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War of Ideology
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 24, 2004
When foreign policy wonks go to bed, they dream of being X. They dream of writing the all-encompassing, epoch-defining essay, the way George F. Kennan did during the cold war under the pseudonym X.
Careers have been spent racing to be X. But in our own time, the 9/11 commission has come closer than anybody else. After spending 360 pages describing a widespread intelligence failure, the commissioners step back in their report and redefine the nature of our predicament.
We're not in the middle of a war on terror, they note. We're not facing an axis of evil. Instead, we are in the midst of an ideological conflict.
We are facing, the report notes, a loose confederation of people who believe in a perverted stream of Islam that stretches from Ibn Taimaya to Sayyid Qutb. Terrorism is just the means they use to win converts to their cause.
It seems like a small distinction - emphasizing ideology instead of terror - but it makes all the difference, because if you don't define your problem correctly, you can't contemplate a strategy for victory.
When you see that our enemies are primarily an intellectual movement, not a terrorist army, you see why they are in no hurry. With their extensive indoctrination infrastructure of madrassas and mosques, they're still building strength, laying the groundwork for decades of struggle. Their time horizon can be totally different from our own.
As an ideological movement rather than a national or military one, they can play by different rules. There is no territory they must protect. They never have to win a battle but can instead profit in the realm of public opinion from the glorious martyrdom entailed in their defeats. We think the struggle is fought on the ground, but they know the struggle is really fought on satellite TV, and they are far more sophisticated than we are in using it.
The 9/11 commission report argues that we have to fight this war on two fronts. We have to use intelligence, military, financial and diplomatic capacities to fight Al Qaeda. That's where most of the media attention is focused. But the bigger fight is with a hostile belief system that can't be reasoned with but can only be "destroyed or utterly isolated."
The commissioners don't say it, but the implication is clear. We've had an investigation into our intelligence failures; we now need a commission to analyze our intellectual failures. Simply put, the unapologetic defenders of America often lack the expertise they need. And scholars who really know the Islamic world are often blind to its pathologies. They are so obsessed with the sins of the West, they are incapable of grappling with threats to the West.
We also need to mount our own ideological counteroffensive. The commissioners recommend that the U.S. should be much more critical of autocratic regimes, even friendly ones, simply to demonstrate our principles. They suggest we set up a fund to build secondary schools across Muslim states, and admit many more students into our own. If you are a philanthropist, here is how you can contribute: We need to set up the sort of intellectual mobilization we had during the cold war, with modern equivalents of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to give an international platform to modernist Muslims and to introduce them to Western intellectuals.
Most of all, we need to see that the landscape of reality is altered. In the past, we've fought ideological movements that took control of states. Our foreign policy apparatus is geared toward relations with states: negotiating with states, confronting states. Now we are faced with a belief system that is inimical to the state system, and aims at theological rule and the restoration of the caliphate. We'll need a new set of institutions to grapple with this reality, and a new training method to understand people who are uninterested in national self-interest, traditionally defined.
Last week I met with a leading military officer stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose observations dovetailed remarkably with the 9/11 commissioners. He said the experience of the last few years is misleading; only 10 percent of our efforts from now on will be military. The rest will be ideological. He observed that we are in the fight against Islamic extremism now where we were in the fight against communism in 1880.
We've got a long struggle ahead, but at least we're beginning to understand it.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/post_new.asp?board_id=1556
Spinning Our Safety
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 25, 2004
Maybe it's because I've been instructed to pack a respirator escape hood along with party dresses for the Boston convention. Maybe it's because our newspaper has assigned a terrorism reporter to cover a political convention. Maybe it's because George Bush is relaxing at his ranch down there (again) while Osama is planning a big attack up here (again). Maybe it's because there are just as many American soldiers dying in Iraq post-transfer, more Muslims more mad at us over fake W.M.D. intelligence and depravity at Abu Ghraib, and more terrorists in more diffuse networks hating us more.
Maybe it's because the F.B.I. is still learning how to Google and the C.I.A. has an acting head who spends most of his time acting defensive over his agency's failure to get anything right. Maybe it's because so many of those federal twits who missed the 10 chances to stop the 9/11 hijackers, who blew off our Paul Reveres - Richard Clarke, Coleen Rowley and the Phoenix memo author - still run things. Call me crazy, Mr. President, but I don't feel any safer.
The nation's mesmerizing new best seller, the 9/11 commission report, lays bare how naked we still are against an attack, and how vulnerable we are because of the time and money the fuzzy-headed Bush belligerents wasted going after the wrong target.
Even scarier, the commissioners expect Congress, which they denounced as "dysfunctional" on intelligence oversight, to get busy fixing things just as lawmakers are flying home for vacation.
The report offers vivid details on our worst fears. Instead of focusing on immediately hitting back at Osama, Bush officials indulged their idiotic idée fixe on Saddam and ignored the memo from their counter-terrorism experts dismissing any connection between the religious fanatic bin Laden and the secular Hussein.
"On the afternoon of 9/11, according to contemporaneous notes, Secretary Rumsfeld instructed General Myers to obtain quickly as much information as possible," the report says. " The notes indicate that he also told Myers that he was not simply interested in striking empty training sites. The secretary said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time - not only bin Laden."
At the first Camp David meeting after 9/11, the report states, "Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz made the case for striking Iraq during 'this round' of the war on terrorism."
Six days after the World Trade Center towers were pulverized, when we should have been striking Osama with everything we had, the Bush team was absorbed with old grudges and stale assumptions.
"At the September 17 N.S.C. meeting, there was some further discussion of 'phase two' of the war on terrorism," the report says. "President Bush ordered the Defense Department to be ready to deal with Iraq if Baghdad acted against U.S. interests, with plans to include possibly occupying Iraqi oil fields."
President Bush was unsure of himself, relying too much on a vice president whose deep, calm voice belied a deeply cracked world view.
He explained to the commissioners that he had stayed in his seat making little fish faces at second graders for seven minutes after learning about the second plane hitting the towers because, as the report says, "The president felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."
What better way to track the terror in the Northeast skies than by reading "My Pet Goat" in Sarasota?
The commissioners warn that the price for the Bush bullies' attention deficit disorder could be high: "If, for example, Iraq becomes a failed state, it will go to the top of the list of places that are breeding grounds for attacks against Americans at home. Similarly, if we are paying insufficient attention to Afghanistan, the rule of the Taliban or warlords and narcotraffickers may re-emerge and its countryside could once again offer refuge to Al Qaeda, or its successor."
And, if that's not ominous enough, consider this: "The problem is that Al Qaeda represents an ideological movement, not a finite group of people. It initiates and inspires, even if it no longer directs."
"Yet killing or capturing" Osama, the report says, "while extremely important, would not end terror. His message of inspiration to a new generation of terrorists would continue."
If the Bush crowd hadn't been besotted with the idea of smoking Saddam, they could have stomped Osama in Tora Bora. Now it's too late. Al Qaeda has become a state of mind.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/25dowd.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Ed_fascist: Yup, knew that would be your 'educated' response. But, of course, you admire the 'wisdom' of W. 'Nuff said.
ROTFLMAO@U
ed fascist....just for you!!!
fas·cist (plural fas·cists) or Fas·cist supporter of fascism: somebody who supports or advocates a system of government characterized by dictatorship, centralized control of private enterprise, repression of all opposition, and extreme nationalism
Fear of Fraud
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 27, 2004
It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.
When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, Calif., reported by Andrew Gumbel of the British newspaper The Independent. Mr. Gumbel's full-length report, printed in Los Angeles City Beat, makes hair-raising reading not just because it reinforces concerns about touch-screen voting, but also because it shows how easily officials can stonewall after a suspect election.
Some states, worried about the potential for abuse with voting machines that leave no paper trail, have banned their use this November. But Florida, which may well decide the presidential race, is not among those states, and last month state officials rejected a request to allow independent audits of the machines' integrity. A spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush accused those seeking audits of trying to "undermine voters' confidence," and declared, "The governor has every confidence in the Department of State and the Division of Elections."
Should the public share that confidence? Consider the felon list.
Florida law denies the vote to convicted felons. In 2000 the state hired a firm to purge supposed felons from the list of registered voters; these voters were turned away from the polls. After the election, determined by 537 votes, it became clear that thousands of people had been wrongly disenfranchised. Since those misidentified as felons were disproportionately Democratic-leaning African-Americans, these errors may have put George W. Bush in the White House.
This year, Florida again hired a private company - Accenture, which recently got a homeland security contract worth up to $10 billion - to prepare a felon list. Remembering 2000, journalists sought copies. State officials stonewalled, but a judge eventually ordered the list released.
The Miami Herald quickly discovered that 2,100 citizens who had been granted clemency, restoring their voting rights, were nonetheless on the banned-voter list. Then The Sarasota Herald-Tribune discovered that only 61 of more than 47,000 supposed felons were Hispanic. So the list would have wrongly disenfranchised many legitimate African-American voters, while wrongly enfranchising many Hispanic felons. It escaped nobody's attention that in Florida, Hispanic voters tend to support Republicans.
After first denying any systematic problem, state officials declared it an innocent mistake. They told Accenture to match a list of registered voters to a list of felons, flagging anyone whose name, date of birth and race was the same on both lists. They didn't realize, they said, that this would automatically miss felons who identified themselves as Hispanic because that category exists on voter rolls but not in state criminal records.
But employees of a company that prepared earlier felon lists say that they repeatedly warned state election officials about that very problem.
Let's not be coy. Jeb Bush says he won't allow an independent examination of voting machines because he has "every confidence" in his handpicked election officials. Yet those officials have a history of slipshod performance on other matters related to voting and somehow their errors always end up favoring Republicans. Why should anyone trust their verdict on the integrity of voting machines, when another convenient mistake could deliver a Republican victory in a high-stakes national election?
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. Think about what a tainted election would do to America's sense of itself, and its role in the world. In the face of official stonewalling, doubters probably wouldn't be able to prove one way or the other whether the vote count was distorted - but if the result looked suspicious, most of the world and many Americans would believe the worst. I'll write soon about what can be done in the few weeks that remain, but here's a first step: if Governor Bush cares at all about the future of the nation, as well as his family's political fortunes, he will allow that independent audit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/opinion/27krug.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
And Nixon saying "I am not a crook".
carter's comment is comparable to fidel castro preaching that cuba lives in freedom
You is ignorant and extremely biased.
Zit, your so-called non-existent hatred is growing like a huge zit that a bandaid couldn't cover.
Hey eddie, how come no smart azz comment regarding this article??? You find this premise comical????
If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines"
by Thom Hartmann
embedded links*
http://www.mapcruzin.com/news/bush041603a.htm
Maybe Nebraska Republican Chuck Hagel honestly won two US Senate elections. Maybe it's true that the citizens of Georgia simply decided that incumbent Democratic Senator Max Cleland, a wildly popular war veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was, as his successful Republican challenger suggested in his campaign ads, too unpatriotic to remain in the Senate. Maybe George W. Bush, Alabama's new Republican governor Bob Riley, and a small but congressionally decisive handful of other long-shot Republican candidates really did win those states where conventional wisdom and straw polls showed them losing in the last few election cycles.
Perhaps, after a half-century of fine-tuning exit polling to such a science that it's now sometimes used to verify how clean elections are in Third World countries, it really did suddenly become inaccurate in the United States in the past six years and just won't work here anymore. Perhaps it's just a coincidence that the sudden rise of inaccurate exit polls happened around the same time corporate-programmed, computer-controlled, modem-capable voting machines began recording and tabulating ballots.
But if any of this is true, there's not much of a paper trail from the voters' hand to prove it.
You'd think in an open democracy that the government - answerable to all its citizens rather than a handful of corporate officers and stockholders - would program, repair, and control the voting machines. You'd think the computers that handle our cherished ballots would be open and their software and programming available for public scrutiny. You'd think there would be a paper trail of the vote, which could be followed and audited if a there was evidence of voting fraud or if exit polls disagreed with computerized vote counts.
You'd be wrong.
The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill (www.thehill.com/news/012903/hagel.aspx) has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska.
Back when Hagel first ran there for the U.S. Senate in 1996, his company's computer-controlled voting machines showed he'd won stunning upsets in both the primaries and the general election. The Washington Post (1/13/1997) said Hagel's "Senate victory against an incumbent Democratic governor was the major Republican upset in the November election." According to Bev Harris of www.blackboxvoting.com, Hagel won virtually every demographic group, including many largely Black communities that had never before voted Republican. Hagel was the first Republican in 24 years to win a Senate seat in Nebraska.
Six years later Hagel ran again, this time against Democrat Charlie Matulka in 2002, and won in a landslide. As his hagel.senate.gov website says, Hagel "was re-elected to his second term in the United States Senate on November 5, 2002 with 83% of the vote. That represents the biggest political victory in the history of Nebraska."
What Hagel's website fails to disclose is that about 80 percent of those votes were counted by computer-controlled voting machines put in place by the company affiliated with Hagel. Built by that company. Programmed by that company.
"This is a big story, bigger than Watergate ever was," said Hagel's Democratic opponent in the 2002 Senate race, Charlie Matulka (www.lancastercountydemocrats.org/matulka.htm). "They say Hagel shocked the world, but he didn't shock me."
Is Matulka the sore loser the Hagel campaign paints him as, or is he democracy's proverbial canary in the mineshaft?
In Georgia, Democratic incumbent and war-hero Max Cleland was defeated by Saxby Chambliss, who'd avoided service in Vietnam with a "medical deferment" but ran his campaign on the theme that he was more patriotic than Cleland. While many in Georgia expected a big win by Cleland, the computerized voting machines said that Chambliss had won.
The BBC summed up Georgia voters' reaction in a 6 November 2002 headline: "GEORGIA UPSET STUNS DEMOCRATS." The BBC echoed the confusion of many Georgia voters when they wrote, "Mr. Cleland - an army veteran who lost three limbs in a grenade explosion during the Vietnam War - had long been considered 'untouchable' on questions of defense and national security."
Between them, Hagel and Chambliss' victories sealed Republican control of the Senate. Odds are both won fair and square, the American way, using huge piles of corporate money to carpet-bomb voters with television advertising. But either the appearance or the possibility of impropriety in an election casts a shadow over American democracy.
"The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which all other rights are protected," wrote Thomas Paine over 200 years ago. "To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery.."
That slavery, according to Hagel's last opponent Charlie Matulka, is at our doorstep.
"They can take over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."
Taking over our election systems? Is that really possible in the USA?
Bev Harris of www.talion.com and www.blackboxvoting.com has looked into the situation in depth and thinks Matulka may be on to something. The company tied to Hagel even threatened her with legal action when she went public about his company having built the machines that counted his landslide votes. (Her response was to put the law firm's threat letter on her website and send a press release to 4000 editors, inviting them to check it out. (www.blackboxvoting.com/election-systems-software.html)
"I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states," Matulka said in a January 30, 2003 interview. "God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country," he added, "because they leave no paper trail. These corporations are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting machines."
In the meantime, exit-polling organizations have quietly gone out of business, and the news arms of the huge multinational corporations that own our networks are suggesting the days of exit polls are over. Virtually none were reported in 2002, creating an odd and unsettling silence that caused unease for the many American voters who had come to view exit polls as proof of the integrity of their election systems.
As all this comes to light, many citizens and even a few politicians are wondering if it's a good idea for corporations to be so involved in the guts of our voting systems. The whole idea of a democratic republic was to create a common institution (the government itself) owned by its citizens, answerable to its citizens, and authorized to exist and continue existing solely "by the consent of the governed."
Prior to 1886 - when, law schools incorrectly tell law students, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations are "persons" with equal protection and other "human rights" - it was illegal in most states for corporations to involve themselves in politics at all, much less to service the core mechanism of politics. And during the era of Teddy Roosevelt, who said, "There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains," numerous additional laws were passed to restrain corporations from involvement in politics.
Wisconsin, for example, had a law that explicitly stated:
"No corporation doing business in this state shall pay or contribute, or offer consent or agree to pay or contribute, directly or indirectly, any money, property, free service of its officers or employees or thing of value to any political party, organization, committee or individual for any political purpose whatsoever, or for the purpose of influencing legislation of any kind, or to promote or defeat the candidacy of any person for nomination, appointment or election to any political office."
The penalty for violating that law was dissolution of the corporation, and "any officer, employee, agent or attorney or other representative of any corporation, acting for and in behalf of such corporation" would be subject to "imprisonment in the state prison for a period of not less than one nor more than five years" and a substantial fine.
However, the recent political trend has moved us in the opposite direction, with governments answerable to "We, The People" turning over administration of our commons to corporations answerable only to CEOs, boards, and stockholders. The result is the enrichment of corporations and the appearance that democracy in America has started to resemble its parody in banana republics.
But if America still is a democratic republic, then We, The People still own our government. And the way our ownership and management of our common government (and its assets) is asserted is through the vote.
On most levels, privatization is only a "small sin" against democracy. Turning a nation's or community's water, septic, roadway, prisons, airwaves, or health care commons over to private corporations has so far demonstrably degraded the quality of life for average citizens and enriched a few of the most powerful campaign contributors. But it hasn't been the end of democracy (although some wonder about what the FCC is preparing to do - but that's a separate story).
Many citizens believe, however, that turning the programming and maintenance of voting over to private, for-profit corporations, answerable only to their owners, officers, and stockholders, puts democracy itself at peril.
And, argues Charlie Matulka, for a former officer of one of those corporations to then place himself into an election without disclosing such an apparent conflict of interest is to create a parody of democracy.
Perhaps Matulka's been reading too many conspiracy theory tracts. Or maybe he's on to something. We won't know until a truly independent government agency looks into the matter.
When Bev Harris and The Hill's Alexander Bolton pressed the Chief Counsel and Director of the Senate Ethics Committee, the man responsible for ensuring that FEC disclosures are complete, asking him why he'd not questioned Hagel's 1995, 1996, and 2001 failures to disclose the details of his ownership in the company that owned the voting machine company when he ran for the Senate, the Director reportedly met with Hagel's office on Friday, January 25, 2003 and Monday, January 27, 2003. After the second meeting, on the afternoon of January 27th, the Director of the Senate Ethics Committee resigned his job.
Meanwhile, back in Nebraska, Charlie Matulka had requested a hand count of the vote in the election he lost to Hagel. He just learned his request was denied because, he said, Nebraska has a just-passed law that prohibits government-employee election workers from looking at the ballots, even in a recount. The only machines permitted to count votes in Nebraska, he said, are those made and programmed by the corporation formerly run by Hagel.
Matulka shared his news with me, then sighed loud and long on the phone, as if he were watching his children's future evaporate.
"If you want to win the election," he finally said, "just control the machines."
Thom Hartmann is the author of "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights." www.unequalprotection.com This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, or web media so long as this credit is attached.
I have just went through some of your most idiotic posts full of biased dribble, can't see the forest for the trees, childish posts with your 3rd grade sound bites...talk about a total waste...but then y'all 'think' you have somethin' to say....lol...you were lookin' in your ever present mirror admiring yourself as you typed this crap.
just read your own posts as if they were posted by someone else, and then come tell this board about your awesome maturity........you're a joke!!........and a total waste of this board's space
Instead of shooting your mouth off with lies, biased crap and go Cheney yourself attitude while playing stupid little sound bites, YOU try answering a question once. You are getting loonier by the day.
so forget your friggin bias, and answer this..
Hard to warn someone when they know everything, they are the 'A' Team and unwilling to listen, which is the personification of this administration.
bill clinton not only didn't warn an incoming president about the dangers that existed in 99 and 2000,
So now the 'tale' is that Wilson declared that Iraq never tried to buy unranium. Sure am glad to know we went to war if Iraq made any overtures to purchase yellowcake. When should we invade Iran, o' wise one??? Never too many fronts for the U.S.
The tale spun by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson that Iraq did not ever try to buy uranium yellowcake from Niger is now in the process of unraveling.
Hey zit, catching up on some posts and didn't follow the news very closely the past few days...thought you might bring me up to speed on how 'winning the peace' is going. Thanks.
You must be remarking on your comment....and I agree!!
KFC, I'm baaaack.....
Two weeks ago I spent 8 days at the Olympic Swim Trials in Long Beach.
Tell me, Mr. Patriot, which Olympic Trials did you attend???
How many of you Libs will be pulling against the Americans in the Olympics?
ROTFLMAO@U...don't agree with your answers??? What answers??? I have asked you several direct questions which you choose to ignore. You are right: you haven't debunked anything.
Let me ask you a simple one yet again: Why do no republicans speak out with regard to ensuring a fair election that even skeptics would say was such?? Seems simple enough.
By the way, up rather late in SD...pullin' an all nighter??
Goin' to visit the Alamo while conducting some biz...Have a good one all.
LOL......that is just soooooo funny. Keep up the great posts full of cute soundbites and lame thoughts. Your right wing fans say AMEN!!!
And you call yourself a serious person for serious times. As your number one fan would say....
ROTFLMAO@U
LOLOLOL.....
You must eat a lot of toast...Oprah recommend that??
one thing's for sure.......after daschle's statement today, he is toast regarding his re-election
berger took documents regarding the infiltration of al qaeda in america that gwb NEVER SAW, and would have implicated clinton in withholding national security information from an incoming president
How do YOU know what he took??? Talk about bias...
Yeah, and Bush is building quite a legacy, one most sensible Americans hope to soon forget
another chapter in clinton legacy building, except this one backfired bigtime,
May have been a big reason....love your unbiased analysis...
and may have been a big reason why 9-11 happened
It seems....nice choice of words. These documents would have shown...oh really, did you peruse the pilfered papers???
Now this I love:
and for you conspiracy theorists, there is a case that can be made that gwb was not told about al qaeda infiltration in this country exactly because clinton wanted it to happen on gwb's watch, all for political motives.........
Well, if this isn't Mr. Look Under Every Rock for a conspiracy...you got your head so far in ....well, the sand. Clinton wanted this to happen...but you are the epitomy of clear and unbiased thinking....and oozing hate.
oh, how history repeats itself!
So, lemme see here. You are comparing that right wing, Nixon approved break-in to the Democratic headquarters with Berger taking some papers that only you know what they were.
You are a bonafide head case
ROTFLMAO@U...Of the many questions posed to you, you have been sorely lacking in debunking much of anything other than your inability to articulate much of substance.
YALLAD (yet another lefty lame argument dismissed)
DU is less of a health concern than cell phones causing brain tumors...
A citizens' tribunal Saturday in Tokyo found U.S. President George W. Bush guilty of war crimes for attacking civilians with indiscriminate weapons and other arms during the U.S.-led antiterrorism operations in Afghanistan in 2001.
The tribunal also issued recommendations for banning depleted uranium shells and other weapons that could indiscriminately harm people, compensating the victims in Afghanistan and reforming the United Nations in light of its failure to stop the U.S.-led operation there.
ROTFLMAO@U
Ah yes, our self-serving, oh-so-humble-in-so-many-ways, devoid of hate, know-it-all flaming hypocrite, hit it right on the head.
.......there's an old market adage...."it's not what they say, it's what they do"
Yes, indeed...
"He's very compassionate," says Chris, an intelligent man who's open-minded enough to make listening to liberals a sort of hobby. "If you look at the way he's bucked the far right: I mean, $15 billion for AIDS in Africa!" He speaks at the church services of blacks, and "you don't fake that. That's not just a photo op."
Of course, two years after Bush made his pledge, only 2 percent of the AIDS money has been distributed (in any event, it will mainly go to drug companies). And appearing earnest in the presence of African Americans has been a documented Bush strategy for wooing moderate voters since the beginning.
That is the faux watching the rooster coop.
Texas grand jury investigates Halliburton
Huh???? Maybe you should sneak a second look.
The last time I looked, the deficit was shrinking! And it will keep on shrinking from all the revenue the tax cuts are generating!
Dang liberal biased media...
Ah, the channel of choice in our family forever, or so it seems, is now the target of those who control or own virtually all commercial radio, television and print outlets. Yup! Not Barney or the Muppets or Kermit anymore. Now it is former Congressman Newt Gingrich, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Wall Street Journal's Paul Gigot.
Not satisfied to have "unfair and unbalanced" Fox News on TV; talk radio dominated by Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Sykes and Mark Belling; and newspaper chains that are more interested in packaging advertising supplements than reporting the news, the right wing is taking over PBS. They have decided that they cannot eliminate public television and radio - despite years of trying - so now they are dead set on controlling the programming.
I hope Oscar the Grouch kicks there azzzzz....
Dang, must be an election coming up!!!!!
Eager to sign his fourth tax cut in as many years, President Bush is pushing congressional leaders to extend a series of middle-class tax cuts before Congress's planned adjournment at the end of the week.
Too late, Bush already has!!
And that dumb F**k Kerry will bring this country to it's knees!
Interesting choice of word. So, was that Amen to:
in case you didn't know, our country is a constitutional republic based on democratic principles.......
or the smell or varmint poontang???
Could??? Spree, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow you can best believe an electronic voting system that lacks a paper trail will be hacked. But you do notice nary a word from the elite here that grace us poor lost sheep.
And regarding our zitless wonder and his continual rant of liberal bias, Hardball had a long opening piece on Berger. I guess when one has evolved where hate can no longer exist within self-righteous paranoia fills the void.
"Oh Lord, it is hard to be humble..."
Dime how does one do a recount on an electronic voting machine, although here in NY we have machines that we manually pull the lever, we get no paper record of our vote, so if someone tampers with the machine it is the same thing as the electronic one, but I see the concern with the electronic ones, a person could hack into them
easy, while I agree with what you are saying what I find most disturbing is not what our young people don't see (can't fault them for being young) but what our adult citizens choose not to see. Generally speaking, the farther one leans to the right the less they truly care about democracy and the more important 'party' becomes. They ignore all questions of relevance regarding such matters while shrilly looking under every rock for bias which of course can only mean ONE thing: liberal bias.
They would be most content with one party rule AS LONG AS IT IS THEIR PARTY. Carving up Texas for one party rule: great idea AS LONG AS IT IS THEIR PARTY. Implementing safeguards to ensure a democratic election: not a chance if it might cost THEIR PARTY the election, so they remain mute while THEIR PARTY does it's very best to defeat ANY such reform. Then, to top it off, they accuse the other party of being hypocrites. All the while cloaking themselves in God and Flag.
I'll say it again: bin Laden is hoping for Bush's election.
The Arabian Candidate
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 20, 2004
In the original version of "The Manchurian Candidate," Senator John Iselin, whom Chinese agents are plotting to put in the White House, is a right-wing demagogue modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy. As Roger Ebert wrote, the plan is to "use anticommunist hysteria as a cover for a communist takeover."
The movie doesn't say what Iselin would have done if the plot had succeeded. Presumably, however, he wouldn't have openly turned traitor. Instead, he would have used his position to undermine national security, while posing as America's staunchest defender against communist evil.
So let's imagine an update - not the remake with Denzel Washington, which I haven't seen, but my own version. This time the enemies would be Islamic fanatics, who install as their puppet president a demagogue who poses as the nation's defender against terrorist evildoers.
The Arabian candidate wouldn't openly help terrorists. Instead, he would serve their cause while pretending to be their enemy.
After an attack, he would strike back at the terrorist base, a necessary action to preserve his image of toughness, but botch the follow-up, allowing the terrorist leaders to escape. Once the public's attention shifted, he would systematically squander the military victory: committing too few soldiers, reneging on promises of economic aid. Soon, warlords would once again rule most of the country, the heroin trade would be booming, and terrorist allies would make a comeback.
Meanwhile, he would lead America into a war against a country that posed no imminent threat. He would insinuate, without saying anything literally false, that it was somehow responsible for the terrorist attack. This unnecessary war would alienate our allies and tie down a large part of our military. At the same time, the Arabian candidate would neglect the pursuit of those who attacked us, and do nothing about regimes that really shelter anti-American terrorists and really are building nuclear weapons.
Again, he would take care to squander a military victory. The Arabian candidate and his co-conspirators would block all planning for the war's aftermath; they would arrange for our army to allow looters to destroy much of the country's infrastructure. Then they would disband the defeated regime's army, turning hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers into disgruntled potential insurgents.
After this it would be easy to sabotage the occupied country's reconstruction, simply by failing to spend aid funds or rein in cronyism and corruption. Power outages, overflowing sewage and unemployment would swell the ranks of our enemies.
Who knows? The Arabian candidate might even be able to deprive America of the moral high ground, no mean trick when our enemies are mass murderers, by creating a climate in which U.S. guards torture, humiliate and starve prisoners, most of them innocent or guilty of only petty crimes.
At home, the Arabian candidate would leave the nation vulnerable, doing almost nothing to secure ports, chemical plants and other potential targets. He would stonewall investigations into why the initial terrorist attack succeeded. And by repeatedly issuing vague terror warnings obviously timed to drown out unfavorable political news, his officials would ensure public indifference if and when a real threat is announced.
Last but not least, by blatantly exploiting the terrorist threat for personal political gain, he would undermine the nation's unity in the face of its enemies, sowing suspicion about the government's motives.
O.K., end of conceit. President Bush isn't actually an Al Qaeda mole, with Dick Cheney his controller. Mr. Bush's "war on terror" has, however, played with eerie perfection into Osama bin Laden's hands - while Mr. Bush's supporters, impressed by his tough talk, see him as America's champion against the evildoers.
Last week, Republican officials in Kentucky applauded bumper stickers distributed at G.O.P. offices that read, "Kerry is bin Laden's man/Bush is mine." Administration officials haven't gone that far, but when Tom Ridge offered a specifics-free warning about a terrorist attack timed to "disrupt our democratic process," many people thought he was implying that Al Qaeda wants George Bush to lose. In reality, all infidels probably look alike to the terrorists, but if they do have a preference, nothing in Mr. Bush's record would make them unhappy at the prospect of four more years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/opinion/20krug.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Just how is Edwards a hypocrite?? Is it utilizing an available and legal tax break/shelter??
Sure do and all the right wingers with their professed love of democracy were outraged and having a field day poking fun at the Dems. But no matter as long as it is the 'right' party.
Hey you hypocrites, another great day for democracy, huh?? Bet you can't wait for a paperless electronic voting machine in your 'hood. Shoot, save yourself some time and just let Diebold vote for you!!
Yeah, easy, yet I can't find this mentioned on the liberal biased media that is on everrrry channel 24/7. Hmmm, wonder if 'fair and balanced' is covering this??? Nahhh, no way.
But to the music of 'This is how we do it', once again Bush does his thing by cutting funds to an agency/watch dog to ensure the desired results while often times (not in this case) stating the exact opposite. I think our resident hypocrite said it best: ...."it's not what they say, it's what they do"
Imagine the outrage from said hypocrite and friends if this situation were completely reversed. Once again, y'all's love for democracy is greatly exceeded by your love for your party.
The Bush Administration has stacked the Election Assistance Commission with supporters of paperless voting technology, while the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) got walloped with a $22 million budget cut in fiscal 2004, which means that NIST will have to cut back substantially on its cyber security work, as well as completely stop all work on voting technology for the Help America Vote Act.
With no mandatory federal standards or certification in place and no funding available, the Bush Administration and Republican-controlled Congress have ensured that their friends in the elections industry maintain control of voting technology and, in effect, election results.
Well, easy, I have yet to come across a Republican (and I have tried) who has voiced concern about potential and likely abuses in electronic voting at some time and the ability to ensure a fair election...and recount the vote, if necessary, with an accurate paper trail....
recent survey by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) showed that 77% of registered voters are not concerned about the security of e-voting systems
I wonder who in the hell they surveyed?? The Neo's? HA
Secrecy Is the CIA's Stock in Trade, and the Agency's Hidden Weakness
Reforming the internal culture is key to healing a broken system
By William M. Arkin,
SOUTH POMFRET, VT. — By now, almost everyone knows that the CIA is a mess. Almost everyone knows that what it needs is a top-to-bottom overhaul. Almost everyone is wrong.
What the CIA and the competing baronies that make up the rest of the intelligence community actually need is quite simple: They need to turn on the lights. And take a few names. Strange as it may sound, what's killing our secret intelligence services is secrecy. That and a lack of personal accountability. Even the most dedicated people can't do good work when they're sitting in the dark. And though we don't always like it, most of us work better if we get some outside input — and if we know we'll be held accountable for our results.
Without question, the intelligence community needs fixing. It has produced fumbles so catastrophic that they might have been laughable if they hadn't cost so many lives. Just on the issue of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction — a major justification for the ill-starred U.S. invasion of Iraq — the Senate Intelligence Committee last week issued a 511-page chronicle of such wrongheaded, slipshod, unprofessional work that the CIA has forfeited any claim to authority or competence. And the agency's defense of itself just compounded the embarrassment: It didn't get everything wrong, acting Director John McLaughlin said. And where it was wrong, he added, so was almost everybody else.
Unfortunately, the debate over reforming the CIA seems to be going off track. This being a presidential election year, Democrats and Republicans are of course blaming each other. The Bush administration pressured the intelligence community into providing a National Intelligence Estimate that validated its personal and ideological preconceptions, say the liberals. On the contrary, say the conservatives, the intelligence community is simply hogtied by outmoded rules and restrictions imposed by previous Democratic administrations. In the meantime, the policy professionals have plunged into a welter of complex proposals for restructuring the whole intelligence apparatus. Nothing makes Washington's policy wonks more comfortable than rearranging an organization chart.
No doubt some of the proposed reforms might make the intelligence community work better, but they miss the fundamental point: No amount of structural reform will have much effect unless the CIA changes an internal culture so obsessed with secrecy that it smothers its own best efforts. Nor will reform take permanent root without the principle of personal accountability. It may seem counterintuitive that a secret intelligence agency can suffer from too much secrecy. But that is exactly the case with the CIA. Boiled down to essentials, what the Senate Intelligence Committee — and the nonpartisan 9/11 commission before it — found was the CIA has become so addicted to a culture of secrecy that it is largely unable to operate in the real world. The agency's obsession with secrecy has also made it so insular that it is often unable or unwilling to reach out for help from outside experts.
In the run-up to Iraq, the Senate and House intelligence committees found, the leaders of the intelligence community failed to "adequately supervise the work of their analysts and collectors." Secrecy was so out of control that even CIA analysts with full security clearances were routinely denied access to crucial information by others in the agency. As for its cooperation with other agencies, the CIA — even after the 9/11 communications failures — refused to share everything it knew with outsiders, even those within the U.S. intelligence community. All governments must protect their internal security from outside penetration. But refusing to trust members of your own family is paranoia — not tight security. And it's axiomatic that what makes good intelligence analysis is unfettered consideration of every aspect of every issue from as many points of view as possible. The more eyes and voices, the better.
As for personal accountability, it's the elephant at the party no one wants to talk about. Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, who presided over the recent disasters, has departed for "personal" reasons, accompanied by kind words from the president. As he left, Tenet urged CIA colleagues to ignore outside criticism.
He needn't have worried. Washington seems disinclined to blame anybody in particular. Instead, what seems to be developing is a bipartisan consensus that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community need reorganization, plus an even more powerful director of central intelligence as well as new covert-action and domestic-intelligence agencies.
But what we need now is not a time-consuming and distracting renovation, but rather some simple measures aimed at forcing a change in CIA culture. The CIA's budget needs to be open to scrutiny, as do its organizational charts. We need to make public more of the analysis performed by staff members so that if the agency is failing to consider crucial information — as it apparently did when the United Nations failed to find banned weapons in Iraq — someone on the outside could ask why.
Real secrets, ones with a reason to be kept, can be concealed even in the midst of open debate. In fact, greater openness and the elimination of habitual and abusive secrecy will only strengthen the sanctity of real secrets.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-arkin18jul18,1,4531520.story
How the Left Lost Its Heart
Now, the working class has no true champion
By Thomas Frank, Thomas Frank is editor of the Baffler magazine and author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" This article was adapted from that book by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt a
WASHINGTON — That our politics have been shifting rightward for more than 30 years is a generally acknowledged fact of American life. That this movement has largely been brought about by working-class voters whose lives have been materially worsened by the conservative policies they have supported is less commented upon.
And yet the trend is apparent, from the "hard hats" of the 1960s to the "Reagan Democrats" of the 1980s to today's mad-as-hell "red states." You can see the paradox firsthand on nearly any Main Street in Middle America, where "going out of business" signs stand side by side with placards supporting George W. Bush.
I chose to observe the phenomenon by going back to my home state of Kansas, a place that has been particularly ill served by the conservative policies of privatization, deregulation and deunionization — and that has reacted to its worsening situation by becoming more conservative still. Indeed, Kansas is today the site of a ferocious struggle within the Republican Party, a fight pitting affluent moderate Republicans against conservatives from working-class districts and down-market churches. And it's hard not to feel some affection for the conservative faction, even as I deplore its political views. After all, these are the people that liberalism is supposed to speak to: the hard-luck farmers, the bitter factory workers, the outsiders, the disenfranchised, the disreputable.
Although Kansas voters have chosen self-destructive policies, it is clear that liberalism deserves a large part of the blame for the backlash phenomenon. Liberalism may not be the monstrous, all-powerful conspiracy that conservatives make it out to be, but its failings are clear nonetheless. Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and liberalism just as surely lost places like Wichita and Shawnee as much as conservatism won them over.
This is due partly, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council, the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far outweighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and — more important — the money of these coveted constituencies, "New Democrats" think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation and the rest of it.
Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for the working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on bread-and-butter economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshiping country really wants to be the voice of poor people? Where's the soft money in that?
This is, in drastic miniature, the criminally stupid strategy that has dominated Democratic thinking off and on ever since the "New Politics" days of the early '70s. Over the years it has enjoyed a few successes, but, as political writer E.J. Dionne has pointed out, the larger result was that both parties have become "vehicles for upper-middle-class interests" and the old class-based language of the left quickly disappeared from the universe of the respectable. The Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters — their traditional base — the big brushoff, ousting their representatives from positions within the party and consigning their issues, with a laugh and a sneer, to the dustbin of history. A more ruinous strategy for Democrats would be difficult to invent. And the ruination just keeps on coming.
Curiously, though, Democrats of the DLC variety aren't worried. They seem to look forward to a day when their party really is what David Brooks and Ann Coulter claim it to be now: a coming-together of the rich and the self-righteous. While Republicans trick out their poisonous stereotype of the liberal elite, Democrats seem determined to live up to the libel.
Such Democrats look at a situation like present-day Kansas, where social conservatives war ferociously on moderate Republicans, and they rub their hands with anticipation: Just look at how Ronald Reagan's "social issues" have come back to bite his party! If only the crazy Cons push a little bit more, these Democrats think, the Republican Party will alienate the wealthy suburban Mods for good, and we will be able to step in and carry places like superaffluent Mission Hills, along with all the juicy boodle that its inhabitants are capable of throwing our way.
Though I enjoy watching Republicans fight one another as much as the next guy, I don't think the Kansas story really gives true liberals any cause to cheer. Maybe someday the DLC dream will come to pass, with the Democrats having moved so far to the right that they are no different from old-fashioned moderate Republicans, and maybe then the affluent will finally come over to their side en masse. But along the way the things that liberalism once stood for — equality and economic security — will have been abandoned completely. Consequently, at precisely the historical moment when we need them most, Democrats no longer speak to the people on the losing end of a free-market system that is becoming more brutal and more arrogant by the day.
The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school-prayer; it's that, by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans, they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion. We are in an environment where Republicans talk constantly about class — in a coded way, to be sure — but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.
Democratic political strategy simply assumes that people know where their economic interest lies and that they will act on it by instinct. The glaring flaw in this thinking is that people don't spontaneously understand their situation in the great sweep of things. Liberalism isn't a force of karmic nature that pushes back when the corporate world goes too far; it is a man-made contrivance as subject to setbacks and defeats as any other.
Consider our social welfare apparatus, the system of taxes, regulations and social insurance that is under attack these days. Social Security, the Food and Drug Administration and all the rest of it didn't just spring out of the ground fully formed in response to the obvious excesses of a laissez-faire system; they were the result of decades of movement-building, of bloody fights between strikers and state militias, of agitating, educating and thankless organizing.
More than 40 years passed between the first glimmerings of a left-wing reform movement in the 1890s and the actual enactment of its reforms in the 1930s. In the meantime, scores of the most rapacious species of robber baron went to their reward untaxed, unregulated and unquestioned.
Today, while liberals sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right has embraced the task of building a movement that speaks to those at society's bottom, that addresses them on a daily basis. From liberals, the nation's working class hears little, but from the conservatives it gets an explanation for everything. Even better, it gets a plan for action, a scheme for world conquest with a wedge issue.
My home state has proudly taken a place at the front of the pack in the common man's rush to conservatism. It is true that Kansas is an extreme case, and that there are still working-class areas there that are yet to be converted to conservatism. But it is also true that things that begin in Kansas — the Civil War, Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut — have a historical tendency to go national.
So maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is in the vanguard. Maybe what has happened there points the way in which all our public policy debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political choices of Americans everywhere will be whittled down to the two factions of the Republican Party.
Sociologists often warn against letting the nation's distribution of wealth become too polarized, as it clearly has in the last few decades. A society that turns its back on equality, the professors insist, inevitably meets with a terrible comeuppance. But those sociologists are thinking of an old world in which class anger was a phenomenon of the left. They weren't reckoning with Kansas, with the world we are becoming.
Behold the political alignment that Kansas is pioneering for us all. The state watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year. Kansas aches for revenge. Kansas gloats when celebrities say stupid things; it cheers when movie stars go to jail. And when two female pop stars exchange a lascivious kiss on national TV, Kansas goes haywire. Kansas screams for the heads of the liberal elite. Kansas runs to the polling place. And Kansas cuts those pop stars' taxes.
As a social system, the backlash works. The two adversaries feed off each other in a kind of inverted symbiosis: One mocks the other, and the other heaps even more power on the mocker. This arrangement should be the envy of every ruling class in the world. Not only can it be pushed much, much further, but it is fairly certain that it will be so pushed. All the incentives point that way, as do the never-examined cultural requirements of modern capitalism.
Why shouldn't our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-frank18jul18,1,3286333.story
some would say the crappy market of the past three years has no correlation with a budget busting administration that is keeping the exploding deficit under wraps (as best they can) until after the election. some would say there is no correlation with the policies of this administration and a weak dollar and some would even say a weak dollar is good. some would say there is no correlation with a wimpy economic recovery and a weak stock market regardless what some watered down mickey d's manufacturing jobs report says.
some would say there is no correlation with a massive war effort in a country of dubious value on the pretext of the war on terror and a growing feeling our country is being led down the wrong path.
some would say there is no correlation with an economic policy that cuts taxes for the rich, cuts them again and then yet again while shifting the burden to the middle class and a party that spends like no tomorrow all the while calling themselves fiscally responsible. But then, the market in its infinite wisdom, reflects "it's not what they say, it's what they do".
Sorry KFC, not into chickenhawks, but when I return to New Orleans one day, we can meet if you are so inclined. Gonna check out the Alamo later this week so y'all will have to do without me. Try to be good and not Cheney yourselves.
And speaking of confederate currency of which our dollar is fast becoming, I would think you'd feel right at home.
Great points, zit:
being prepared breeds confidence............perhaps if you actually read things to understand, you'd know that feeling
and this:
you may mistake my confidence for arrogance, but your arrogance through ignorance is deadly to the soul
I do believe you are addressing our president!!!
Easy, zithead already stated he learns nothing from his pastor's sermons. That pretty much sums up the person.
My Foster Farm Reject: It is OUR dollar that isn't worth anything (look at a chart of our dollar vs. canadian dollar since Bush has been in office) and regarding Bush's focus, I will say he is quite focused as he attempts to get that square peg of defeating terrorism in that round hole of Iraq.