Master DeFoe

OK, so I'm not ready to leave entirely yet. I'll use this space for items in which the Free Press would have no interest.

I'm 169 pages into Daniel DeFoe's 600-page "A General History of the Pyrates," (the modern book with soft covers, not the original letterpress edition with all the f's), and finding it very uneven. DeFoe wrote quickly and prodigiously, and apparently never proofread or revised anything.

He wrote novels, topical journalism, partisan journalistic propaganda, histories, historical fiction, and some indifferent poems. DeFoe made his living churning out words, although his recurring dream was to become a rich and respected businessman. Unfortunately, his wine and tile manufacturing businesses brought him nothing but debts and bankruptcies.

What I'm learning from "The Pyrates" is that these desperate men, colorful and romantic according to our modern perception of them, were sleazy, illiterate, mostly sadistic, violent gangsters who were generally eased into their way of life by first following the occupation of privateers, an arrangement by which tough gunsuls obtained government licenses to engage in legalized piracy, as long as they didn't attack their own monarch's vessels, and as long as said monarch got his cut of the action.

When the license was eventually withdrawn, as it invariably was, these professional robbers and cutters of throats as often as not simply continued their chosen profession without benefit of license, or the habit of restraining themselves from attacks on their own country's ships.

The worst pyrate was Blackbeard. He was such a villain that when the brave Leftenant Bobby Maynard went after him with nary cannon nor shot nor shell, just pistols and cutlasses, and did a David-and-Goliath turn by cutting off the criminal's head and hanging it on his bowsprit, I found myself cheering inwardly.

DeFoe's "Pyrates" was a commercial success, as was his most famous book, the historical novel "Robinson Crusoe." However his masterpiece, a work Virginia Woolf described as "one of the few works in English that is indisputably great," was his account of the foundling who became a borderline prostitute and petty thief, Moll Flanders.

Although it was written as quickly as any of his other productions, "Moll" sustains an intensity from beginning to end that's singularly beautiful, and the writing throughout is a virtuoso flight. DeFoe was, I think, wrestling mightily within himself over the thorny question of who was to blame for Moll's criminal and predatory way of life.

Was the culprit she herself, a morally weak and spiritually bankrupt voluptuary who never, after her first youthful infatuation, gave a thought to anyone except (as we say today) old number one? Or was her turning toward crime and the seamy London underworld of part-time sex workers and full-time pickpockets forced upon her by a callous, stratified, male-dominated, hypocritical society in which a poor woman with no family connections, no dowry with which to snag a financially viable husband, and no friends in high places was forced to live by her wits?

My reading of the novel is that DeFoe was never able to answer his own question.

New Destinations, New Horizons

It's time to shut down the blog shop here at Omnem Movere Lapidem and move on.

Actually, I won't be ceasing operations, but just transferring the franchise to the Los Angeles Free Press blog. I hope to see all four or five of my regular readers there, where I post under the name "Catboxer."

Happy trails.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

According to this Reuters article the Democrats have a good chance of taking control of Congress next year.

Their imminent control of the House has been a foregone conclusion for some time, but now it looks like they have a good chance of taking the Senate as well.

There's been a lot of criticism of the Democrats coming from the left side of the blogosphere for the past few weeks, and I've been one of the harshest critics. But I still think the Democrats taking Congress will be a positive development.

They probably won't muster the necessary backbone to derail the administration's worst policies, the war and tax breaks for the rich, but they will question them, and more importantly a changing of the guard will break the stranglehold the neocon regime has had in all departments of government the past six years.

It would be too much to expect of the Democrats that they should seriously attack the hostile takeover of U.S. government by big money -- the corporations and special-interest-funded PAC's.

However, once the wheel of change finally starts moving, who knows where it might take us? Once political change gathers momentum, it might develop a mind of its own, and take us to places the Democrats can't imagine at the moment.

But one thing's for sure: the neocon mafia has been cresting the top of the roller coaster for a long time, and now they're looking down that first steep drop.

(Photo credit: Reuters via Firedoglake.com)

RIP Constitutional Republic, 1787-2006

The 219-year-old constitutional republic known as the United States of America died this past Wednesday when its newly-designated monarch signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

Among other things, this new law terminates the right of habeus corpus in the United States and enables the monarch or his appointed deputies to indefinitely detain anyone they deem an "unlawful enemy combatant," defined as "a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States."

Makes no difference if you're an American citizen. If you're "a person" and you've "materially supported hostilities" against what used to be the United States, by, say, giving money to a group deemed "terrorist," you may be tossed into jail without having the right, formerly guaranteed under the provisions of habeus corpus, to appear in court and ask why you have been so tossed. You may languish there forever, without being charged with a crime. You may be tried before a military tribunal without having the opportunity to examine the evidence against you, since such evidence as there is may, under the terms of this act, remain secret.

The Military Commissions Act repeals the Bill of Rights. Free speech and freedom of the press are fatally compromised by it, since the monarch has specifically stated that "...for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America." (The program he was speaking of was his own electronic surveillance of his subjects, or formerly, citizens.)

So what are the chances that any day now, the publisher of the New York Times might be fingered by Alberto Gonzales as "a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities" against the monarchy?

The fourth-amendment right to privacy is no longer guaranteed, since law enforcement agencies connected with these tribunals can secretly gather, then later refuse to divulge whatever evidence they choose.

The right to avoid self-incrimination is rendered moot by this law's allowing of confessions obtained by types of torture (such as waterboarding) that are less odious (as determined by the monarch and his staff) than "grave breaches" of the Geneva Convention's Common Article Three.

As for Amendments six, seven, and eight (the right to a speedy trial, trial by jury, and prohibition of "cruel and unusual" punishments), see paragraph number three above, and the paragraph preceding this one.

The centrality of Habeus corpus to an understanding and practice of law based on citizens' rights is much older than the U.S. Constitution. It's enshrined in English common law and goes back to the 13th-century Magna Carta and beyond.

As MSNBC's Keith Olbermann pointed out on his commentary program "Countdown," "(E)ven without habeas corpus, at least one tenth of the Bill of Rights, I guess that's the Bill of 'Right' now, remains virtually intact. And we can rest easy knowing we will never, ever have to quarter soldiers in our homes… as long as the Third Amendment still stands strong.

"The President can take care of that with a Signing Statement."

Olbermann also adds, "Countdown has obtained a partially redacted copy of a colonial 'declaration' indicating that back then, 'depriving us of Trial by Jury' was actually considered sufficient cause to start a War of Independence, based on the then-fashionable idea that 'liberty' was an unalienable right.

"Today, thanks to modern, post-9/11 thinking, those rights are now fully alienable."

Olbermann broaches a pertinent topic by citing the 1776 Declaration of Independence, in which aroused subjects served notice that they would no longer tolerate the excesses of an arbitrary monarch, and said of him that "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

If that was true of George III of England, a king whose rule was legitimized by law and tradition, how much more true is it of King George II of America, who is self-appointed, self-anointed, and the self-declared "decider?"

People of the former Republic of the United States, what will it take for you to realize just how much power you have? When will you discover the tremendous persuasiveness of a mass movement based on non-cooperation? When will you realize that he's only the decider until we decide otherwise?

Humming Along

It's time to fire up that pimped-out faux combat vehicle you've been keeping parked in the backyard. The price of crude oil fell to $57.65 a barrel yesterday.

Crude oil and gasoline prices are now sliding to a level equal to the lowest point we've seen in the past year -- about $52, on 12/02/05. This in spite of a threat from OPEC to cut production by a million barrels a day.

So all us "consumers" had better take advantage of the situation while we can. Let's plan a road trip! Just be sure you're home by election day.

The Candidate Redux

In 1972 Robert Redford starred in a movie about a liberal urban storefront lawyer doing advocacy work for the poor who was talked into running for governor. It didn't hurt that the Redford character, McKay, was the son of a former governor of the state in which he was to run, and the guy who talked him into running was a well-known power broker with extensive media connections.

McKay starts off as a leftist idealist, but by the time his consultants and handlers get through crafting his image, he finds that he discarded his principles one by one as he naively sauntered down the primrose path to power, and that in the end his commitment to social justice has somehow been transformed into "caring."

Jeremy Larner, a former speechwriter for the 1968 presidential hopeful Eugene McCarthy, wrote the script and won an oscar for "The Candidate," whose theme is as pertinent to politics today as it was in '72. Bill McKay was not the first and certainly not the last progressive politician who has sadly discovered that getting ahead politically entails at least a partial sacrifice of one's principles.

Enter Barack Obama.

Obama burst onto the national scene like a fireworks exhibition when his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention made him the overnight political equivalent of a rock star. Prior to that he was an obscure and virtually unknown state senator toiling in the Illinois legislature.

The appeal of "The Audacity of Hope" wasn't just in its articulate, intelligent, and gracefully crafted message; Obama, the messenger, was immediately recognizable as the politically-correct progressives' wet dream. Young, handsome, black, the son of an African immigrant and a native Kansan, and with his impeccable progressive credentials intact and a matter of public record thanks to his work in the Illinois legislature, Barack Obama appeared as nothing less than the young Moses, destined to lead his long-suffering people out the nightmare of supply-side Egyptian bondage.

Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate that fall in a walk after his Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race due to a sex scandal. Since then he has become one of the major disappointments of the 109th Congress, his formerly progressive approach to most major issues having dissolved in a blurry miasma of timid, delicate, anemic and vapid stands on the Iraq War, the impoverishment of the middle class, and the long-term consequences of petroleum dependency.

In the past year Obama has been criticized harshly by author/bloggers such as Alexander Cockburn and David Sirota, and this month is scrutinized in a major magazine piece, "Barack Obama Inc.," by Ken Silverstein in the November Harper's.

Silverstein documents Obama's changes of position, comparing his pre-Senate stands on issues such as the war with his current pronouncements, including his rejection of John Murtha's withdrawal plan with the comment that the U.S. needs to exit Iraq "in a responsible way -- with the hope of leaving a stable foundation for the future," which substitutes platitudes for his earlier opposition to "a dumb war."

Obama helped defeat a measure that would have capped credit-card interest rates at 30 percent, reversing his long-standing opposition to predatory financial practices aimed at the poor and middle classes, and his favorite solution to the energy quandry is ethanol, a certifiable hoax which costs more petroleum energy to produce than it saves and primarily benefits gigantic agribusiness firms like Archer, Daniels, Midland, whose production centers are in midwestern states such as Obama's Illinois.

Silverstein concisely synopsizes the reasons behind Obama's transformation: "After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to the right, and the political system in general has become thoroughly dominated by the corporate perspective, the first requirement of electoral success is now the ability to raise staggering sums of money. For Barack Obama, this means that mounting a successful career, especially one that may a include a run for the presidency, cannot even be attempted without the kind of compromising and horse trading that may, in fact, render him impotent."

That Obama has become a major player in national politics so quickly is phenomenal, but not surprising, considering the way he's played his cards. And in the final analysis, it's not the candidate, but the system in which all candidates are trapped that's at fault for having leeched the courage of his convictions from the young senator's agenda.

"(I)t is startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington," Silverstein says. "He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltaway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on...Obama's top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms."

It's as if we can hear Obama asking his consultants and contributors the same question Robert Redford's movie character Bill McKay asked his handlers at the successful conclusion of his first campaign, "What do we do now?"

And here I thought it was the leaders who were leading us.

Silverstein's story is not online yet. It's available in the November issue of Harper's magazine, now on newsstands, and should be posted on the publication's updated website within the next few days.

The Enemy Within

Our executive branch's Secret Service, on the job twenty-four/seven, has defused another glowering threat to our national security.

Fourteen-year-old freshman Julia Wilson was pulled out of her biology class at Sacramento's McClatchy High School on Wednesday and grilled by two SS agents. According to the AP's account, Julia had used her web page at Myspace.com to post "a picture of the president, scrawled 'Kill Bush' across the top and drew a dagger stabbing his outstretched hand. She later replaced her page on the social-networking site after learning in her eighth-grade history class that such threats are a federal offense."

She told the Secret Service guys she'd made a mistake with the original post, but they weren't having any mea culpa.

According to the Sacramento Bee, Julia said the agents "threatened her by saying she could be sent to juvenile hall for making the threat. 'They yelled at me a lot,' she said. 'They were unnecessarily mean.'"

The girl's parents were upset about not being present when she was grilled. But an assistant principal at the school said he usually does not notify parents when law enforcement comes to the school to interview students because "parents usually interfere with an investigation."

A regional ACLU lawyer, Ann Brick, believes Julia Wilson's Myspace post did not sound like a "true threat" to the president, and said the offending page was political speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

Apparently the Sacramento area is a hotbed of insurrection, and little Julia Wilson is not the only area resident to have posed a threat against the person and dignity of the president recently. According to the Bee, "Earlier this month, federal officials arrested two Sacramento-area men for allegedly threatening the president. Elk Grove resident Michael Lee Braun has been charged with sending two threatening letters to the El Dorado Hills country club where Bush recently made an appearance. Rocklin resident Howard J. Kinsey is accused of threatening the president through a text message."

At this time the Secret Service has not investigated any of my friends yet, although several of them have been known to sit in their living rooms sending out hostile thought beams in the direction of the White House.

Playing for the Gallery

Seems Kim Jung Il finally got himself a little nukie, or if you want that in Spanish, a nukito. The practical consequences of this developmentette don't amount to much unless Kim has misread the hazardous debris field that is the mind of the most important member of his audience -- Mr. G.W. Bush.

On this score one of my favorite bloggers, Dennis Perrin at Red State Son, has a few choice words.

"The hysteria over North Korea's nuclear testing is no surprise: countries not under our thumb nor on our payroll aren't allowed to have deterrent capability. How are we supposed to bomb and/or invade them when they can hit back and hit hard? At bottom, this is what the present 'crisis' is really all about. Of course, an isolated regime run by a man exhibiting questionable emotional stability is not something the sane wish to see wielding genocidal weaponry. But enough about Bush. What of Kim Jung Il?"

The whole thing is eminently worth reading.

The World Still Waits

A small but enthusiastic crowd of antiwar demonstrators marched through the streets of Seattle and rallied for several hours in front of the Federal Building October 5 after police-instigated violence at one of the crowd's gathering places threatened to disrupt the day's events.

When uniformed Seattle police forcibly confiscated flags from several demonstrators at Cal Anderson Park on Capitol Hill at about one p.m., just as a contingent of student marchers arrived from the University of Washington, at least one protester began wrestling with officers in an attempt to recover his banner. He was shoved to the ground and arrested as a small and short-lived melee erupted which resulted in two other arrests.

Dian Hassel, a Seattle resident who witnessed the incident, said "One of the flags had a metal piece on top of the pole -- an eagle with spread wings -- and the police were saying it could be used as a weapon."

Following the arrests a dozen or so uniformed officers and at least one undercover cop formed a line on the sidewalk skirting the park while half a dozen police cruisers with lights flashing stood by in the street. The disturbance quickly subsided and speakers began addressing the crowd of several hundred. After that the rest of the day's events were peaceful.

Many of those present had never participated in any sort of public demonstration before. One such was Shawna, a 53-year-old former flight attendant who showed up carrying a large sign reading "Drive Out the Bush Regime," and said "I've never been this upset about things before. Something's got to change."

"I can go to Washington, D.C. for $20 and do more of this kind of thing," she added, referring to her discount priveleges as a former airline employee, "and I'm planning to."

Another first time demonstrator was Susanne Romaine, who marched in costume as a beauty pageant winner, "I Miss America" and said, "I miss the sense of democracry."

Shortly after two p.m. the demonstrators began winding down the west flank of Capitol Hill and proceeded downtown, where they marched down the middle of Second Avenue bringing traffic there to a halt. It was at this point that the protest reached its maximum size, containing at the most 500 participants. People began gradually drifting away when the march terminated at the Federal Building, where the most committed and dedicated protestors settled in for more speeches until darkness fell.

The Seattle demonstration was just one of approximately 200 such events taking place on October 5 in large and small cities nationwide, in Canada, and overseas, organized and sponsored by the World Can't Wait (to drive out the Bush Regime). The organization took out full-page ads in big-city newspapers to promote the event, during which the largest turnout occurred, as usual, in New York and San Francisco.

Approximately 5000 protesters gathered in Dag Hammerskjold Plaza across the street from the U.N. in New York City according to event organizers, where the demonstration began with modest numbers but swelled throughout the day.

In San Francisco rain did not deter approximately 3000 demonstrators from marching and rallying at Justin Herman Plaza, where their permit for a mass demonstration inexplicably did not include a permit to operate a sound system. Speakers including Daniel Ellsberg and Miguel Molina used bullhorns to address the crowd.

While demonstrations were individually covered by local newspapers and broadcasting outlets in the cities where they occurred, the national media took no notice of the events of October 5, and its impact on the national debate over the war was consequently minimal.

Undeterred, World Can't Wait spokespersons have already announced plans to begin organizing another nationwide round of protests and demonstrations later this week.

Post-Mortem

As the president continues to flog the debris and shattered remnants of what used to be a war, attempting to massage it back to life, Bob Woodward may have delivered the funeral oration for this dear, departed misadventure.

Woodward's first two books in his "Bush at War" series were flattering to the boy king. The most recent one, "State of Denial," emphatically is not.

Speaking last May Bush giddily predicted the war would be remembered as the time when "the forces of terror began their long retreat." Two days later a secret memo from the Joint Chiefs' intelligence division reported to the White House that "Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year (2007)."

Woodward identifies and documents the four salient facts about the late, great Iraq War. First, there was never a war strategy or objective beyond terminating the Saddam Hussein regime; once that was done, the entire strategy has consisted of the happy chatter of public relations.

Item: In 2004, "Robert D. Blackwill, the NSC's top official for Iraq, was deeply disturbed by what he considered the inadequate number of troops on the ground there. He told (Natonal Security Advisor Condoleeza) Rice and Stephen J. Hadley, her deputy, that the NSC needed to do a military review.

"If we have a military strategy, I can't identify it," Hadley said. "I don't know what's worse -- that they have one and won't tell us or that they don't have one."

Keep in mind, Hadley, who later replaced Rice as national security advisor, was giving vent to the same criticism as the war's detractors, who are constantly characterized as "objectively pro-terrorist" by people like Cheney.

Secondly, secret government interoffice memos have consistently referred to Iraq as a failed state for the past year and half.

Upon becoming secretary of state, Rice hired Philip D. Zelikow, an old friend, and sent him to Iraq to report back to her on conditions there. The resulting memo said in part, "At this point Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change." This was in February, 2005.

Third, Bush has been relying more and more as time goes by on Henry Kissinger for advice concerning the war, apparently on the assumption that what didn't work in Vietnam will work in Iraq. Kissinger has inexplicably been trotting out memos he wrote in 1969 as support for Bush's failed Iraq non-policy.

Fourth, Bush has lied habitually and repeatedly by saying commanders on the ground determine troop levels. Woodward's evidence on this topic is worth quoting at length:

"Vietnam was also on the minds of some old Army buddies of Gen. Abizaid, the Centcom commander. They were worried that Iraq was slowly turning into Vietnam -- either it would wind down prematurely or become a war that was not winnable

"Some of them, including retired Gen. Wayne A. Downing and James V. Kimsey, a founder of America Online, visited Abizaid in 2005 at his headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and then in Iraq.

"Abizaid held to the position that the war was now about the Iraqis. They had to win it now. The U.S. military had done all it could. It was critical, he argued, that they lower the American troop presence. It was still the face of an occupation, with American forces patrolling, kicking down doors and looking at the Iraqi women, which infuriated the Iraqi men.

"'We've got to get the fuck out,' he said."

Read all of Woodward's extensive book excerpt here. Thanks to Georgia10 at DailyKos.

Everybody knows the Iraq War is dead. Bush knows it, Rice knows it, Rumsfeld knows it, possibly even our delusional and schizoid vice president knows it. Their private despair contrasts gruesomely with their public happy chatter.

Therefore, it's past time to bury this moldering corpse of a lost war, which, despite having been dead over a year, continues to render Iraq a smoking, stinking ruin, and the U.S. the most hated country on earth since Nazi Germany.

To that end, it's important to skip work or school on Thursday, October 5, and take to the streets in one of the 114 demonstrations and marches happening nationwide, because George Bush has made clear he will never quit Iraq. That's why The World Can't Wait (to drive out the Bush regime).

What Are They Saying?

Here are a few samples collected at random from around the blogosphere of people's reaction to Congress passing a bill yesterday that legalizes torture and abolishes the right of habeus corpus.

"Surprised? You shouldn't be. This is who we are. Oh yes, there are angwy wibwals out there, mourning the "real" America that appears lost. I don't know what movie they've been watching for the past 40 or so years (not to mention the classics from long before), but judging from their astonished reactions, it looks like it was directed by Frank Capra or perhaps the early Spielberg, with the young Mickey Rooney, Kristy McNichol and Haley Joel Osment waving American flags, washing down caramel corn with sidewalk-bought lemonade as Ray Charles, in a glittering Old Glory tux, sings 'America The Beautiful' while the spirits of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy hold hands, gaze from the clouds and smile over the proceedings.

"Well, that film is pulled and back in the can. Get ready for coke-fueled Scorsese, baked Tarantino, or Rob Zombie with a blockbuster budget."

"Yeah, the shit is covering the fan, or to paraphrase Burroughs, we now see what's at the end of every fork."

--Dennis Perrin at Red State Son.

"The first thing to do is apparently quite controversial, why, I have no idea. But it is imperative that we fully recognize how seriously godawful the situation is.

"I'll say it again: Americans are living in a fascist state. Don't like the word 'fascism?' Neither do I. So what? It's ludicrous to call the gutting of habeas corpus, etc, etc, by near unanimous consent merely 'authoritarian.' We are living in a fascist state.

"Some commenters...said I am being too discouraging. Hardly. This country's government has been transformed and is no longer recognizable as a working democracy. That's simply a fact and we better accept it.

"Because when you're dealing with fascism, 'We can beat this, people if we just fight harder!' is naive win-one-for-the-Gipper fantasy-land. It's gonna get a lot worse than it is now before it gets better. We're gonna be lucky if more of us don't end up 'persons of interest' to the Bush administration. Remember, if you're not with Bush, you're objectively pro-terrorist and I can't tell you how many times when commenting on rightwing blogs I've been accused of 'aiding and abetting' the terrorists."

tristero at Hullabaloo

"It's good to see that many Senate Democrats (32 out of 44) voted against this bill, but it's too little, too late. Many of them announced only for the first time today (September 28) that they are opposing the bill (though, to be fair, many Democrats attributed their opposition to the recent changes made to the bill over the last few days, ones which were made even after the oh-so-noble McCain-Graham-Warner-White House 'compromise' was announced).

"But it is still difficult to understand the Democrats' strategy here. They failed to try to mount a filibuster because they feared being attacked as coddlers of the terrorists. But now they voted against the bill in large numbers, thereby ensuring those exact accusations will be made anyway -- and made loudly (the White House already started today). Yet they absented themselves the whole time from the debate (until they magically appeared today), spent the last several weeks only tepidly (at most) opposing the President's position, and thus lost the opportunity to defend and advocate the position they took today in any meaningful way. As a result, the Democrats took a position today (opposition to this bill) which they have not really defended until today.

"They make this same mistake over and over. Isn't this exactly what happened when they sort-of-supported-but-sort-of-opposed the Iraq war resolution in 2002 because they were afraid of being depicted as soft on terrorism, only to then be successfully depicted as soft on terrorism because they were too afraid to forcefully defend their position? It's true that fewer Democrats voted for the President's policy this time around, but it's equally true that they found their voice only on the last day of the debate -- on the day of the vote -- after disappearing for weeks while they let John McCain 'debate' for them.

"Nonetheless, it is fair to say, given how lopsided this vote was (both in the House and the Senate), that the Republicans are the party of torture, indefinite and unreviewable detention powers, and limitless presidential power, even over U.S. citizens on U.S. soil. By contrast, Democrats have opposed these tyrannical, un-American and truly dangerous measures. Even if Democrats didn't oppose them as vociferously as they could have and should have, this is still a meaningful and, at this point, critically important contrast."

Glenn Greenwald

The Patriarch

Among the list of sponsors of the World Can't Wait (to Drive Out the Bush Regime) rallies, marches, and meetings occurring in 80 U.S. cities on October 5, there is one name particularly noteworthy for its novelty, as well as its owner's remarkable longevity and moral authority.

Studs Terkel, now 94, will be agitating for regime change in D.C., in Chicago on October 5. No stranger to protest, Terkel has participated in every significant American movement for social change and liberation since the early days of the Great Depression, when he decided to abandon his youthful plan to become a lawyer and instead went to work for Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA).

He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and in the front line of protest against the Vietnam War.

His first book, "Giants of Jazz," came out in 1956 (I read it in about 1960). But his most famous work is 1970's "Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression."

Born in New York, but raised in Chicago from a very early age, Terkel grew up in a hard-working Jewish family on the South Side. His father, a tailor, and mother, a seamstress, ran a boarding house as a sideline for a time, and Studs credits his juvenile fascination with the odd collection of guests at the evening dinner table for his lifelong curiosity about what makes people tick.

Somewhere in his youth friends tagged him with the nickname because they thought he resembled Chicago novelist James T. Farrell's fictional protagonist, Studs Lonigan, a brawling, working-class Irish wastrel and quick-buck artist. Presumably Studs's friends slapped this inappropriate moniker on him because they thought he was tough. In fact, he turned out to be a great deal tougher than Lonigan, who died young, ground down by an abrasive world. By contrast, Terkel has shown amazing elasticity throughout his long life, and astonished his doctors by surviving, then thriving after open heart surgery last year, at age 93.

He'll need a ride to the Chicago protests next Thursday because he's never learned to drive.

Earlier this year he joined other Chicago-area plaintiffs in filing a suit in federal district court against AT&T to stop them from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order. He's obviously not done yet.

On the subject of the upcoming protests, Studs Terkel offers us a sort of prose poem, also posted at the World Can't Wait site:

It’s time we assert ourselves,
And said to these outrageous liars
Who offended our sense of decency
And native intelligence

It’s time to BUGGER OFF!
Get lost!
And let’s unite on behalf of peace and sanity
and all that makes life rich and worthwhile.

Tom Paine was perhaps the most eloquent visionary
of the American Revolution.

His book, "Common Sense," sold a couple of hundred thousand copies.
The population was hardly four or five million,
which means, of course, people read it.
It was a best seller for years.

He says, in that,
"Let us not let them confuse reason with treason.
Enough of that nonsense."

OUT!
VAMOOSE,
Bush administration!

What I’m saying, really, is:
The World Can’t Wait!
Drive Out the Bush Regime!

And Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 1969

Daniel Ellsburg, the patriot who stole the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, then photocopied them and passed them to the New York Times for publication, is back and stirring up an October surprise for the regime.

Actually, he never went away. But whenever the times call for heavy doses of truth and decisive action, he steps into his natural leadership role and provides both.

Ellsburg is one of the organizers of the demonstrations sponsored by "The World Can't Wait (to drive out the Bush Regime)" scheduled nationwide for October 5.

Speaking at the umbrella group's organizational meeting in San Francisco on September 7, Ellsburg recalled the critical days of 1969 and his role in them, and linked that historic crisis to the Iraq War, the potential for war with Iran, and the need to get people activated to demand change, truth, and accountability once more.

"I keep looking at that date on the calendar – October 5. I think of 1969-- I was copying the Pentagon Papers with Tony Russo in that month," Ellsburg recalls, "starting October 1. My intention, however, at that time was to bring them out in connection with something called the Moratorium on October 15, 1969...because on that day, across the country 2 million people marched. Not in any one place, they were counted up and added up because they all walked out -- it was a weekday -- out of school, out of businesses...They met in rallies, heard many speakers... But it was a weekday and they called it the Moratorium because people thought the word general strike was too provocative, but that’s what they had in mind.

"It was a walkout, in other words it was no business as usual. The president was watching it in the White House, hour by hour, while pretending that he wasn’t. In fact he was in the situation room getting half-hour reports on how many people. They were being counted, in Washington and New York, from a U2 [plane] above."

So, we might ask if we were talking to Ellsburg, "What good did it do? It didn't stop the war, which went on until 1975." Likewise, skeptics might be excused for adopting a "so what" attitude toward the demonstrations coming up on October 5, and for believing that Bush pays no attention to them (or so he says).

But Ellsburg has an answer for that.

"What (the 1969 demonstrators) didn’t know was that in fact they were stopping nuclear war. The president had made threats of nuclear war secretly several times starting in May and in August and September, saying that he was prepared to use nuclear weapons on Vietnam. They said that to the Russians and the North Vietnamese directly in Paris."

But, Ellsburg claims, with two million people in the streets, Nixon decided he couldn't nuke Vietnam, that the public backlash would simply be too great.

Consider the situation we're in now, with a madman in the White House and another in charge at the Pentagon, threatening to bomb Iran, and when asked if those bombs would be nuclear, responding that "all options are on the table; nothing is ruled out."

I would urge people in the strongest possible terms to turn out on October 5 and register your disapproval of the direction this country has taken, is taking, will take if it's not stopped. So far we haven't seen significant mass disruption of the administration's war and propaganda effort, but they're only one day away from being run off the rails if a couple million people suddenly decide that all is not hopeless, that protest is not futile, and that there's no machine, however huge, multi-tentacled, and ominous, that can't be monkeywrenched and disabled.

Read the entire text of Ellsburg's speech to the World Can't Wait organizational meeting here. You'll find links to the organization's home page there also.

Dumb Stupid Big Mean Nasty Poophead Chavez

I noticed a couple of the wingnut tirades against Hugo Chavez this week included the shoking charge that he reads Noam Chomsky.

True...but not in the original.

He also looks at Playboy. No need to translate the pictures.

He's a bad ass.

He also says big, mean things about the U.S., and George W. Bush. He's a big meany.

He's also says that unlike the cooperative and courteous princes of Saudi Arabia, he will never re-invest his petrodollars that he gets from the oil he sells us in the U.S. Instead, he will do what he's been doing and invest them in socialist schemes in Latin America, thereby undermining U.S. hemispheric hegemony.

He learnt that word "hegemony" from Noam Chomsky. What a big poopy pants. If he doesn't want to play ball with us, we'll take our ball and go home.

Either that or take our bat and knock his big, Chomsky-reading, Playboy-ogling, Petrodollar-withholding dumb stupid fat round shiny big mean head off.

Red and Redder

In late 2004, after the election, a film maker named Michael Shea decided he had to find out what makes heartlanders tick.

Shea didn't understand how Bush could have gotten re-elected. He didn't know anybody who'd voted for him, and lived in one of the bluest states (California). So he and some friend/assistants set out for the intercoastal heart of the country, with the idea of interviewing red-state Republican/Christians. They planned to approach their subjects politely, avoid confrontation, and just ask them what they believe and to describe themselves.

I haven't seen the movie Red State, but I've read some partial transcripts. I'm finally beginning to understand why it's impossible to talk, or relate to many of our fellow citizens, probably even a majority, who appear to live in a parallel universe.

For example one interviewee, Dennis Mansfield of Boise, Idaho, who describes himself as a "Republican activist," says:

Those of us who are conservatives and call Christ the king of our lives realize that we really serve a kingdom and not a democracy. In a sense we're citizens in two cultures at the same time. We are Americans, but we really realize that the longer, bigger picture, sort of the eternal picture, is that we're also citizens of a king, and his name is Christ; his name is Jesus...Christ is love, but he's also the god, Jehovah, that had tons of people taken out because of their complete idolatry.

This is the first I've ever heard of God's bipolar disorder.

Equally perplexing was the testimony of Gladys Gill, Director of the Mississippi chapter of Concerned Women for America:

Mrs. Gill: I think we lost more than we gained with civil rights. I hope to see them repealed...I don't know where you folks were when we were trying to hang on to state's rights.

Shea: I was two I think.

Mrs. Gill: Yeah, right

Shea: In fact I was born in the year the Civil Rights Act was passed.

Mrs. Gill: Yeah. Right. So you don't remember what life was like when we had liberty to do what we needed to do in our own lives.

The blogger Digby, who saw the movie day before yesterday, says, "My favorite moment was when Mrs Gill, the Mississippi director of Concerend Women For America, gets upset that she's been 'worked over' by this interviewer who had just asked her what she believed in. It's clear that when the totality of Mrs Gill's racism and intolerance became manifest in the few minutes that she spoke, she suddenly realized that she had given herself away as a white supremecist (sic) and Christian nationalist. Naturally she claimed victimhood and ended the interview."

The people in the Red State movie aren't just from another country; they're from another planet. Welcome to Uranus.

You can see clips of this parallel reality on the movie's site.

Digby's got one more interesting thing to say: "One of the things that's obvious in this film is that these people are practiced phonies too. They say things like 'we took us a trip to California and couldn't believe what we saw out there!' like it's 1952 and they're Andy and Barney. You can't tell me these people don't watch TV. There's a good part of their schtick that's pure poseur --- the 'heartland hick fer Jesus' is very often a thoroughly modern American who's playing just as many games as anybody else. Taking their 'moral concerns' at face value and thinking they can be persuaded by tweaking issues and changing rhetoric is to be a chump. This is a tribal game."

Digby's word "tribal" hit me like a silver bullet between the eyebrows. Suddenly I understood why debate, appeals to reason, the marshalling of factual information, and the revelation of lies and criminal behavior is futile in today's political climate. Progressives, who tend to be educated, secular, and committed to rationalism, are wasting their time documenting their carefully constructed arguments, hoping to find the combination of facts and persuasion that will burn off the fog of ignorance, superstition, and bloodthirsty, enraged fanaticism.

We had the right idea in the sixties. We're not going to win any elections. What we need to do is put some distance between ourselves and that other tribe.

D.C. Ethics = Oxymoron

The dictionary defines ethics as "The study of the general nature of morals and of the specific moral choices to be made by a person; moral philosophy."

But if you were to judge by the behavior of the House Ethics Committee, "ethics" is a redundant term. The Committee seems to believe that "ethical" is a synonym for "legal," and that if it ain't illegal, it's not unethical.

Consider the case of Jeffrey Shockey. He makes $160K a year working as a top aide to California Congressman Jerry Lewis, currently under investigation by the feds for his close relationship with Cunningham-connected lobbyist Bill Lowery.

Before he worked for Lewis, Shockey worked for Lowery's lobbying firm. And before he worked for Lowery's lobbying firm, he worked for Lewis.

Ask not for whom the revolving door revolves...

Besides making $2 million with Copeland, Lowery, Jacques, Denton, and White in 2004, he was awarded a $1.9 buyout package by the firm when he was re-hired by Lewis in January, 2005.

It might be the first time anybody ever got a "buyout" for quitting a job.

But since he did nothing illegal, the House Ethics Committee decided in mid-September that Shockey's ethical integrity was spotless, and in a September 15 letter told him he had not broken "any applicable laws or House rules."

But, "We strongly urge you against taking any officianl action in any matter that may affect the interests of Copeland, Lowery, its successors or any of its clients through the end of the the 109th Congress," the letter added sternly and irrelevantly.

Certainly the clients for whom Shockey lobbied, all governmental entities including the towns of Redlands, Yucca Valley, and Twenty-Nine Palms, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, and the governing board of Cal State San Bernardino, will miss his efforts on their behalf, but can take consolation from the presence of his wife now filling his old job at Copeland, Lowery.

And all of them, incidentally, have been subpoenaed in connection with the Lewis investigation. TPM Muckraker has all the sordid details of the Lewis-Shockey-Lowery affair, or, more accurately, affairs.

The House Ethics Committee may have overlooked some of the more interesting details of Shockey's finances. His Wikipedia profile claims the 40-year-old aide-lobbyist "according to tax records of the District of Columbia...is a senior citizen who earns less than $100,000 a year. That qualifies him for a major reduction of the taxes he pays on his District home, worth over a million dollars. The tax break essentially reduces the assessed value of an elderly person's home in half."

The Ethics Committee is a standing joke on Capitol Hill. Its members have to be forced to serve, and are extremely reluctant to "delve into the conduct of friends and possibly fellow party members – and perhaps endanger their own political futures," according to a recent Copley News Service Article by Joe Cantlupe.

One Congressman who heard he was in line to serve on the ethics crew started ducking calls from the speaker of the House.

The Committee in recent years has not taken action against any member or employee that wasn't already under indictment by the Justice Department, as happened in the cases of Tom DeLay of Texas, Randy Cunningham of California, and Bob Ney of Ohio.

Vali Otsyuda

"The people who cast the votes decide nothing," Josef Stalin famously said. "The people who count the votes decide everything." Or so claimed Stalin's private secretary, Boris Bazhanov, although a second source has never confirmed the quote.

Sounds like Stalin, though. Or maybe Dick Cheney.

It's way past time to call local and state elections commissions, not to mention the Diebold corporation, to account for the shaky and suspect elections of recent years, at every level. If we needed another heads-up after 2000 and 2004, it was provided by the recent Maryland Democratic primary in that state's Congressional District four (see below).

Here's John Nichols, writing on this topic in the most recent issue of The Nation:

"The Sunday Washington Post headline said it all. Echoing a theme that is finally being picked up by print and broadcast media that for too long has neglected the dramatic problems with this country's systems for casting and counting votes, the newspaper's front page announced: 'Major Problems At Polls Feared: Some Officials Say Voting Law Changes And New Technology Will Cause Trouble.'

"Following a disastrous election day in Maryland that was defined by human blunders, technical glitches, long lines and long delays in vote counting so severe that some contests remain unresolved almost a week after the balloting, the Post declared that, 'An overhaul in how states and localities record votes and administer elections since the Florida recount battle six years ago has created conditions that could trigger a repeat -- this time on a national scale -- of last week's Election Day debacle in the Maryland suburbs, election experts said.'

"No fooling!"

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

If we, the people, don't rise up and demand an unconditional, comprehensive universal return to paper punch-card ballots, along with state and local apparatuses honest and capable enough to audit them, we've got to be either crazy or hopelessly apathetic.

Update on the Maryland Democratic Primary

Matt Stoller, the proprietor of My DD, just got this e-mail from Donna Edwards this afternoon:

"Hello,

"By now you are aware of the multiple layers of problems that occurred in the Tuesday, September 12, election in Maryland's 4th Congressional District. Whether these flaws are attributable to incompetence, inefficiency, or fraud -- we may never know. Votes are still being tabulated in Maryland's 4th District -- provisional ballots arriving as late as Tuesday, September 19, a truckload of machines and memory cards arriving 21 hours after the polls closed on September 12, changing estimates of absentee ballots to be counted, etc.

"Needless to say, the system is deeply flawed -- leaving voters with little reason to be confident. In the midst of all of this system failure and uncertainty, I wanted to share with you the transcript of an exchange that took place on Tuesday, September 19, between my opponent, Albert Wynn, and his colleague on the powerful House Energy & Commerce Committee:

BARTON: Down in Texas, we had a Democratic primary about 50 years ago that Lyndon Johnson won by 54 votes. And he got the nickname "Landslide Lyndon." We have Mr. Wynn next. He had a little bit of a tussle last week, but he did win. And so, I want to recognize "Landslide Wynn" for any opening statement that he wishes...
WYNN: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. In fact, they're still counting, but we're quite optimistic. And I did take a couple pages out of Lyndon's book, so if I win, it can be attributed to Texas know-how.
(LAUGHTER)
(UNKNOWN): Did you (inaudible)?
BARTON: I hope not. I hope you win fair and square.
(LAUGHTER)
WYNN: A win is a win.

"P.S. Just within the last couple of hours, the Board of Elections in Prince George's County opened up a machine with no tamper tape (so much for security), and at least one other machine that recorded votes for other offices but none for U.S. Congress."

Al Wynn is the type of politician that needs to be eliminated from the Democratic Party.

But even more important, the Maryland Democratic primary is a replay of dysfunctional, flawed, and corrupted elections of the recent past as well as a preview of coming attractions, unless we take action now.

Soooooooeey

The non-profit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released its second annual listing of the 20 most corrupt members of Congress today.

It featured three Republican senators -- Burns of Montana, Frist of Tennessee, and Santorum of Pennsylvania -- and 17 House members. Three of the 17 are Democrats: Alan Mollohan of West Virginia, William Jefferson of Louisiana, and Maxine Waters of California. The remaining 14 are Republicans.

Californians are disproportionately represented in this rogues' gallery. Others on this elite list besides Waters include Ken Calvert, Richard Pombo, John Doolittle, Gary Miller, and my own Congressional rep, Jerry Lewis, current Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, a position he moved up to from his chairmanship of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

He's currently under investigation by the feds for his close association with lobbyist Bill Lowery, an earmark specialist, and a questionable land deal.

Besides the 20 most corrupt, the report also lists "five to watch;" Congresspersons who are on the verge of breaking into the top 20. This year's roster includes four obligatory Republicans as well as the current favorite of liberals and anti-war types, the Democrat John Murtha of Pennsylvania. Murtha is also a favorite of the Pentagon, and has been intimately involved with the brass hats' weapons procurement procedures for many years.

This edition of the Most Corrupt report, entitled "Beyond DeLay" and thick as a big-city phone book, "documents the egregious, unethical and possibly illegal activities of the most tainted members of Congress," according to its editors.

Besides noting Tom DeLay's recent departure, the report informs readers that "Two members have been removed from last year’s list of 13. Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham (R-CA) is now serving an eight-year jail term for bribery and Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) has agreed to plead guilty to crimes that will likely result in a minimum two-year prison term."

"CREW created this exhaustive go-to guide on corruption in Congress to expose and hold accountable those members of Congress who believe they are above the law," says Melanie Sloan, executive director of the citizens' group. "The officials named in this report have chosen to enrich themselves and their families and friends by abusing the power of their office, rather than work for the public good.

"Congress persists in abdicating its constitutional responsibility to police itself, opting to ignore the ethical and legal transgressions of its members. Luckily for the public, at least the Department of Justice still believes that political corruption is worth pursuing," she added.

Already There

Yesterday on CNN, retired U.S. Air Force General Sam Gardiner announced that "We are conducting military operations inside Iran right now. The evidence is overwhelming."

Gardiner's evidence is gathered from public sources available to anyone -- no secrets here. He cites the House Committee on Emerging Threats recent request for State and Defense Department officials to show up and testify about whether U.S. forces were in Iran. The officials didn’t show up for the hearing.

Gardiner also refers to the latest issue of Time Magazine, which reveals that "some U.S. naval forces have been alerted for deployment. That is a major step," he said.

So, does all this have anything to do with the upcoming midterm Congressional elections? D'ya think?

Tristero, the other main-page writer at Digby's Hullaballoo, has put together a list of probable and possible Rovian strategems for keeping the House (and Senate) in order. At the top of the list, of course, is gas prices.

"Now," says Tristero, "Digby observed that Bush must have told Them - the Oil "Them" - to open the spigot. And indeed, gas prices have fallen. But in truth, it's a leap of faith to suggest that the lower oil prices this election seas...sorry, I meant, this fall, had anything to do with the fact that there are 2 oilmen running the United States and their political ass is on the line. I wouldn't presume to suggest, say, that Bush, Cheney, and Rice begged the cartels and companies to temporarily ease off on the pricegoug... sorry, the utterly fair profit margin they're taking."

He goes on to compile a comprehensive list of October surprise rabbits the administration might pull out of numerous hats, from killing or capturing Osama bin Laden to the revelation of some kind of major sexual or financial misbehavior by some major Democrats.

But number three on Tristero's list is the scariest of all: "A nuclear strike, either on Iran or somewhere else like NoKo, unilateral, pre-emptive, and announced as a fait accompli. Bush has, after all, started military ops against Iran, according to Sam Gardiner..."

The general added that prior to the Iraq invasion, there "was a campaign to begin the war before the war began." Drawing a parallel with the White House's anti-Iranian rhetoric he remarked, "You know, I would suggest the evidence (of an impending war against Iran) is there."

Even now I try to convince myself that they'd never do that, that it's just too far beyond the pale. But I know better, and so do you.