Good riddance 2007!

As the dreadful year 2007 is consigned to history, I can't help but think of all we have lost.

First are all the vibrant, young human beings who will never again take a breath: 899 military men and women who died in Iraq; 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech; 13 drivers on a bridge in Minneapolis; 14 Californians in the wildfires of October; and a charismatic female leader in Pakistan.

These are just a few among many others who died as a result of war, genocide, poverty, AIDS, cancer, inadequate health care, inner city gun violence, drug wars and automobile accidents. We lost many beloved people in 2007, as we do every year, but many of these deaths were completely senseless and premature, the result of terrible governmental policies or crazed fanatics.

We also lost a lot of financial security in 2007. Millions lost jobs to mysterious corporate policies like "downsizing" and "outsourcing," and, because of greed that led to the mortgage crisis, millions more lost their homes. It is estimated that by the time the mortgage crisis is resolved, $1.2 trillion in property values will be lost. In the California wildfires of 2007, 1500 families lost their homes and the insured value is estimated at $1.6 billion.

With enormous implications for global warming, the Greenland ice sheet was recorded to have lost 10% more ice in 2007 than it did in its previous record year. The amount of ice lost is equivalent to two times all the ice in the Alps.

The biggest loss in 2007, however, was the utter and complete loss of trust and faith in the conservative republican government of the United States, led by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Of course, this isn't new to 2007, merely a continuation of what began with the election of 2000 and the utter disregard for the Constitution by the Supreme Court, and continuing ever since then with the countless abuses of the Constitution by the Bush administration.

From the Patriot Act to the suspension of Habeas Corpus, from unlawful detainment of citizens to the torture and extraordinary rendition of non-citizens, from illegal eavesdropping to illegal "sneak and peek," from violations of the Geneva Conventions to illegal wars, from manipulated intelligence to refusal to honor Congressional subpoenas, from absolute secrecy surrounding White House activities to deleted emails and destroyed videotapes, from hundreds of signing statements to the unitary executive theory, from the illegal outing of a CIA agent to the commuted sentence of one of the guilty, from no-bid contracts for Cheney associates to work in Iraqi cities to broken promises regarding the rebuilding of an American city, this administration is responsible for the single most important thing we have lost this year and over the past seven years: trust and faith in our government.

And along with that loss, we have suffered the loss of many of our liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, and indeed we are on the verge of losing the Constitution itself.

In an editorial today, the New York Times summarized it well:

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too
far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

In the year 2007, the president and vice president have continued their abuses of the Constitution, and deprived the people of the United States of their rights, liberties, and reputation with the rest of the world.

We have a chance this year to overturn the nightmare of the past seven years. We have a chance to finally put in power someone who will restore the Constitution and truly represent the people of the United States of America.

This election is the most important in half a century.

We shouldn't elect someone because they oppose gay marriage, or go to the "right" church, or even because they believe in God. We must elect someone because they believe in the Constitution.

We shouldn't elect someone because they promise to protect our borders from Mexicans and Central Americans, but because they will protect the ideals and the liberties for which our forefathers fought so valiantly.

We shouldn't elect someone just because they scream "9/11" or promise to be the toughest guy on the planet, but because they know how to work with other countries and are more interested in peace than in war.

We shouldn't elect someone because they promise to lower taxes but because they promise to use tax money wisely.

We shouldn't elect someone who makes us afraid. Rather we must elect someone who promotes courage and hope.

In 2008, we will joyfully witness the end of the reign of George W. Bush and the criminal gang he brought to Washington.

In 2008, we have the opportunity to elect a wise and ethical leader who will restore our democracy and our Constitution.

So I'm not sad to see 2007 go. I'm looking forward to 2008.

Here's to a New Year, a new leader, and new hope.

Decision Time

Yesterday I got my voter pamphlet in the mail in preparation for the February 5th primary.

This is it – the beginning of a month of caucuses and primaries that will determine the 2008 nominees for president.

I have long believed that the fix is in and newspapers, corporations and Democratic power brokers are determined to make Hillary the nominee. That's how I think it works. No matter how much a populist candidate like Edwards or Obama, or Dean last time around, captures the imagination of the people, the media, the corporate power structure, and the party machine are simply too strong to allow the great unwashed masses to have their say.

I hope I'm proved wrong. It's not that I don't think Hillary would make a competent president. She would be entirely competent if she ever became president. But there are two huge problems with a Hillary candidacy, the first being that I fear she can't win. No one can run dirty, smear campaigns like the other party, and they despise Hillary Clinton more than they despised John Kerry, and they pretty much made mincemeat out of him. Could she overcome that and win anyway? She might be able to squeak out a narrow victory depending on who the Republicans nominate, but many of us would suffer enormous anxiety until the results are in.

The second problem is that even if she wins, she won't bring the kind of change that most of us in the party want to see. Her presidency won't be a transformational one, an inspiring one, a unifying one. Under President Hillary Clinton the corporations will grow stronger and the middle class will grow smaller, and the divisions in the country will continue and possibly grow wider.

Will I still vote for her if she is the nominee? You bet your life. I may think she is the worst choice for the democrats, but even the worst choice on my side is better than the best choice on the other side. At least Hillary would do something to protect the environment and to repair our reputation around the world. Under a Clinton presidency something would be done about health care and the budget deficit. And a President Clinton, being an attorney and a former Senator, would understand how important it is for the president to obey the law and honor the Constitution.

None of those things (environmental protection, international cooperation, health care, sane economic policies, and a rededication to the Constitution) would be a sure thing in any Republican nomination. Just listen to the candidates.

So while I will be disappointed if Hillary wins in both Iowa and New Hampshire and then goes on to win in the primaries on February 5th, I will still support her. I will, however, be enormously disappointed that we democrats, by not choosing the populist Edwards or the inspiring and brilliant Obama, missed a real opportunity to say "no" to the media, the corporations, and the democratic machine. And I will be fearful every day until the national election that the choice of Hillary may mean four more years of republican destruction of the middle class, refusal to join the international community, environmental disaster, and the horrible specter of war.

Conservative fears, conservative fictions

Every once in a while a seemingly trivial event happens that not only exposes the modus operandi of a group of people, but actually stands as a metaphor for who they are and what defines them.

That event happened last week at Princeton University when conservative student Francisco Nava called 911 and hysterically reported he had been attacked by two masked men. He had cuts and bruises on his face, and insisted his attackers had been people who had been making death threats against him because of his conservative views on sex.

Nava, a supposedly pious Mormon, belongs to a society on campus that promotes abstinence and condemns the university's policy of providing condoms to students requesting them.
Conservative university activists and commentators like Robert George and David Horowitz, as well as a number of conservative bloggers came to his defense and implied this "hate crime" proved how much the left hated religious students who speak up for their beliefs.

The only problem was that Nava eventually admitted he made the whole thing up. The death threats had been fabricated and the wounds were self-inflicted.

So what does the fabricated story of one obviously demented young person represent in terms of the bigger picture?

First of all, it represents the extreme paranoia of the radical right. From the feared takeover of America by Communism in the fifties, to the hysteria over hippies and sexual expression in the sixties, to the fear of "liberal courts" in the seventies, to the fear of AIDS and homosexuals in the eighties, to the fear of Clinton in the nineties, to the fear of "Islamofascists," liberals, and illegal immigrants today, the one thing that unites extremists on the right is either actual fear of what they see as one or another "demonic" movement, fueling the activities or beliefs of other human beings – often their fellow citizens - or the use of fear to score political points. Either way, real or cynically hyped fear of some horrible fate has defined radical conservatives for over fifty years. It is what fuels the continuing support of the war against a nation that did not attack us (because in their minds it could have) as well the assertion that there is a "war on Christmas" (which they see as one battle in the war against Christians).

Secondly, it represents the willingness to blatantly lie to achieve your ends. Whether we are talking about a deranged college student with a fear of sex manufacturing death threats and actual attacks against himself, or the president of the United States and his paranoid vice president concocting a fantasy of aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds, radical conservatives who live on fear demand absolute power over their fellow citizens, and to achieve and maintain power they will lie, fabricate, distort the facts, and even hide and destroy contrary evidence.

Fear is such a terrible thing to live with on a daily basis. It keeps the body in a state of alert unnecessarily, because most of what we fear simply does not come true. All but a handful of the things we feared as children were irrational and most of us who achieved some level of maturity grew out of those fears. That doesn't mean no bad things happen in life. Of course bad things happen, but interestingly enough most of those bad things surprise us. The things we obsess about, however, are usually things that never come to pass. Conservatives spent decades worrying that the Soviet Union would start a nuclear war with us, and it never happened. On the other hand, no one seemed worried that planes could crash into buildings and kill thousands of people, yet today we live with the terrible memories of the surprise attacks of 9/11.

Yes, there was a Soviet Union whose leader said "We will bury you," but those were words. The reality is that ultimately the Soviet Union buried itself. And as much as some religious conservatives want to fret about it, homosexuals are not ruining marriage, antiwar citizens are not going to "defeat" America, the courts are not going to outlaw Christianity, and no one is waging war on Christmas.

Either radical conservatives have completely lost their minds, or this is all a very calculated move on their part to scare people into giving up their rights, their ideas, and their freedoms in order to change America into a place where they can once again be spoiled children, demanding that mommy give them everything they want, and having temper tantrums when they have to face something they don't like and don't understand.

We liberals, who are the target of their attacks, their lies, and their fears, are simply ordinary people who look at the world differently than they do. We aren't liberal because we want to take away anyone's freedoms. We are liberal because we believe in equality and freedom for all, not just for the white or the wealthy. We aren't liberal because we are trying to steal anyone's hard earned money. We are liberal because we believe in the power of a community coming together and pooling some of their resources for the benefit of all. We don't condone sexual promiscuity, but we also don't want to see the spread of sexually transmitted diseases or an increase in abortions because young people give in to powerful sexual urges and have unprotected sex. I could go on and on, but the point is really simple. We may differ on some ways to go about building a better society, but we are not the enemy.

We also don't use violence to achieve our ends and never have. We use words and legal means to get our points across. We don't attack people physically and we aren't trying to destroy morality or society. Those who look for physical attacks, falsely report physical attacks, or see the threat of nuclear annihilation or societal decay around every corner, whether they are Francisco Nava or Dick Cheney or Mike Huckabee, who seems to have his own irrational fears about sex, writing in 1998 that "it is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations—from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia," have something seriously wrong with them psychologically.

They should, of course, be afforded the same freedom of speech as the rest of us, but the American people should educate themselves, see how irrational they are, and consign them to the fringes of society.

The greed market and the growth deception

Over at Outraged Citizen, I have presented a laywoman's perspective on the current housing crisis as only the latest example of how the "free market" over the past sixty years has been a predatory market, how it is destroying the middle class, and how the measurement of "growth" in the economy is a decptive indicator of the health of our economy as well as our democracy. Today's free market lures Americans into buying things they cannnot afford on credit, and then penalizes them when they cannot pay:

If the "free market" has become nothing more than a market to make the rich richer, while using and abusing the poor and working classes in deceptive financial proposals they don't understand and shouldn't be expected to understand, tempting and luring them into wanting the things the upper class and upper middle class can afford, convincing them they "deserve" these things, and offering them creative ways to possess them, only to penalize them later because they could never afford them in the first place, then it is a market controlled by powerful, unconscionable forces that threaten us all. It is a market that is neither "free" nor "fair." It is a predatory market, a market that could eventually crush the middle class.

The importance of timing

I'm beginning to think that victory in the presidential race is all about timing.

Four years ago, Howard Dean was doing quite well, leading in many polls as the Iowa Caucuses neared. However, he lost there, coming in third as I recall. Kerry, who had been quite a bit behind both Dean and Gephardt just a few weeks before the caucuses, pulled out a surprise victory and Dean and Gephardt saw their chances end that day. Many have attempted to explain that turn of events, none of them satisfactorily.

This year, just two weeks before the caucuses, the long time frontrunners in both parties, Romney and Clinton, also seem to have peaked too soon, and now we see Huckabee surging from out of nowhere, and Obama finally overtaking Clinton. These are clearly two of the most inexperienced candidates, in terms of governing at the federal level, but perhaps have campaign teams that know something about the psychology of the American people, who can be quite fickle, are easily bored, and embrace novelty.

It is possible, of course, that these last minute changes in candidate preference have to do with voters evaluating the clients over time and thus changing their minds as they accumulate more information. Or perhaps this really is a change election, and Obama and Huckabee, being unfamiliar to many Americans prior to the campaign, represent the biggest change. But it is also possible that American voters, trained by advertising to opt for the new brand, simply get tired of seeing and hearing so much from and about the frontrunners.

Could timing have as much to do with it as anything else? And if so, is this really the best way to choose a president?

David and Goliath in California

The small town of Portrero, California, in San Diego County just stood up to Blackwater USA, a company that has been called "the world's most powerful mercenary army." 824 acres in and near the town had been the choice for Blackwater West, a new training facility for mercenaries and bodyguards (and possibly future border guards), and the city council had been inclined to approve the project.

The ordinary citizens of Portrero, however, opposed having Blackwater in their backyard for many reasons: fire hazard, traffic, noise, water rights, etc. They wanted to preserve their quality of life in this rural town and they didn't want a private army marching in. So they stood up and voted this week to oust all the pro-Blackwater council members and replace them with leaders who oppose the invasion of Blackwater.

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors has the final say on the project, but it will now be more difficult for them to approve it because these residents of the affected land have spoken so loudly. The Board may still reject the will of the residents of Portrero, but they might want to think twice. Supervisors can also be recalled, and Blackwater officials don't have a vote.

A Senator in the White House

We have a myth in this country that anyone can grow up to be president. Not true.

For one thing, voters prefer to elect governors rather than senators, which is why the last senator elected to the presidency was John Kennedy, forty-eight years ago. Since then, we have elected three candidates who had served as vice presidents, and four who were governors. For some reason, many voters are suspicious of Washington insiders, and think lawmakers are not good choices for the presidency. Therefore, they often prefer to bring in an "outsider," no matter how incompetenet or inexperienced that outsider is.

Yet in this primary campaign, we have many senators running for office, all of them the most qualified candidates for the job.

In the Republican field, John McCain is the only senator running, and he is by far the most experienced and qualified of the Republican candidates running for president. Mitt Romney has experience as governor, as does Huckabee, but neither seems very knowledgeable in foreign policy, which is essential at this time in history. Besides, they seem more interested in fighting with each other over religion right now. Rudy Giuliani's best experience seems to be with finding new wives and assigning police officers to protect them from imaginary threats, and Tancredo and Hunter like to act tough on their respective issues - immigration and the war – but don't have much to say about anything else. Ron Paul has apparently figured out how to raise money, but he wants to shut down so much of the government that he really can't be considered a serious candidate for the presidency.

On the democratic side, one former senator and four current senators are vying for the nomination: John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden. Dodd and Biden probably have the most experience and would make wise presidents, but Clinton and Obama have the most money and the most media attention. Edwards is an attractive candidate, but many believe him to be unelectable as he was on the losing ticket last time. Kucinich is right on most of the issues, but he can't get traction with the media, while Richardson just doesn't seem to connect with the voters. The democratic voters are in the mood for dramatic change this year so they will probably go with the first female nominee or the first African American.

It is definitely time to change the pattern and put a senator in the White House. Electing only governors, with experience only as chief executives, has only led to massive increases in the power of the president with a decrease in congressional power, which is not what the founders intended. And presidents who have never served in the legislative branch tend to have bad relationships with Congress, unless the president and Congress are of the same party. Few of the nation's problems are addressed when there is gridlock or open hostility in Washington between these two branches of government.

If the electorate holds to their previous forty-eight year pattern, however, and the republicans nominate Huckabee or Romney, both white male governors, and then manage to effectively "swift boat" Hillary or Obama with ugly misogynist or racist attacks, which they surely plan to do, we might have four more years of republican hell.

We can hope, though, that the electorate has finally woken up. Maybe the incompetent, power mad, and secretive presidency of George W. Bush will finally have cured them of their longstanding pattern of putting only governors in the White House.

Returning to the Dark Ages

I really, really don't like having the negative view of organized religion that I have these days.

I'm not talking about faith, or spirituality, or one's search for meaning in the universe, or even the sincere practice of a faith that encourages one to love one's enemies and care for one's neighbor.

I'm talking about the many negative manifestations of organized religion today in this country and around the world, manifestations that are self-righteous, arrogant, petty, hateful, and even deadly.

We are all familiar with the self-righteous ramblings of radical Muslims, and their call for jihad against the West, as well as their unconscionable acts, but should we not also be appalled by the Christians and Jews among us who are war's biggest cheerleaders and torture's apologists?

And what are we to think of the Catholic Church scandal involving the molestation of children by priests, and the multiple scandals in evangelical churches involving secret homosexual affairs by ministers even as they rail against homosexuality? The hypocrisy, of course, is stunning.

And now, religion has entered the presidential race in full force.

The Republican Party has been showing great deference to the evangelical community for years now, even as its leaders like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell insist Americans brought 9/11 on themselves, but the presence of a Mormon in the Republican field has made the specter of religion in politics even more absurd, if not dangerous.

Today, for instance, candidate Mike Huckabee, soft voiced, dewey eyed, dimple cheeked minister, with the name reminiscent of that beloved urchin created by Mark Twain, asked if rival Mitt Romney didn't believe Satan was the brother of Jesus. Though he later apologized and acted as if he meant no harm, the horrible word was out: Mitt Romney believes Satan and Jesus are in the same family. Now this is, to the best of my understanding, part of the rather convoluted dogma of Mormons, but how different is it really than believing that Lucifer was once the brightest and most important of all the angels, which is what Christians believe? It isn't all that different. Both are part of the complex narratives each religion tells. (Some of the things I was taught in Catholic school were real doozies, but let's not go there.) However, the very fact that Huckabee would bring this up, knowing how it would inflame Evangelical Christians, shows just how viscious he can be, and how dogmatic he knows many Americans to be, when it comes to religion.

At first, it seemed the republicans might embrace the Mormon Mitt Romney as an acceptable candidate, mostly because Rudy Giuliani was pro-choice and didn't hate gays, and no other candidate seemed capable of beating the democrats. He seemed nice enough, his looks were Reaganesque, and he was a white guy, but that religion thing just wouldn't go away. Apparently a group of evangelical home schooling parents in Iowa who couldn't stomach a Romney presidency began supporting Huckabee big time, and his candidacy has taken off. Now that it seems he can win, the evangelicals are flocking to support him, because, after all, it doesn't matter to them who might have the best economic or foreign policies or who might be the best leader, it only matters what one's religious beliefs are.

This, of course, is why our founders wanted to keep church and state separate, and why they said there must be no religious test for candidates for public office. They wanted to protect us from the kind of nonsense that ensues when we begin judging candidates on the basis of the church they attend and the religious dogma they embrace.

I thought we had gotten over this when Kennedy was elected president and proved that his religion had nothing to do with his presidential decision making. Fears of the pope sending orders to Kennedy, of course, were never realized and Kennedy is revered today by both Protestants and Catholics. But something has changed today. We seem to be in a big hurry to return to the Dark Ages when faith trumped reason, and religious affiliation was somehow proof of one's character and worthiness.

We should all remember how all of that turned out. The Crusades and the Inquisition, the two bloody and vicious historical events that pitted groups of believers against other groups of believers, are permanent blights on Christianity. Huckabee's attack (and other attacks circulating on the internet) may not be of the same severity as the attacks of the Inquisition, but they are in the same tradition.

Fortunately, the Dark Ages gave way to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, which is what inspired our founders to create this nation and to separate church from state.

Now, it seems, some in the Republican Party want to join church with state again, not formally of course, at least not yet, but informally, through whispering political campaigns, and slipping "innocent" questions about someone's faith into an interview, or as Romney did, implying that atheists and agnostics are simply not good Americans, or as others are doing, using Barack Obama's ancestry to imply he might be a "secret Muslim."

When it comes right down to it, the problem is dogma, i.e. beliefs that are held as absolute, mostly because some "prophet" or group of anonymous writers or preachers declare them to be the truth. Most dogmas contain truly unbelievable things to those who don't share the faith. Not being a Mormon or a Muslim, the belief in the "revelations" to Joseph Smith and Muhammad seem far fetched to me, but then as a Catholic, I have to admit that the teachings about guardian angels, Limbo, Purgatory, and indulgences are pretty out there as well. And the evangelical belief that the earth is only 6000 years old and that someday the good will be "raptured" up into heaven leaving behind their beloved family members, not to mention their clothes, is pure fiction to me. But it doesn't matter what I think or what anyone thinks about one's own or another's religion as long as it doesn't force its way into our politics.

In this country that was founded by wise and enlightened men, who professed many different faiths, there should be no need to debate our religious beliefs. All of us have some nutty teachings in our religions, at least nutty to those outside. So what? We are free to believe what we want about God and spiritual things in this country, and that is what makes us such a great nation. So why do we want to blow it by getting all worked up about what one group believes vs. another group? Do we want to divide the nation even more than it is already divided?

A focus on the religious beliefs of the candidates is simply a distraction from the things that do matter in this presidential campaign, like the war in Iraq, health care, poverty, the shrinking middle class, the environment and global warming, the need to find alternative sources of fuel, the population explosion that threatens to deplete the earth's resources, AIDS, the housing crisis, and so on. I want to hear about those things, not about the candidate's prayer habits or his religion's dogma. Have we forgotten so soon that Saint Ronny of California, the Republican patron saint, and Blessed Nancy, his wife, rarely attended church and brought astrologers into the White House? Perhaps in today's climate, Saint Ronny would have had to drop out before the second debate.

These attacks on people for their religious beliefs are part of the dark side of organized religion, and they both anger and terrify me. Not only does this intolerance divide us from each other, it ensures the ignorance and laziness of certain citizens when it comes to governance and voting. It is much easier to vote for a candidate on the basis of one issue, such as gay marriage or abortion, than to do the hard work of finding out all the policy positions of the candidate and the broad direction in which he or she wants to take the country. And it is much easier to simply believe God will guide the nation and anoint the leader, and then whisper his choice to you through your minister, than it is to educate yourself as a citizen.

It can't be said often enough that we are electing a president, not a saint, a theologian, or a holy man. We should be looking for courage and wisdom and maturity and stability and the ability to remain steadfast when trouble comes. We know that the pressures on any president are enormous. If prayer gives the president courage and strength to endure, terrific! If he gets his courage and wisdom from some other source, who cares? His religion, or even his lack of faith, should not matter. What should matter is his competence, his trustworthiness, and his vision for this country we all claim to love.

What shouldn't matter is whether he believes Lucifer was an angel or the brother of Jesus.

Hallelujah!

From the L.A. Times:

A proposed initiative that drew national attention for its potential to affect next year's presidential election will not appear on the June ballot, organizers said Thursday. Republican backers of the measure, which could have tilted the presidential contest toward the GOP nominee by changing how California awards electoral votes, conceded that they were unable to raise sufficient funds.

Sacramento consultant Dave Gilliard, the campaign manager, said that even if a financial angel were to shower the campaign with $1 million, there was not enoughtime to qualify the measure for June."I was surprised that more people that finance these types of efforts didn't step forward," Gilliard said. "We had strong supporters and good supporters but didn't come anywhere close to making the budget."

Whitehouse puts White House on notice

There is a new American hero in the Senate: Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who today took the Bush administration to task in a speech on the floor of the Senate in preparation for an attempt to repeal the "Protect America Act." It's worth reading at least twice. After outlining three formerly "highly classified secret legal opinions related to surveillance" which suggest the president has almost unlimited powers, including the unprecedented power to offer legal determinations that the Justice Department is bound by, he says,

We are a nation of laws, not of men. This nation was founded in rejection of the royalist principles that “l’etat c’est moi” and “The King can do no wrong.” Our Attorney General swears an oath to defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States; we are not some banana republic in which the officials all have to kowtow to the “supreme leader.” Imagine a general counsel to a major U.S. corporation telling his board of directors, “in this company the counsel’s office is bound by the CEO’s legal determinations.” The board ought to throw that lawyer out – it’s malpractice, probably even unethical.

Wherever you are, if you are watching this, do me a favor. The next time you are in Washington, D.C., take a taxi some evening to the Department of Justice. Stand outside, and look up at that building shining against the starry night. Look at the sign outside- “The United States Department of Justice.” Think of the heroes who have served there, and the battles fought. Think of the late nights, the brave decisions, the hard work of advancing and protecting our democracy that has been done in those halls. Think about how that all makes you feel.

Then think about this statement: "The Department of Justice is bound by the President’s legal determinations."

If you don’t feel a difference from what you were feeling a moment ago, well, congratulations – there is probably a job for you in the Bush administration. Consider the sad irony that this theory was crafted in that very building, by the George W. Bush Office of Legal Counsel.

Minister, Mormon, Muslim?

Mitt Romney gave his "don't disqualify me because I'm a Mormon" speech today, trying to fend off Mike Huckabee's surge among evangelical Christians. He spoke some moving words about religious freedom and tried to convince listeners that people of faith are all alike (until he talked about Muslims later in the speech). But he indicated that the president should be a man of faith, and should represent all people of faith in America. What he did not say is that the president represents all people in America, period. In fact, for blatant political reasons, he attacked people who profess no religion. He said:

"We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong."

In this deliberate slap at atheists, agnostics, and also people of faith who believe in a much clearer separation of church and state than most of the republican candidates, Romney is saying it is important to have religion in politics, and those who wish to have less religion in politics are somehow less worthy as Americans.

Romney also referred to the founders' determination not to have a religious test for candidates for public office, but instead of agreeing with them, Romney was basically implying that there is a test, and he has passed it. By saying a president must be a person of faith, Romney was instituting his own test, which would exclude atheists and agnostics as viable candidates for the presidency.

What Romney, and many in the Republican Party don't seem to grasp is that it is possible to consider oneself a member of a religious faith, or a very spiritual person with no specific religious affiliation, and still desire a secular society. There is no secular "religion" that I know of, but there is a desire on the part of some of us, including some with deep religious faith, to keep religion out of politics, because when you don't keep religion out of politics you get two things: insisting God has anointed you as candidate, or using religion as a weapon against an opponent.

The current religious test that many evangelicals seem determined to administer is one that says one must be an evangelical Christian to be president. This is why Romney, a Mormon, felt he had to give this speech today. It is also why you hear ordained Baptist minister Mike Huckabee saying, in response to a question about what accounts for his rise in the polls, that it was God responding to all the people praying for his candidacy. "It is the same power," he said, "that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 500 people."

When politics and religion get all mixed up together you get this kind of response. You get Mike Huckabee in 2007 implying that God wants his candidacy to succeed, and you have George W. Bush in 1998 saying he believed God was calling him to be president.

At the same time, you have slanderous emails saying Barack Obama, a devout Christian, is a secret Muslim, who is hiding his real faith and who is a tool of al Qaeda who will help them destroy America from within. Anyone who has followed the candidacy of Barack Obama knows this to be absurd, but if you mix politics and religion, (and in this case paranoid fears of terrorism) and if you set up an informal religious test for the presidency, then all you have to do to succeed in getting yourself or your candidate elected is to prove you meet the test and your opponents do not.

Huckabee, like Bush before him, is sending signals to evangelicals that he passes the test, while Romney and Obama are faced with an uphill climb just to prove they are worthy. Romney, a Mormon, must prove Mormonism isn't that different from Christianity, while Obama, a Christian, must prove that he did not adopt his father's Muslim faith.

If we really honored the intent of the founders to disavow any religious test for public office, they wouldn't even be in that position, and those who are attacking them wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

I do not believe what the Mormons believe, and as an outsider I view some of their beliefs as more like science fiction, but I also don't think Mitt Romney would bring his religious beliefs into the presidency, nor allow leaders of the Mormon Church to tell him what to do. I know Barack Obama is not a Muslim, and having a Muslim father (who left the family when he was a baby) and having lived in a Muslim country for a few years doesn't make him one. And I also don't think Obama would allow his Christian pastor to influence his decisions as president.

There are many things worse than promoting a secular society where people are free to practice any religion they want even as they keep it out of politics and government. One of them is ending up with George W. Bush as president. The others are voting for candidates because they profess the "right" religion, or demonizing them in the name of religion.

I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today

Popeye's friend Wimpy was always trying to con people into paying his way, and one phrase he is famous for - "I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" - could be our national motto, for that is the nature of the credit based society we live in today.

Clever advertising, crafted over the decades by retailers and credit card companies to convince Americans to buy now and pay later, and furthermore to convince them they "deserve" the things they want now but can't afford, is one of the main culprits in the current housing crisis and possible recession.

Banks and industries are unfortunately now reaping what they have sowed, and the indoctrinated consumer is getting the shaft, as they always do in an unregulated market.

Read the entire article at Outraged Citizen.

A matter of trust

I don't know what to make of the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that concludes Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Apparently everyone else is off and running with it.

The Bush administration, in the person of Steven Hadley, was quick to spin the NIE, saying it proved the administration was right that Iran wanted a nuclear weapon and that its diplomatic efforts are paying off.

Except, of course, if the NIE is right, the administration has been wrong all along, claiming non-stop that Americans must be very afraid of Iran's "new Hitler," President Ahmadinejad, because he and his government are working their little fingers overtime to build a bomb. Cheney, especially, has been pushing for military strikes against facilities where those "bombs" are being built. Just a speech or two ago, President Bush spoke of Iran and "World War III" in the same sentence, just as he used to invoke the specter of mushroom clouds and 9/11 in every sentence about Iraq.

Others are embracing the report and blindly trusting it, even though the NIE was completely wrong about Iraq, and gave the Bush administration some of the cover it needed to wage the war it had been lusting after since it came into power.

How can we trust the NIE now when it got things so wrong before? Could it be wrong again? Or is it doing exactly the same thing it did nearly five years ago? Is it simply doing the bidding of the Bush administration?

In 2002, the administration needed justification for their war, and one came in the form of the NIE. In 2007, it may need justification NOT to go to war, and a new estimate gives them just that.

A lot of people, including myself, believed strongly that Bush was heading for, at the very least, air strikes against Iran. None of us quite knew how he was going to do that, in that our military is so tied down, its resources squandered, in Iraq, but none of us have ever seen Bush as being practical, and so a strike against Iran was always a possibility, especially with uncle Dick pressing his protégé so hard.

But it seems a few with much more common sense - and sanity - than the vice president may have prevailed. The release of the NIE may be the work of the Secretary of State, who has favored diplomacy all along, and seems to have learned from her mistake in supporting the Iraq War. It also may be that this president finally realized striking Iran would not only further damage his legacy, but possibly destroy the Republican Party not only in the upcoming election, but for decades to come.

It's too early to know, however, why this report came out now, and why it includes what it does. For that matter, it's too early to even trust what it says.

What I wish I had written...

Marty Kaplan has an essay in today's Huffington Post that reflects my sentiments exactly: in spite of just having suffered through seven years of governance by the worst president (and even worse vice-president) ever, there remains the real possibility that next November the American people could elect someone just as bad, or even worse (which seems unimaginable).

Here's a sample:

Despite all this country has gone through, anything can happen next November. Why should we believe that 2008 will not produce a president as incompetent and lawless as 2004 did, or as unelected as 2000 did?

If we think the news media in 2008 will rescue us from lying and demagoguery, we must have slept through its coverage of the run-up to Iraq, its yawning at Valerie Plame's outing and the Justice Department's corruption, its enabling of the Social Security "crisis," of "amnesty" propaganda, of the "other side" to evolution and climate change.

If we think that three billion dollars' worth of campaign ads in 2008 won't persuade Americans that day is night and black is white, we must not recall the Swift Boating.

If we place our faith in the critical thinking skills of the American people, we must have amnesia about the majority persuaded that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

If we believe that turnout in November 2008 will be unprecedented, we must also believe that voter caging, voter roll-purging, voter intimidation, papertrail-free machine voting, dubious election eve indictments, and the rest of the Rovian coup technology will somehow, perhaps out of the goodness of their own hearts, have been renounced by the Republican executive branch overnight.

Why Romney's "JFK moment" won't work

Mitt Romney has decided to channel JFK and give a speech about his religion. Spooked by the recent Huckabee surge in the Iowa polls, Romney wants to reassure Iowans that his Mormonism is not all that different from their Christianity, and that it will not determine the decisions he makes as president.

I suspect this ploy won't work for two reasons.

First, Mormonism is very different from the various Christian faiths in the United States. Mormons may, as Romney said, believe in the Bible, but they also believe in extra scriptures, among them The Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants. Mormons also do not believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible and are suspicious of its accuracy. As Joseph Smith said, "I believe the Bible as it read when it came from the pen of the original writers. Ignorant translators, careless transcribers, or designing and corrupt priests have committed many errors." While some traditional Christians might agree with parts of this statement, it will not sit well with many others.

Mormons consider themselves nontraditional Christians, or a new type of Christian, and their desire is to convert traditional Christians to what they maintain is the true faith. That faith involves believing the teachings of Joseph Smith that, among other things, Mormons are called to restore the true Gospel of Jesus Christ that has been distorted by other churches. Again, this will not go over positively with most evangelical Christians.

Mormons also conduct secret ceremonies in a Temple which is off limits to all but a select group of Mormons in good standing. My guess is that most American Christians, who open their churches to all not just for the purpose of worship, but for the purpose of evangelism, would find this bizarre, elitist and even dangerous.

During JFK's run for the presidency, there was very real prejudice, mostly based on disinformation, against Catholics, but there are not that many differences in core beliefs between Catholics and Protestants. Both believe in the same scriptures and neither has extra scriptures unacceptable to the other group. And finally, the Catholic Church does not exclude people from its churches nor conduct secret ceremonies. Therefore, the main thing JFK had to reassure voters about was that he would not take orders from the Pope. Unlike Romney, he was not in the position of having to convince most Americans that he was a Christian, or that he believed the same things they did.

Second, we are living in a different age than the one in which JFK made his speech. Separation of church and state was the issue then, and evangelical Christianity was not the force that it is now. In JFK's time, most Americans worshipped privately, and wanted all religion to stay out of government. Today many Christians would like to see more of a connection between church and state, but only if the church is of the evangelical Christian variety. Because of this, a Mormon president would simply be unacceptable. So this puts Romney in an impossible situation. Romney must try to convince voters that his religion will not be brought into the oval office, when what the Republican base really wants to hear is that a candidate will bring his faith there, only it can't be Romney's faith.

This is why Huckabee is surging in Iowa. He will bring church and state together, and not only is his Christian faith acceptable to the Republican base, but Huckabee is an ordained Baptist minister.

With the evangelical Christians having found an acceptable candidate, Romney's presidential bid will soon be dead. And the speech he plans to give, unlike the speech given by JFK, will not help resurrect it.

Big Brother emerges from retirement

Most of my friends on the left have re-read Orwell's 1984 within the last five years and have noted the many similarities between the fictional world of Big Brother and the real world of George W. Bush, especially in the distorted use of words and language. The three slogans of Oceana, the fictional country in which 1984 takes place ("freedom is slavery," "war is peace," "ignorance is strength"), remind us of some of the titles of legislation offered up by the Bush administration ("clear skies initiative," "no child left behind," etc) which mask the real purpose of the laws. It doesn't require too much stretching to see how the Bush administration, with its mastermind Karl Rove (who just might qualify as the modern embodiment of the mythical "Big Brother"), learned how to distort language in order to fool the public.

The Bush administration also has a long history of distorting facts, as in the infamous WMD rationale for the Iraq War. Again, the truth is the exact opposite of what the administration tried to claim. And again, like the mythical country Oceana, which would be at war one day with Eastasia, and then the next day with Eurasia, with all references to the war with Eastasia gone from the public record, the Bush administration went to war in Afghanistan one day, and a few months later was at war with Iraq, with references to Afghanistan all but gone from the news. Likewise, just as Oceana was involved in a perpetual war that bestowed unlimited power on its leader, so George W. Bush has begun a permanent "war on terror" which he insists gives him unprecedented powers.

However, the blatancy of the lying has gone one step further with the re-emergence of Rove from his recent "retirement." Now Bush's Brain is blatantly rewriting history, accusing the Democrats of being the ones pushing for war with Iraq in the year 2002, when they were in fact the ones trying to delay a vote even as Rove's boss was preparing for a war he was determined to wage, even without a Congressional vote. Peter Baker of the Washington Post does a good job of proving Rove a liar by quoting former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer and former Bush chief of staff Andrew Card. According to Baker, Card said Rove's "mouth sometimes gets ahead of his brain" and Fleisher asserted "It was definitely the Bush administration that set it in motion and determined the timing, not the Congress. I think Karl in this instance just has his facts wrong."

Now if we really were living in Orwell's 1984, Card and Fleischer, like Winston, the hero who rebelled against the mind control of Big Brother, would have their faces stuck in rats' cages to have their noses eaten off. But this is Bush country, 2007, and Rove cannot stop the news media and the Democrats from refuting his lies.

But it doesn't matter to Rove. He knows he doesn't have to use torture and thought police to be effective. In a country of couch potatoes and mindless consumers, and a media controlled by a few corporations who care more about profit than truth, all he has to do is get the lie out there, just like the Swift Boat ads, and he can create a stir. Even with a few reporters finally rebutting him, the lie is still there and some people will believe it.

Rove has always implemented a strategy of winning with narrow majorities. He doesn't have to discredit the Democrats with a large number of voters, he just has to fool or confuse enough people to allow his side to win. So he lies, the lie is spread on page one of the major papers, the media belatedly and unenthusiastically rebuts the story on page nine, and he has "catapulted the propaganda," as his great leader once said.

This has been the Rovian strategy for the past two presidential elections, and now that Rove no longer has an official job in Washington, he is free to make similar mischief in this election. And, so far, just as the citizens of Oceana were powerless to confront Big Brother, the Democrats do not have an effective strategy to fight him.

And that is very bad news for all of us.