted nanoassassins. Very sad, very messy.

And I should add that sixty-seven thousand planets will go extinct in the next terrestrial week due to poor stewardship, which doesn’t even include the nineteen hundred others due to supernova, asteroid collision and structural failure. The problems creatures create for themselves astonish me. Free will is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be lethal.

I often want to intervene, but that goes against the first principle of this whole thing of mine. If creatures take half the energy they spend on begging me to help them and put it into making their worlds better, the universe will be a significantly nicer place.

I know--you’re thinking that my communicating with you is a type of intervention, but it’s not. Nobody will ever believe you. For whatever strange reason, they keep believing religious fanatics and wingnuts like Robertson. It’s bad enough that preachers put words in my mouth, but the things they have me saying almost make me want the shut the whole experiment down.

Then again, when both suns rise at the same time over the yellow mountains of planet Grislbex, or when your whales sing their mating songs, or when….well, it makes it all worthwhile. Don’t you agree?

Theocons, Theofascists, Theobaloney

2006-05-18T00:47:00.000-04:00

Theocons and Theofascists are finally turning on their Golden Boy Bush. According to the New York Times, a revolt is being led by Christian conservatives who feel betrayed by the President.

Does this mean the Radical Right are finally embracing rational thought? Hardly.

They aren’t pissed because Bush is an incompetent liar. They aren’t upset that he recently stated on the subject of Immigration that, “we are a nation of laws,” despite the fact that he chooses to ignore some of them. They aren’t upset that his Attorney General went on TV the next day saying that, “if laws exist, they have to be respected, they have to be enforced,” even though he has shown utter contempt for the ones he doesn’t like and doesn’t believe the President is obligated to follow. They aren’t pissed at the gross mishandling of Iraq or the ever-growing mountain of debt.

No, they are pissed because Bush and his Republican Congress aren’t radical enough. That’s right, the Theocons are angry because attempts to impose their superstitions on the rest of us have failed. They feel betrayed that our so-called leaders haven’t followed through on issues like outlawing abortion and prohibiting gay marriage.

But they fail to realize that their radical agenda is abhorrent to a majority of Americans and politically untenable. So, since they can’t force us to behave the way they want, some are becoming more militant, scary and dangerous. Don’t believe me?

Last week a new Theofascist group held “concerts” attracting thousands in San Francisco and Detroit declaring that Christian faith is under attack. The group BattleCry and its umbrella organization Teen Mania label the imaginary attack on their faith and values “a war” (does that remind you of the words of a tall, bearded, AK-47 toting man on the Afghan/Pakistan border, per chance?). Their rhetoric comes close to inciting violence, all in service of their warped interpretation of the Bible. As ever, when angry, fearful, narrow-minded control freaks cloak themselves in the language of absolute truth, bad things begin to happen.

I’m glad the hapless presidency of George Bush has been, in effect, emasculated. He is already a lame duck. But I’m horrified that arrogant, intolerant, divisive Theofascists are turning up the volume on their hatred, anger and self-righteousness. They have nothing to do with Jesus, and everything to do with social tyranny.

Fox "Journalist" Gibson

2006-05-18T00:38:00.000-04:00

Here's a fun post from my new blog, Bible Fiction, dedicated to railing against the growing number of Fundamentalists pushing for Theocracy in America...

John Gibson, Partisan Hack

Liar Liar

2006-05-15T03:17:00.000-04:00

Though none of the mainstream media outlets would touch it, rumors swirled around the Blogosphere this weekend that Bush Administration mastermind Karl Rove is about to be indicted for perjury and perhaps more.

I suspect it’s no mere coincidence that President Bush has a prime-time speech scheduled tomorrow night on the subject of Immigration. It provides a convenient spotlight to do damage control on the same day Rove’s indictment is likely to go public.

But no amount of damage control can salvage the Bush Presidency. Rove’s resignation will be the death knell of the Bush regime--perhaps the most corrupt and incompetent in our history. The Bush accomplishment list will remain blank until the end. But it’s not just Bush.

On Meet The Press today, Newt Gingrich responded to the recent corruption scandals and White House troubles by saying “I think there’s a problem in both parties.” Which is the dishonest dodge a lot of Republicans continue to use to hide the fact that their party has completely eclipsed the Democrats in the arena of corruption, bloat and pork.

The Republican Party has actually become a Reagan Republican’s worst nightmare. Where they used to stand for fiscal responsibility, they now support the biggest debt binge ever (and still growing). Where they used to stand for small government, they now support a President whose actions come closer to Big Brother than any in our lifetime. Where they used to stand for military savvy, they now stand for disastrous strategy failure. Where they used to stand for values, they’ve become this decade’s cigar smoking, poker playing, hooker hiring sleazebags.

When the Supreme Court gave Bush the Presidency, Republican friends assured me that even though Dubya seemed developmentally disabled, his hidden genius was in picking world class advisors. But now that several of his advisors and cronies (DeLay) are in jeopardy of going to jail, along with a host of supporting players from Cunningham to Abramoff already locked up, it seems my friends were perfectly wrong. The Bush Administration, including Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Don Rumsfeld, appear to be some of the most arrogant, treacherous, radical, cynical, inept, incompetent political operatives in memory. In short, disastrous.

Nowadays, when anyone admits being a Republican, I always respond: “Oh? You must hate George Bush.” Wide eyed, they often muster, “What do you mean?” But the answer is obvious. George Bush has as much in common with a Reagan Republican as a Sunni has with a Shia. Both Sunni and Shia worship the Koran, and both Bush and Reaganites worship tax cuts, but that’s where the similarities end.

Early in his Presidency, some opponents of Bush labeled him a liar. Conservatives dismissed the charge as hysterical liberal hyperbole, but history has proven them wrong, too. Not only have Bush, Cheney and Rummy been caught in too many lies and distortions to dismiss, but two of their top advisors allegedly lied to the Feds, not to mention the public.

As with any organization, corporate culture emanates from the top. In the Republican Party, dishonesty and hypocrisy have become endemic. And in the Bush Administration, lying seems woven into the cultural fabric. The likely indictment of Karl Rove will soon add yet another strand to his awful, sordid tapestry.

You're Wrong, Dubya

2006-05-11T12:34:00.000-04:00

First of all, Mister President--Prove It.

Prove that your eavesdropping program doesn’t target ordinary Americans. You’ve long-since lost the trust of the American people, and it’s time to let the FISA court review your activities to ensure their lawfulness.

Your wiretapping speech today was deceptively precise. You said the government “does not listen to domestic phone calls without a warrant.” But you conveniently avoided the emerging fact that the government does a lot of other things to our phone calls without a warrant.

USA Today reports that the NSA now tracks most all calls, capturing the timing and numbers called without actually recording the content. Is this not “mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” to use your words?

At the very least, it seems to violate the spirit of the law.

Secondly, your values and priorities are entirely wrong. You stated that “our most important job is to defeat this [al Qaeda] enemy.”

Wrong.

Our most important job is to safeguard the Constitution and protect the liberties and values our nation rests upon. If we discard or denude our values in the pursuit of an enemy, we've already lost.

But you just don’t seem to understand this fundamental distinction.

Indeed, you seem hell-bent on re-interpreting and selectively ignoring our laws to suit your own disgraceful partisan purposes.

Until you let objective third-parties review your spying activities, the public will justifiably view you as guilty until proven innocent, withholding the trust you have failed to earn.

UPDATE:

As the facts emerge and the discourse sharpens, one thing is becoming clear:

Though perhaps not listening, Big Brother is watching us closely.

The "New Paradigm" Lie

2006-05-02T17:28:00.000-04:00

Remember the Internet bubble? Remember all those Silicon Valley eCommerce businesses going public and making fortunes for their employees and shareholders? Until the bubble burst and billions of dollars evaporated, destroying bank accounts and lives. The infamous rationale for that financial feeding frenzy was captured in a phrase: “new paradigm”.

Why are Internet companies trading at insane multiples? Where are the earnings? Where is the cash flow? Hey you don’t understand--it’s a new paradigm!

Of course, that assertion turned out to be disastrously wrong. There was nothing quaint or obsolete about the fundamentals of financial analysis. The present value of future cashflow was and remains the foundation of our capital markets. The new paradigm turned out to be a novel way to separate investors from their money.

Years later, we’re being sold the same bill of goods by Republicans, namely Karl Rove and his talking-point spinmeisters. They claim that Democrats are stuck in the pre-9/11 world while they are busy shaping the post-9/11 world.

Let’s call their theory the Post 9/11 Paradigm.

According to Conservatives, all the rules changed after the twin towers fell. Torture became necessary. Rendition became acceptable. Indefinite detention without recourse became the norm. Wiretapping without warrants became justified. After all, human nature and the principles and values we hold dear fundamentally changed on 9/11. It's a new paradigm!

Oh?

With the Bush Doctrine of Preemptive War collapsing and the clamor for investigations, censure and even impeachment rising, the Post 9/11 Paradigm seems to be bursting like the Internet bubble before it.

People are beginning to realize that compassion, tolerance, justice, due process, moderation, oversight, caution, diplomacy, discretion, thoroughness, capability and service still form the foundation of our nation’s values.

Torturing our presumptive enemies (whose actual guilt or innocence hasn’t even been ascertained) is just as repugnant, barbaric and regrettable as ever. It still opens our own citizens to the possibility of vengeance and blowback. Indefinite detention is still as grotesque and inhumane as it was when the Soviet Union used gulags. Secret wiretapping can still lead to the same destructive, unjust and unconstitutional abuses it led to in the past.

No, human nature and the consequences of injustice didn’t change on 9/11. What changed was the level of our fear, and the willingness of politicians to stoke that fear for their own aims. So the next time I hear a Republican accusing Democrats of being part of the pre-9/11 mindset, I’ll remember a broker trying to sell me a hot internet stock based on a new paradigm--nothing but mistaken, self-serving garbage.

Republicans are The Problem

2006-04-28T23:12:00.000-04:00

Last week’s major political failures had a common denominator--the Republican party. On a variety of fronts, they fell down and confirmed themselves as phony, weak-willed, money-grubbing cons.

Did anything substantive emerge on immigration legislation? No. The divided GOP leadership seems to have pushed the subject under the rug.

Did anything meaningful occur on ethics and lobbying reform? No. The latest attempt to re-write the rules produced a pitiful, hollowed out joke-of-a-proposal.

Did anything prudent happen with spending legislation? No. The latest budget was another pork-filled, election-year bonanza.

Did anything arise from the price-of-oil hysteria on Capitol Hill? No. The President announced that he would not support raising taxes on oil companies, and his party henchmen on Capitol Hill tried, yet again, to slip a provision into the half-baked oil crisis proposal to allow drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.

Did anything happen on the oversight front? No. The second part of the investigation of the rush to invade Iraq--looking at whether the Bush gang fixed intel to support their policy--remained in limbo despite a growing chorus of complaints. Nothing is likely to happen until after the mid-term elections, of course.

All these failures of leadership (or successes of corporate lobbying and coverup) can be traced directly to the door of the GOP.

Americans increasingly don’t like the direction the country is heading. And if they’re smart, they’ll connect our miserable course not just to an incompetent President, but to an unethical, inept and worthless Republican Congress.

It’s becoming easy to see. If you don’t want more business-as-usual, don’t vote for a Republican.

Avoiding 9/11 Movies

2006-04-25T13:04:00.000-04:00

I’ve not going to see any of the 9/11 movies about to be released. Here’s why:

They’re all about making money.

The trailer for the movie “Flight 93” features director Paul Greengrass mugging for the camera as he tells of his earnest, heartfelt desire to make a movie about the worst day in many American’s lives. But films only get made in Hollywood because they stand to generate dollars. And you can bet Greengrass is earning a hefty sum for this venture. As if to hide the fact, the trailer actually ends with an appeal for audience members to donate to a fund for victims, implying that Universal, the distributor, is also donating. Oh?

How much are they donating? And how much of his probable millions is Greengrass donating? I don’t buy it for a second. With all due respect to the families of the victims, I wouldn’t want my loved ones turned into two-dimensional caricatures by the Hollywood story machine.

Ridiculous, bloviating pundit Heather Higgins, Chairperson of the Radical Right anti-feminist think-tank Independent Women’s Forum, shrieked on the Bill Maher show that the stories of the victims of 9/11 need to be told--because the victims are heroes. And this sentiment has been echoed by many supporters of the upcoming films.

But if the stories of the victims are so important, why not hire one of the Burns brothers to do a thorough documentary? A movie dramatization is going to use the faces of actors and the words of writers to approximate what happened, and that’s not good enough for me. I don’t want to hear phony, over-dramatized dialog. I don't want faces of actors associated with those important events. I’m not interested in the guesswork of screenwriters, particularly because I am one. I know the difference between fact and fiction, and it’s significant.

I worked on the 100th floor of the World Trade Center for 2.5 years, and knew more than a few victims of the attack. I personally don’t want the feelings of that day dredged up and stoked by the likes of Greengrass or Oliver Stone. They are excellent filmmakers, but their theories and imaginings of what happened and what was said on 9/11 are of no interest to me, and only serve to cheapen and commercialize the truth of my own experience. I already know what happened.

No thanks. I’m not putting my money into the pockets of filmmakers who, at the end of the day, want to profit from this tragedy. I’m a fan of capitalism and have nothing against people working to feed their children. But in this case, I can’t help but be disgusted by the profit motive behind these movies. This is a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

Dummy Rummy

2006-04-19T12:53:00.000-04:00

President Bush instructed us this week that he is “a decider,” and apparently never changes course after a decision is made, no matter how poor or disastrous his judgment.

And since he feels that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been doing a good job, he has decided to ignore the growing calls for Rummy’s ouster.

But that hasn’t kept Rummy from mounting a media campaign to counter the spate of recently retired military generals urging his firing.

Rummy recently assured the press of his commitment to his office, of the long hours he keeps and the large number of meetings taken with military leaders in the last year. A commitment to the nation and the urgency he feels to fight terrorism are all he believes he needs.

But Rumsfeld doesn’t seem to understand or accept that nobody doubts his work ethic or his desire to serve. They doubt his judgment.

And with good reason. In direct opposition to supporters like extreme conservative Bill Bennett, who asserted on CNN that the mistakes made in Iraq were not Rummy’s fault, it has become clear that the decision to invade Iraq with a “light force”, the decision to ignore long-standing invasion planning, the decision to go in without a plan for securing the peace, and the decision to disband the Iraqi army were ALL made or authorized by Rumsfeld.

These grotesque and tragic blunders, which were made against the judgment of many top military leaders, were neither trivial nor forgivable, and go directly to the question of competence. By his actions, Rumsfeld has proven that he does not have the stuff necessary to lead our nation’s military.

That he remains the Secretary of Defense is a testament not to his effectiveness but to the political calculations of President Bush and his advisors, who would rather keep a loser in office than risk looking like failures themselves. But their chance to save face has long passed. And the tragic incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld remains.

Religion Opposed to Other Fictions

2006-04-17T13:52:00.000-04:00

The Catholic group Opus Dei, linked to the Vatican and cast as the villain in Dan Brown’s book and film The Da Vinci Code, posted a statement asking Sony to attatch a disclaimer to the film reminding viewers that “this is a work of fiction, and that any resemblance to reality is pure coincidence.”

In the spirit of full disclosure, the disclaimer might be appropriate.

But it also seems an appropriate disclaimer to add to the Bible.

As a deluge of scholarly science confirms, the Bible is less a book of history than a book of fable. Aside from the grotesque, ridiculous, barbarous and contradictory proclamations of the Old Testament, the more important (to Christians) New Testament adds to the vague story of a Jew named Jesus a host of after-the-fact miracles aimed at coercing belief, including the claim that his mother was a virgin, that he walked on water, that he rose from the dead, etc. Similar marvels and parlor tricks were attributed to an army of so-called prophets across the ages as followers tried to persuade others to join their sect, and many of their stories have become the stuff of myth, legend and fairy tale.

In addition, the gospels chosen to be included in the Bible were selected from a broad array of gospel writings of the period, many of which were contradictory. The selection gave inappropriate, unwarranted and seemingly arbitrary value to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John at the expense of the others, Judas and Mary, for example. The fact is, all were just hearsay--stories passed down and embellished over the decades, each containing views and biases reflecting the culture of their all-too-human authors. In other words, more fiction than fact.

To be sure, anyone who chooses to live in accordance with the apparent principals and values of Jesus has seemingly chosen an excellent role model. But anyone who believes that the Bible is historical fact stands on no firmer ground than someone who believes the Da Vinci Code is fact.

And anyone who believes that the creator of the universe somehow wrote the Bible--with all its contradictions and bizarre, magical nonsense--is dangerously out of touch with reality, reason, science and sanity.

If you’re going to put a disclaimer on Dan Brown’s film, put it on the Bible, too.

Rummy, A Dangerous Signal

2006-04-13T22:57:00.000-04:00

Several more Generals have come forward to add their names to the growing list of current and retired military leaders calling for the removal of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, but their informed concern seems to be falling on deaf ears at the White House. According to Administration spokespeople:

Getting rid of Rumsfeld won’t solve the problems in Iraq.

So, the man whose horrible judgment, wrong assumptions and incompetence created an untenable security nightmare in Iraq should stay at his post because we need his help to fix the situation. With his kind of help, who needs terrorists?

Of course, Radical Republicans desperately insist that replacing Rummy will:

Send a dangerous signal to the enemy.

But they’ve misused that disingenuous line repeatedly to attack almost every criticism of their Administration. It’s just a bogus, moronic dodge.

Here’s the simple truth:

Nothing sends a more dangerous signal to our enemies than U.S. government officials who are inept, corrupt, unethical, immoral, hypocritical and/or dangerously incompetent. Which sadly covers a large portion of the current Executive Branch.

The American people are slowly waking to the fact that the Bush Administration--and Rumsfeld--are tragic failures at governing, but hey, we get what we vote for. At least November will give us an opportunity to wrest control from the bankrupt party of Strong and Wrong, who are clearly incapable of fixing the many disasters of their own making.

Leaking Lying Loser

2006-04-10T23:57:00.000-04:00

As Senator Joe Biden wisely noted on the Bill Maher show last Friday, the American people are on to President Bush. They’ve learned to pay close attention to his deceptive words, carefully chosen by a Rove-picked team of spinmeisters to imply truths that are actually falsehoods and assert facts that are actually fictions, deflecting responsibility and blame with picayune legalese.

A perfect example: In light of Bush’s authorization to leak select parts of the National Intelligence Estimate, an angry White House press corps demanded an explanation from spokesman Scott McClellan, who could only repeat (and repeat) that the President’s authorization constituted an immediate declassification--his Presidential prerogative--and that criticism of such was an example of cynical partisan politics.

But McClellan failed to explain why the timing of the leaks didn’t constitute the most egregious example of partisan politics on the part of the President. To believe McClellan, you’d have to believe that those critical, nasty Liberal Democrats were trying to destroy America while Saintly Patriotic Republican Bush was trying to share vital information without any political calculation or desire to smear outspoken critics.

What rubbish. And the voting public agrees.

McClellan may actually believe that Bush can do no wrong and should be given, five-plus years into his Presidency, the blind trust of a conquering hero. But most of the rest of us aren’t that stupid. Bush lost his presumption of trust a long time ago. Not even the media can keep up with all the scandals, misjudgments, indictments, strategic errors, failed policies and failures-in-the-making of this disastrous Administration.

Recent items include:

1) Republicans convicted of vote-tampering in New Hampshire had multiple direct communications with the White House immediately prior to their illegal conduct.

2) Bush and company knew the Iraq uranium story had been discredited but used it anyway, then lied that they were unaware it had been discredited.

3) Despite three recently retired military generals calling for the ouster of Secretary Rumsfeld, Bush responded recently that he was satisfied with Rummy.

Satisfied with incompetence, apparently.

Which just goes to show that only the incompetent are satisfied with incompetence. And thus far, most of the Republican faithful still claim to be satisfied with President Bush. This November, say bye bye…