Donle’s Daily Dispatches

Volume 1 Issue 172           Today’s News and Views     Sunday, June 18, 2006

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Update of US Casualties in Iraq: 2502

Update of US Casualties in Afghanistan: 304

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IMPEACH Bush/Cheney

Hoosiers for Peace requests the honor of your presence…

What: Share Sunday Gravy with Local Progressives at Pasta for Peace. Good Food, Stimulating Conversation, Inspirational Music, Film, and Art and a Silent Auction. Did we mention the pasta was shaped like peace signs? To reserve your seat, call 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org. Seats are limited and going fast.

When: June 25, 2006 from 1 to 4 p.m. (with dinner at 2 p.m.)

Where: Indianapolis Peace and Learning Center (6040 DeLong Rd.) in Eagle Creek Park.

Why:  Now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace. Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. To find out more visit www.hoosiersforpeace.org

Cost: Adults $20, Children 5-12 $7, Children under 5 eat free. All proceeds will go towards the advertising campaign. Seats are limited, contact Heather for tickets today: 202-9302 or e-mail heather@hoosiersforpeace.org.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. 
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

May 7, 2006

Dear Peacemakers,

Will you help to spread and encourage peace? With a record number of American soldiers dying in April 2006 and possible military action against Iran becoming daily news, now is the time to spread the word to mainstream America to unite and stand up for peace.

Hoosiers for Peace is sponsoring a statewide advertising campaign, which is focused on uniting the community to call for peace. This campaign will cost $14,000. This money will be used to pay for a full-page ad in the Indianapolis Star to ask more than 700,000 Hoosiers to call for peace. We are contacting dozens of organizations to make a proposal to form a coalition to raise funds and send a collaborative message to Hoosiers to Call for Peace. The message is: Call your friends, your family, and your representatives and ask them to support the Call for Peace.

Like most Americans, we oppose war based on the following, which will be reflected in the advertisement:

A.    War Kills. More than 2,400 American Soldiers have died and nearly 1,000 Hoosier soldiers are in harms way.

B.    War depletes our resources. Billions of dollars are going to sustain war efforts while ordinary citizens struggle for social services.

C.    War will not make us secure. Studies have shown that the U.S. is no more secure today than it was before 911.

Hoosiers for Peace, a website sponsored by Progressive Indiana, requests your support to make this advertisement a success. We will use the advertisement to call for peace. Each group in the coalition  working on this project will be listed in the ad. Each group will be asked to raise $1000 by October 1, 2006. Below are some suggestions for fundraising:

1.                Letter Writing Campaign: Contact your family and friends and ask them to support this call for peace. Tell them how many people we can reach and ask them to make a generous donation and spread the word. You may collect the money through your organization or you may refer them to Progressive Indiana. Donations may be sent through our secure online giving by going to www.progressiveindiana.org and click on donate now or log onto www.hoosiersforpeace and click on donate now. Checks may also be made payable to Progressive Indiana and mailed to:

                Progressive Indiana

                P.O. Box 55253

                Indianapolis, Indiana 46205-0253

2.                Host a house party. Go grassroots and organize a pasta dinner or backyard barbecue and ask for a donation from each guest. Play poker and donate half of each pot to the campaign for peace. Have a bake sale through your church or place of employment.

3.                Plan a small event.  Invite your community to an event and ask for donations for the ad. Small concerts, speakers, and socials are some ideas for these events. Get creative and network!

We need at least 14 groups to join the coalition and many more people to join the campaign to help fill in possible gaps. If we join together we can make this happen and we can bring Hoosiers together through this ad. As we Honor the Dead, Heal the Wounded, and call for an End to the War we can stand united for peace. We can make a difference by showing ordinary Hoosiers that there are many people like them working for peace. Please contact us as soon as possible if you would like to participate in this campaign. With a little work and collaboration we can make a large impact on our community.

In Peace,

Heather Allen-Garde

Director, Hoosiers For Peace

heather@hooisersforpeace.org

heatherreneeallen@yahoo.com

317/202-9302

It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it – Eleanor Roosevelt

David Korten

Butler University

June 26, 2006

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Today's News and Views

06.16.2006

Some Might Call It Treason: An Open Letter to Salon

Two weeks ago, Rolling Stone came out with "Did Bush Steal the 2004 Election?" -- a masterful investigative piece by Robert Kennedy, Jr., arguing that Bush & Co. stole their "re-election" in Ohio, and pointing out exactly how they did it. Primarily because of Kennedy's good reputation, and the mainstream credibility of Rolling Stone, the article has finally opened many eyes that had been tightly shut to the grave state of American democracy.

One week after Kennedy's article appeared, Salon posted an attack upon it by Farhad Manjoo, the magazine's technology reporter. That piece contained so many errors of fact and logic, and was throughout so brazenly wrong-headed, that several hundred readers sent in angry letters, many of them brilliantly refuting some of Manjoo's misconceptions and mistakes, and quite a few demanding that Salon cancel their subscriptions.

A few days later, Joan Walsh, Salon's editor, tried to calm the storm with a defense of Manjoo's writings on the theft of the 2004 election -- a theft that he had frequently addressed before, as he had been trying to "debunk"it ever since that infamous Election Day. Walsh did not answer any of the criticisms of Manjoo's attack, but merely re-asserted Salon's confidence in all his work for them.

At this point I decided to reply, both to Manjoo's piece (which, as I note below, had wrongly used my own work on election fraud to further slander Kennedy's) and to Joan Walsh's apologia. My point was not just to pile on (there was no need for that), but to attempt an explanation as to why so many reasonable people -- many of them self-described "progressives" -- keep refusing to perceive the copious and ever-growing evidence that this regime has never been elected. It was my hope that Salon might at least consider moderating its position on election fraud, which now demands more serious treatment than the magazine has thus far given it.

I sent the letter to Salon on Tuesday. June 13. Two days later, I received an email from them telling me that they would not be posting it. "In terms of the Ohio election fraud issue," wrote Jeanne Carstensen, "we don't feel your letter, as passionately argued as it is, adds anything substantially new to the debate, which we've covered the hell out of already."

I believe that that assertion too is wrong, and that the issues here are far too grave for "the debate" to be thus prematurely halted; and so I'm very pleased that HuffPost has agreed to run my e-mail as an open letter.

Dear Joan,

I'd like to thank Salon for touching off this spirited debate on Farhad Manjoo's argument with Robert Kennedy, Jr., and also want to thank you in particular for your own personal defense of Manjoo's writings on election fraud. I am especially impressed by your desire "to place this debate in its proper political context." Such careful explanation is exactly what we need; and so I'd like to help shed just a bit more light upon that context, by clarifying the record as you have described it.

In defense of Manjoo's writings since Election Day 2004, you claim (just as he has often claimed) that Salon cares tremendously about the problem of election fraud, and always has: "Salon has aggressively covered Republican efforts to suppress Democratic voter participation going back to December 2000," and has "followed the story doggedly ever since." In 2002, you claim, "Manjoo expanded Salon's coverage of our flawed election system with a special focus on the problems with electronic voting." Since then, you write, "[h]e has approached his stories on the massive problems with voting in this country in the same way, with an open mind." In his zealous drive to learn the truth, you say, "he did not find evidence" of any widespread fraud in Georgia in 2002 (where Democrat Max Cleland lost his Senate seat, surprisingly, to Saxby Chambliss, and Democrat Roy Barnes was, also surprisingly, ousted as governor by Sonny Perdue). And, two years later, you remind us, Manjoo found nothing to confirm the view that fraud decided Bush's re-election in Ohio.

And so Salon has, for the last six years, been searching earnestly for "evidence" of fraud, and finding nothing but "unproven charges." If I may say so, this version of your history is not credible. First of all, it begs the question -- for there is vast evidence of fraud, as the letters you've received make wholly clear. Certainly you have the right to keep insisting that there is no evidence, and Manjoo certainly has every right to quibble with whichever single claim he may perceive as bogus or exaggerated. Neither move per se, however, can negate the copious, precise and ever-growing evidence of massive fraud in 2004, any more than the tobacco companies could negate the evidence that cigarettes are lethal, or the US religious right suppress the evidence of natural selection, or of global warming. As it's the evidence that matters above all, Salon's readers ought to be encouraged to study it themselves, and not accept mere claims about it, whether yours or mine.

So let me move beyond that fundamental argument, and make a more specific criticism of your recent statement in defense of Salon's treatment of election fraud. That statement obscures the fact that Manjoo's attitude toward his subject -- and, therefore, Salon's position -- has been strangely inconsistent. On the one hand, you are surely right to say that he has done some excellent reporting on the looming danger of election fraud -- before Nov. 2 of that fateful year. Back then he did a fine job covering several sinister developments, including the shenanigans of Nathan Sproul, a theocratic activist whose firm, Sproul & Associates, conducted bogus voter-registration drives in at least six states, covertly registering people as Republicans without their knowledge, and often trashing forms filled out by Democrats. (As I point out in Fooled Again, my book on the 2004 election, SEC records suggest that Sproul may also have abetted the subversion of the recount in Ohio.) In fact, I thought so highly of Manjoo's reporting pre-Election Day that I was often guided by it in my own research for Fooled Again, and therefore even thanked him warmly in the book's acknowledgments (p. 349). Considering such trenchant work throughout the presidential race, it seemed, to say the least, quite odd that Manjoo suddenly and absolutely shifted ground as soon as Bush's unexpected victory was official. Where he had indeed been dogged and impartial in exposing some real threats to the integrity of the election, ex post facto he seemed far less interested in dealing with the evidence of GOP malfeasance than in jeering every effort to discuss it. Instead of careful scrutiny of that evidence, he resorted mainly to sarcastic hooting and ad hominem assault -- the same tactics that the Bush Republicans themselves have always used to cast all argument about their unexpected win as sheer insanity.

That is what Manjoo did in his review of Fooled Again, accusing me of "fraud," "pseudo-journalism," lying and venality. (My reply to that piece is here.) In his attack on Robert Kennedy's article he has done the same thing once again -- trashing Kennedy's motives, and accusing him, essentially, of plagiarism: "Nothing here is new. If you've ... read Mark Crispin Miller's 'Fooled Again,' you're already familiar with everything Kennedy has to say." That claim is quite false. Kennedy and Rolling Stone have given us a shattering new view of the Ohio travesty, based both on prodigious journalistic synthesis and remarkable firsthand research. Its interviews alone -- especially with Lou Harris, the polling eminence, who deems Ohio stolen by Bush/Cheney -- are, or ought to be, big news. While I am proud to say that Kennedy considers Fooled Again a major inspiration, I cannot claim that he derived much information from my book. His focus is entirely on Ohio, whereas Fooled Again devotes only some 15 pages (out of 350) to the crimes and improprieties committed in that state. My book deals with the election fraud committed nationwide in 2004 -- as Manjoo knows. Why, then, would he say that Kennedy had cribbed it all from me? Far from wanting Salon's readers to assess the evidence themselves, he seems to want people not even to know about it -- certainly a strange objective for a writer with "an open mind."

What explains this eagerness to kill all conversation on an issue of such grave importance? This is not a question just about Farhad Manjoo and/or Salon, because your way of dealing, or not dealing, with this all-important matter has been typical of the entire US political establishment throughout Bush/Cheney's reign. This general silence has prevented us from facing an enormous threat to our democracy, which is now at unprecedented risk. We might start to illuminate this problem by doing now exactly what you claim you want to do: "place this debate in its proper political context." Let us therefore reconsider your reporter's violent post-election U-turn, which had him all at once reflexively deriding the very story that he had himself been very capably reporting.

What Manjoo did after Election Day was simply gallop off into the journalistic herd as it went thundering rightward, parroting the Bush machine's own talking points. According to Ken Blackwell, Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Karl Rove and others, the election was a simple slam dunk for the president, however many and astounding the anomalies, and even if the numbers actually did not add up, or the official explanation ("family values") make a lick of sense; and anybody who suggested otherwise was, a priori, a "sore loser" and/or "paranoid," a "moonbat" venting mere "conspiracy theory," etc. "No voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004," said Tom DeLay. "It was, at the end of the day, an honest election," said Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA). Between such propaganda and the post-election coverage in the US press there was no difference whatsoever. With the heroic exception of Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, right after Election Day the mainstream press re-echoed the Republican barrage with groundless catcalls of its own. "Election paranoia surfaces; Conspiracy theorists call results rigged," laughed the Baltimore Sun; "Internet Buzz on Vote Fraud Is Dismissed," chuckled the Boston Globe; "Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether," the Washington Post giggled; and the New York Times was most derisive of them all, with a broadside -- "Vote Fraud Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Buried" -- that mocked not just the rampant "theories" of election fraud but cyberspace itself, with its "Web log hysteria," "on-line market of dark ideas," and "breathless cycle of hey-check-this-out," etc.

Such was the consensus that Manjoo too suddenly embraced, thereby bringing Salon fully into line with all the corporate media; nor was Manjoo's a lonely voice in the progressive media, which also either laughed off or ignored the evidence of fraud. No left/liberal publication, whether on- or off-line, focused on that evidence, nor did the story make a national splash on leftist radio, nor, aside from John Conyers and Jesse Jackson, did any lefty media stars take up the cause. By and large, the left press based its blithe dismissals of the issue not on any careful sifting of that evidence but on the mere say-so of certain politicians. Mother Jones ran a piece by Mark Hertsgaard, purporting to debunk the "theory" that Bush/Cheney stole Ohio. For evidence Hertsgaard relied on the assurances of various Ohio Democrats, who swore to him that there had been no fraud. Posting on TomPaine.com, Russ Baker likewise mocked the widespread "theories" of election fraud, on the basis of a brief trip to Ohio where he also talked to Democrats who swore to him that there had been no fraud. Once Election Day was past, The Nation also, like Salon, at once forgot its pre-election coverage of impending problems -- in particular, a powerful overview by Ronnie Dugger -- and simply dropped the subject, other than to ridicule the "theory" that Ohio had been stolen; David Corn, for instance, took that line, basing it on what he'd heard from certain Democrats who swore to him that there had been no fraud. And when we look back at the corporate media's non-coverage of this crucial story, we find that the consensus came not only from the bellicose Republicans, but also from those Democrats who swore repeatedly that there had been no fraud.

On the other hand, those maverick Democrats who had seen evidence of fraud, and who were keen to publicize it -- Conyers, Jackson, Stephanie Tubbs-Jones and others -- weren't consulted by the press, which largely snubbed those activists and statisticians who had studied the election fraud in depth. (Robert Koehler of Tribune News Services was a heroic exception.) Thus the media, both corporate and left/liberal, favored only those who genuflected at the party line, which both parties were assiduously toeing. According to the journalistic groupthink, any Democrat who duly exculpated the Republicans was necessarily (a) well informed about what really happened on Election Day, and (b) being completely honest, on the record. In fact, some of those Democrats were clueless, or reluctant to go public with the truth. For instance, Bill Anthony, the Democratic chair of Franklin County's Board of Elections, has quietly contradicted what he said both to Manjoo and Baker, telling Bob Fitrakis, on the record, that he does believe Bush/Cheney stole Ohio, largely by fiddling with the numbers in the rural counties in the state's Southwest (a major vote-theft, as Kennedy explains in Rolling Stone). On the issue of election fraud, the Democrats observed the code of omerta. In Who Counts?, Dorothy Fadiman's forthcoming documentary on Republican election fraud, Bob Hagan, a Democratic state senator from Youngstown, tells of having had his own e-vote for Kerry flip to Bush -- a glitch that wiped out Kerry votes throughout Ohio (and at least a dozen other states), and yet the Democrats told Hagan not to mention it: "The Kerry campaign said, 'Leave it alone. Don't talk about it. It's not something we want to get out.'"

So much for the democratic spirit of the Democratic Party, which, in burying the most important civic issue of our time, has been just as complicit as the GOP, although they cloud the issue far less rudely. Take "Democracy at Risk," the DNC report on the election in Ohio, which came out in the summer of 2005. The document appears to be a very damning study of Republican malfeasance in Ohio. It offers many harrowing statistics, and some strong firsthand accounts, of Democratic disenfranchisement throughout the state -- only to deny that fraud had anything to do with it. The problem, rather, was "incompetence," which was somehow epidemic in Ohio on Election Day, and which, stranger still, invariably helped Bush/Cheney and hurt Kerry/Edwards. The report is not exactly readable, with long abstruse equations covering page after page -- a haze of math that does not quite conceal the bald self-contradictions that distort the document like heavy cracks across a windshield. For instance, the report confirms, in various ways, that there were far too few machines only in Democratic precincts, while the number of machines in GOP strongholds was more than adequate. Then, out of nowhere, toward the end, we're told that members of both parties were affected equally by the statewide shortage of machines, so that the glitch did not, of course, affect the outcome of the race.

The whole report is twisted thus, the authors tortuously bending over backward to assure us that DeLay et al. were right: "No voter disenfranchisement occurred in this election of 2004." If we look deeper into the report (and also read the pertinent exposés by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman at freepress.org), we find that it is less an earnest study of the fraud committed in Ohio than a political statement, meant primarily to distance the committee, and the party, from John Conyers and those other Democrats who had been so tactless as to harp on the abundant evidence of systematic fraud by the Republicans. This fact is highly relevant to Manjoo's attack on Robert Kennedy, as Manjoo's case is heavily dependent on the DNC report. Manjoo invokes it several times, accusing Kennedy of quoting only certain parts of it and pointedly ignoring all those later parts that clear the GOP of fraud. Your reporter calls this a "deliberate omission of key bits of data." And yet that charge is groundless, as the DNC report is only partly accurate, and Kennedy, quite rightly, quoted only its sound figures and ignored its weird exculpatory spin.

The DNC report is typical of that cowed, calculating party, whose managers consistently deny the evidence of fraud, even though the consequence is their assured political castration. Why exactly would they take that suicidal course? The reasons generally given for their silence on the subject are preposterous on their face. Kerry won't discuss the issue frankly on the record, we've been told, because he's worried that the media will smack him for it. ("They're saying that, if I don't concede, they'll call us sore losers!" he reportedly said to a stunned John Edwards just before he called it quits the morning after.) That may be what Kerry, among others, actually believes, but it's absurd, as no amount of public scorn, however withering, could ever be as frightening to a democratic politician as the twilight of democracy itself.

We also hear that Democrats have been reluctant to speak out about election fraud because they fear that doing so might cut down voter turnout on Election Day. By such logic, we should henceforth utter not a peep about election fraud, so that the Democratic turnout will break records. Then, when the Republicans win yet again, because they've rigged the system, how will all those Democratic voters feel? Maybe those who haven't killed themselves, or fled the country, will recover just enough to vote again. Would it then be prudent for the Democrats to talk about election fraud? Or would it still seem sensible to keep the subject under wraps?

The argument is idiotic, yet the people who have seriously made it -- Bernie Sanders, Markos Moulitsas, Hillary Clinton's and Chuck Schumer's people, among others -- are extremely bright. The argument, as foolish as it is, does not bespeak a low I.Q., but, I would suggest, a subtler kind of incapacity: a refusal and/or inability to face a deeply terrifying truth. The Democrats refuse to talk about election fraud because they cannot, will not, wrap their minds around the implications of what happened in 2004, and what is happening right now, and what will keep on happening until we, as a people, face the issue. In short, whatever clever-sounding rationales they may invoke (no doubt in all sincerity), the Democrats won't talk about election fraud because they're in denial, which is itself based on a lethal combination of inertia, self-interest and, above all -- or below all -- fear.

Such fear is understandable. For the problem here is not simply mechanical or technological, legal or bureaucratic, requiring that we merely tweak the rules and/or build a better mousetrap. Any such expedient will naturally depend on a consensus of "both sides" -- and there's the rub, because in this great clash the "other side" detests American democracy itself. The movement now in power is not conservative but radical, intent on an apocalyptic program that is fundamentally opposed to the ideals of the Enlightenment, on which, lest we forget, this revolutionary secular republic was first founded. The movement frankly disbelieves in reason, and in all the other worldly goods that every rational American still takes for granted: pluralism, checks and balances, "the general welfare," freedom, progress, the pursuit of happiness. For this movement, condom use is worse than death by AIDS, however many millions the disease may kill; the ruination of the planet should be hastened, not prevented, as it means that He will be returning soon; the "war on terror" is a matter not of geopolitics but metaphysics, as our national enemy is "a guy named Satan"; homosexuals should not be citizens, the US having been conceived as a "Christian republic"; and -- most relevant to this debate -- the movement's adversaries, which means all the rest of us, are not human beings with divergent interests but literal "agents of Hell," demonic entities against which any tactic, however criminal or sinful, is permissible, because they are likely to use any tactic, regardless of its sinfulness or criminality, to force their evil program on the Righteous Ones.

Of course, that theocratic bloc does not comprise the whole Bush/Cheney movement, which, at the top, is heavily dominated too by frank neo-imperialists, corporate profiteers, careerist sociopaths and livid paranoids compelled by the intense self-hatred typical of such perennial types as Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. Revolution tends to work by unifying the energies, or bile, of only roughly complementary interests. This revolution certainly is no pure upsurge of religious fervor, for its plutocratic animus is just as powerful, apparently, as its crusade to "Christianize" the world. However, while it would be very foolish to ignore the movement's secular agenda (i.e., the avarice and power lust of Cheney/Rumsfeld and their corporate cronies), it is just as foolish to imagine that the movement's theocratic program is mere smoke, calculated just to daze the pious masses so that Congress and Wall Street can rob them blind.

This theocratic program is no secret, as the conquest of the GOP has been the top priority of US Christianist extremists since the early Nineties. It was their aim to put George W. Bush in office, and then to keep him there, despite the will of the electorate; and having done so, they have rapidly transformed our government into an instrument of their crusade. "George W. Bush is our agenda!" as the Rev. Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition, boasted candidly to Salon's Michelle Goldberg a few years ago. He had every right to crow. The executive departments and top federal agencies are now in theocratic hands, and this government pursues no policy, foreign or domestic, that has not been devised or vetted by the party's theocratic apparat. The government now generously subsidizes many theocratic groups that proselytize explicitly, pushing both their own creed and the interests of the Bush Republicans. And now that Congress too is full of theocratic militants (who seem to have no strong opponents), the Supreme Court is just one seat away from an entrenched majority as frankly hostile to the church/state separation as it is to voting rights for all Americans.

The power and fury of the US theocratic movement have been amply documented by a range of keen observers, including Esther Kaplan, Paul Craig Roberts, Kevin Phillips, Stephenie Hendricks, Max Blumenthal, Frederick Carlson, Katherine Yurica, Michael Lerner and Salon's Michelle Goldberg, among others, as well as in my own books Cruel and Unusual and Fooled Again. The threat has also sounded strong alarms on solid Christian grounds, in writings by Jim Wallis, John Danforth, Jimmy Carter, Davidson Loehr, Rich Lang and Bruce Prescott. (Of course, the theocratic program is explicit also in the oratory and writings of the theocrats themselves.) It now remains for us to face the crucial fact that this regime's miraculous "re-election" in 2004 depended heavily on the countless block-the-vote activities of theocratic true believers, who did whatever they could do, from coast to coast, to cut the Kerry vote and pad the Bush vote. That effort was essential to the regime's inexplicable political success. Of all the interests collaborating in Bush/Cheney's drive against democracy, the theocrats alone have a grass-roots constituency -- not large enough, by any means, to sway elections honestly, but large enough, and fierce enough, and with sufficient funds and discipline, to help Bush/Cheney disenfranchise the majority. Although the corporations and the neo-cons wield awesome clout, they have no grass-roots muscle. The theocrats alone can claim that necessary asset, and it has given them enormous power.

It is a terrifying development -- although not insurmountable, unless we let ourselves be blinded and/or paralyzed by fear. Since the last Election Day, that terror has silenced nearly every sector of what ought to be the opposition, including most top Democrats, the press, a lot of principled conservatives -- and outlets like Salon. In his dogged effort to explain away the massive evidence of fraud by the Republicans, Manjoo has based his case not on the facts but, finally, on denial -- as he himself made very clear in his review of Fooled Again. "If you want to improve how Americans vote, here's one piece of advice," he wrote:

Don't alienate half the country by arguing, as Miller does here, that the president and his followers -- whom Miller labels "Busheviks" -- think of their political enemies as "subhuman beings" and believe they must "slaughter" their opponents in the same way that religious fanatics slaughter their holy foes. Even if you believe this to be true, and even if it is in fact true, shut up about it; this sort of unhinged rhetoric can't help, and can only hurt, our capacity to solve the problem of voting in America [emphasis added].

That an American reporter would make such a statement, and that any liberal magazine would publish it, suggests how thoroughly we have repressed all memory of what America was once supposed to mean. "Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816, in a spirit of scientific progress and republican self-liberation. "Even if it's true, shut up about it," Farhad Manjoo wrote in 2005, in the spirit of Bill O'Reilly. Luckily, Manjoo was not a major player when the colonies were trying to get their act together, or we'd all be subjects of the House of Windsor. Although they once were a minority, the first republicans did not "shut up," but made their case until the people came around and finally took the crucial step toward liberty for all. In any case, Manjoo's command is as illogical as it is craven, for there is no convincing evidence that "half the country" voted for Bush/Cheney's re-election, nor is it clear how "shutting up" about the theocratic threat to our democracy could help "improve how Americans vote." The assumption there is that the theocratic movement might somehow be lulled into allowing us to have a functioning democracy, if we're very careful not to tell the truth about them, which will only make them mad. "Even if it's true, shut up about it." That is not the statement of "an open mind," but a plea for willful ignorance and wishful thinking.

If that were just Farhad Manjoo's position, Joan, I certainly would not have written you this letter. I write because that view of his, and yours, has paralyzed the whole political establishment, the press included; and Manjoo's latest piece, and your defense of it, provide a fitting opportunity to point that out. If, as you say, you want to see the system fixed, you must admit that it needs fixing now -- a great step forward that has just been taken by Bob Herbert of The New York Times as well as Robert Kennedy and other reputable people. It is past time to take that step, for there is every indication -- as Salon should now be pointing out -- that the Republicans are readier than ever to subvert the process once more on this next Election Day.

While they gear up to strike again, the Democrats and media keep trying to "solve" the problem of election fraud by claiming endlessly, and groundlessly, that there's no problem, or by charging that the problem somehow lies with all those trouble-makers who insist on trying to talk about it, or that the problem is not partisan malfeasance but "incompetence." Salon must finally break away from that impossible consensus, which means no longer seconding the Democrats as they keep struggling to avoid the issue, but calling on them to behave, at last, like democrats -- and, for that matter, like republicans -- which is to say, at last, like good Americans.

Copyright 2006 © HuffingtonPost.com, LLC

ROBERT KUTTNER

Redefining what it means to protect America

By Robert Kuttner  |  June 17, 2006

ARE THE liberals dividing the Democratic Party once more and weakening Democrats' credibility on defense? Or are they stepping into a leadership vacuum?

The Democrats' schisms over Iraq were on display at this week's Take Back America convention in Washington. Senator Hillary Clinton, whose speech to the gathering was mostly applauded, got scattered boos when she declared that it was not ``smart strategy" to ``set a date certain for troop withdrawal."

The hawkish Senator Clinton, one senior Democratic strategist observed, is prematurely positioning herself for the 2008 general election. First she has to win her own party's primaries. At the rate she's going, she is fast alienating the party's overwhelmingly antiwar base.

Senator John Kerry quickly differentiated his position from hers. Speaking shortly after Clinton, Kerry won cheers when he pledged to introduce a Senate resolution calling for withdrawal of most troops by the end of 2006 (though several in the audience could be heard muttering words to the effect of, ``Where was he when we needed him?").

Most voters want to end American involvement in Iraq. As in the Vietnam War, the voters are ahead of most politicians. And political debate about defense is finally recovering from the administration's manipulation of 9/11 trauma.

In Connecticut, Senator Joe Lieberman, a leading Democratic war-hawk, is on the verge of being chased out of his party by antiwar primary challenger Ned Lamont, a political novice. With the primary Aug. 8, polls show Lieberman only barely leading Lamont. The veteran incumbent is seriously talking about quitting the Democratic Party and running as an independent.

When Senate Republicans forced a quick vote Thursday on a withdrawal resolution before Kerry could work with other Democrats on consensus language, only six senators voted for the Republicans' antiwar language. But that vote drastically understates the pro-withdrawal feeling in the country -- and not just among Democrats. A week of upbeat Iraq news -- Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's death, the long-deferred filling of key cabinet posts, a Bush photo-op in Baghdad -- doesn't change the fundamentals.

After a US missile attack killed the Al Qaeda chief in Iraq, White House political adviser Karl Rove lost no time in declaring to a Republican meeting in Manchester, N.H., that if Democrats had had their way, Zarqawi would never have been killed.

In fact, if Democrats had been in charge, we never would have invaded Iraq, and Zarqawi and his fellow international terrorists would never have gone there. As Senator Russ Feingold reminded the Take Back America meeting, two months after 9/11, the Bush State Department's own website displayed a list of 45 countries where Al Qaeda was active. Iraq was not among them.

Feingold and Kerry both pointed out that the best way to strengthen the Iraqi government, and increase the chances for stability, is to remove the chief lightning rod that is stoking sectarian anger -- the American occupation. Even if US troops withdrew, leaving some of them on nearby carriers, strikes against remaining terrorist leaders, of the kind that killed Zarqawi, would still be possible.

Despite Hillary Clinton's caution, fewer Democratic leaders are now intimidated by Republican catcalls of ``cut-and-run." At stake is far more than presidential jockeying. What's truly at issue is who has the more realistic conception of how to keep Americans secure, in an age of multiple and complex threats.

Speaking at the same convention, former senator Gary Hart, who cochaired a national commission in the late 1990s on homeland defense and counterterrorism, spoke of the many threats to American national security that far outrank Iraq. These include nuclear proliferation, a genuine menace wrongly displaced by the White House obsession with Iraq; negotiated solutions to nuclear saber-rattling by North Korea and Iran; domestic security bungled by an administration that staffs key offices with cronies and strips National Guard units of first responders to provide troops for Iraq; and other regional threats from Islamist militants, as in Somalia where the administration clumsily backed local tribal warlords -- who were just routed by pro-Al Qaeda militants.

Democrats serious about national security are redefining what it means to protect America, and what it means to be a ``Defense Democrat." The dwindling Lieberman wing of the party and its enablers of George W. Bush have had a lock on that label for far too long.

A new generation of threats requires fresh thinking about real security and,in the spirit of tough realist liberals like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman,and John Kennedy, credible leadership from Democrats. Belatedly, we just may get it.

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. His column appears regularly in the Globe.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Over the last few weeks monetary officials have sounded increasingly worried about rising prices. On Wednesday, Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, declared that inflation "is running at a rate that is just too corrosive to be accepted by a virtuous central banker."

I'm worried too — but not about recent price increases. What worries me, instead, is the Fed's overreaction to those increases. When it comes to inflation, the main thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Discussions of inflation can be numbingly arcane — are you a core C.P.I. type or a trimmed-mean P.C.E. person? But the real issue is whether there's a serious risk that inflation will become embedded in the economy.

The classic example of embedded inflation is the wage-price spiral — better described as wage-price leapfrogging — of the 1970's. Back then, whenever wage contracts came up for renewal, workers demanded big raises, both to catch up with past inflation and to offset expected future inflation. And whenever companies changed their prices, they raised them by a lot, both to catch up with past wage increases and to offset expected future increases.

The result of this leapfrogging process was that inflation became a self-sustaining process, feeding on itself. And ending that self-sustaining process proved very difficult. The Fed eventually brought the inflation of the 1970's under control, but only by raising interest rates so high that in the early 1980's the U.S. economy suffered its worst slump since the Great Depression.

Fed officials now seem worried that we may be seeing the start of another round of self-sustaining inflation. But is that a realistic fear? Only if you think we can have a wage-price spiral without, you know, the wages part.

The point is that wage increases can be a major driver of inflation only if workers consistently receive raises that substantially exceed productivity growth. And that just hasn't been happening.

In fact, the distinctive feature of the current economic expansion — the reason most Americans are unhappy with the state of the economy, in spite of good numbers for the gross domestic product and explosive growth in corporate profits — is the disconnect between rising worker productivity and stagnant wages. Over the past five years productivity, as measured by real G.D.P. per hour worked, has risen by about 14 percent, but the real wages of nonmanagerial workers have risen less than 2 percent.

Nor is there much sign that things are changing on that front. The official unemployment rate is low by historical standards, but workers still don't seem to have much bargaining power. (Does this mean that the official unemployment rate makes the job situation look better than it really is? Yes.) The Federal Reserve's Beige Book, an informal survey of economic conditions across the country, reports that over the last couple of months "wage pressures remained moderate over all, with the exception being workers with hotly demanded skills."

But if wage pressures are so moderate, where's the inflation coming from? The answer is soaring oil and commodity prices.

It's true that some widely used inflation measures, like so-called core inflation, strip out the direct "first-round" effects of rising energy prices. But there are still indirect effects, which usually take some time to show up in the data. Much of the recent rise in core inflation probably represents the delayed effect of the big run-up in fuel prices a few months ago. And unless something else happens to drive up oil prices — like, to give a wild example, a military strike on Iran — inflation will probably subside in the months ahead.

And bear in mind that many economists, including Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, have said that a little bit of inflation — say, 2 percent a year on average — is actually good for the economy.

It would be an exaggeration to say that there's no inflation threat at all. I can think of ways in which inflation could become a problem. But it's much easier to think of ways in which the Federal Reserve, wrongly focused on the phantom menace of a new wage-price spiral, could be slow to respond to bigger threats, like a rapidly deflating housing bubble.

So I don't fear inflation nearly as much as I fear the fear of inflation. And I wish the Fed would lighten up on the subject.

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Article published Jun 17, 2006
We should take a hard look at our anti-democratic tendencies

A recent study identifies characteristics common to seven fascist regimes. Laurence W. Britt examines regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Chile, and Indonesia-all of them eventually overthrown - and notes these 14 patterns of national behavior that each regime engaged in to one extent or another.

·  Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. This was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign.

·  Disdain for human rights. Victims of human rights abuse were marginalized or abuse was concealed.

·  Identification of scapegoats as a unifying cause. Scapegoating directed attention away from public problems and channeled frustration into controlled directions.

·  Avid militarism. The military was used to assert national goals, intimidate other countries, and increase the ruling elite's prestige.

·  Rampant sexism. Women were treated as second-class citizens. Homophobia was intensified.

·  A controlled mass media. Leaders of the mass media were often compatible with the regime and kept the public unaware of the regime's excesses.

·  Obsession with national security. A national security apparatus served as an instrument of internal repression.

·  Religion and ruling elite tied together. Propaganda kept up the illusion that those in power were opponents of the "godless."

·  Power of corporations protected. The ability of large corporations to act in relative freedom was not compromised even when personal liberties were curtailed.

·  Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. The poor were seen as an underclass and viewed with suspicion or contempt.

·  Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Artistic and academic freedom were considered subversive.

·  Obsession with crime and punishment. Severe systems of criminal justice produced huge prison populations. Police power was almost unchecked, leading to widespread abuse.

·  Rampant cronyism and corruption. The economic elite and the power elite enriched one another through unethical favoritism.

·  Fraudulent elections. When elections with candidates took place, they would usually be perverted by those in power to achieve the desired result.

Does this sound familiar? Ample parallels can be found between Britt's portrait of fascism and events in early 21st-century America.

Fascism is an ideology built on fear. What breaks the allure of fascism is a faith too authentic to accept lies. One form of this faith is belief in a God of compassion whose perfect love casts out fear. Another is belief in the ability of a free people to govern themselves.

We do not strive for a justice based on repentance and encounter with the God of compassion. Distracted in countless ways, disconnected from one another, we remain deeply ignorant of how all people are one people.

This nation once engaged in a gigantic military struggle to defeat European fascism. We must now undertake a spiritual struggle to defeat the fascism now threatening our hearts and our public life.

Copyright ©2006 The Times Herald.

Judging from the persistent and escalating violence in Iraq, we've passed one milestone that doesn't seem to matter much--al Zarqawi's death--with one that does--2500 dead U.S. soldiers. The war is spiraling out of control, yet a simple decision to board a plane to visit this debacle firsthand has brought much attention and praise on Bush, despite the fact that it'll yield little if any true change. A week from now it'll be just another faded photo-op. The bigger issue is, when are we going to exit? As David Letterman said, much has been said about Bush being able to find a secret way into Iraq. How about a finding a secret way out?

Using the low-bar expectations, this was a good week in terms of things happening that weren't dreadful. Al Zarqawi was alive, now he's dead. Ok, no one can argue that that's not a good thing. But he's already been replaced by Abu Hamza al-Muhajer as Al Qaeda-in-Iraq's leader. The real arguable point, however, is what effect Zarqawi's killing will have on the insurgency. So far, the violence and death has increased. Next, Bush hopped a plane to Baghdad, and it was greeted as some sort of Nixon-like foreign policy coup. Like al Zarqawi's death, this will yield little if anything in the grand scheme of things. But for an under-achieving president like Bush, I guess the trip was a big deal. Lastly, his chief political operative, Karl Rove, learned he will not face indictment in the CIA leak case. Another big win? Sure, if you don't mind that Rove still reeks of scandal and is probably guilty. But to the Bushies, "a lack of enough evidence to indict" translates to "innocence." Not to the rest of us. Sorry George, "Karl Rove not indicted" is not something to brag about.

The bottom line here is that we now have 2500 dead soldiers and an unjust war with no end in sight. We face a real nuclear threat from Iran and N. Korea. The administration's been plagued by scandal; Rove's clearing doesn't mitigate that. Al Qaeda has a new boss in Iraqi. The stock market's been crashing. Jobs growth has been dismal. Gas prices are astronomical. Wages are stagnate. Interest rates and inflation are rising. We're saddled with record debt. And Bush's abysmal approval ratings haven't budged at all from the mid-30's perch. To the low-expectation Repugs, this is not evidence of merely a good week, but signs of a rejuvenated presidency. To the rest of us, America certainly should have much higher standards for excellence.

posted by The Ostroy Report @ 10:33 AM

Eminently Quotable

"One of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence."
-- Charles A. Beard, historian (1874-1948)

"There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy."
-- Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

"[Being a humorist] is a useful trade, a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it -- the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties."
-- Mark Twain

"War, at first, is the hope that one will be better off; next, the expectation that the other fellow will be worse off; then, the satisfaction that he isn't any better off; and, finally, the surprise at everyone's being worse off."
-- Karl Kraus, writer (1874-1936)

"Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws."
-- John Adams, 2nd US president (1735-1826)

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-- Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)

"It does not require many words to speak the truth."
-- Chief Joseph, native American leader (1840-1904)

"When we have the courage to speak out -- to break our silence -- we inspire the rest of the "moderates" in our communities to speak up and voice their views."
-- Sharon Schuster

"Lying is done with words and also with silence."
-- Adrienne Rich, writer and teacher (1929- )

"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul."
-- Isaac Asimov, scientist and writer (1920-1992)

" It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake."
-- Janos Arany, poet (1817-1882)

"Whoever imagines himself a favorite with God holds others in contempt."
-- Robert Green Ingersoll, lawyer and orator (1833-1899)

"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
-- Dwight David Eisenhower, U.S. general and 34th president (1890-1969)

" Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way."
-- Jean Anouilh, playwright (1910-1987)

"An open mind is a prerequisite to an open heart."
-- Robert M. Sapolsky, neuroscientist and author (1957- )

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear."
-- Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)

"A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it."
-- Lewis H. Lapham, editor and writer (1935- )

"In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."
-- Leo Tolstoy, author (1828-1910)

"For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that."
-- Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)

"Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality."
-- Theodor Adorno, philosopher and composer (1903-1969)

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could
do only a little."
-- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

"I place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt."
-- Thomas Jefferson, third US president, architect and author (1743-1826)

"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of
a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd US President (1882-1945)

"When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt."
-- Robert T. Pirsig, author and philosopher (1928- )

"Political freedom cannot exist in any land where religion controls the state, and religious freedom cannot exist in any land where the state controls religion."
-- Samuel James Ervin Jr., lawyer, judge, and senator (1896-1985)

"A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury."
-- John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist (1806-1873)

"Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
-- Flannery O'Connor, writer (1925-1964)

"The high minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think."
-- Aristotle, philosopher (384-322 BCE)

"A sneer is the weapon of the weak."
-- James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891)

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view."
-- Harper Lee, writer (1926- )

"People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them."
-- Dave Barry, author and columnist (1947-)

"It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry."
-- Thomas Paine, philosopher and writer (1737-1809)

"The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."
-- Eric Hoffer, philosopher and author (1902-1983)

"If a politician found he had cannibals among his constituents, he would promise them missionaries for dinner."
-- H. L. Mencken, quoted from The Gist Of It

"We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us."
-- Robert Hayden, poet and educator (1913-1980)

"No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded."
-- Margaret Mead, anthropologist (1901-1978)

"True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess."
-- Louis Nizer, lawyer (1902-1994)

"The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts."
-- Baruch Spinoza, philosopher (1632-1677)

"Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship."
-- Harry S. Truman, 33rd US president (1884-1972)

"Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two equals four."
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, scientist and philosopher (1742-1799)

"The people never give up their liberties, but under some delusion."
-- Edmund Burke, statesman and writer (1729-1797)

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, philosopher (1844-1900)

"I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us."
--Lord Byron, poet (1788-1824)

"There is no pillow so soft as a clear conscience."
-- French proverb

"The man who strikes first admits that his ideas have given out."
-- Chinese proverb

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."
-- H. Jackson Brown, Jr., writer

"If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it."
- Tom Robbins, writer (1936- )

"As I stood before the gates I realized that I never want to be as certain about anything as were the people who built this place."
- Rabbi Sheila Peltz, on her visit to Auschwitz

"Nature can provide for the needs of people; [she] can't provide for the greed of people."
- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

"To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers - or both."
- Elizabeth Charles, writer (1828-1896)

"The more people are reached by mass communication, the less they communicate with each other."
- Marya Mannes, writer (1904-1990)

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
- George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life - the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
- Hubert Horatio Humphrey, US Vice President (1911-1978)

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
- George Orwell, writer (1903-1950)

"Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."
- Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)

"Whenever 'A' attempts by law to impose his moral standards upon 'B', 'A' is most likely a scoundrel."
- H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)

"The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within."
- Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869-1948)

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"
- Eleanor Roosevelt, diplomat and writer (1884-1962)

"The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none."
- Thomas Carlyle, writer (1795-1881)

"I love my country too much to be a nationalist."
- Albert Camus, writer, philosopher, Nobel laureate