Rants

By Scott Swenson-on Huffpo
A McCain supporter at a Friday rally said he was \"scared of an Obama presidency\", linking Obama \"hanging around with Ayers\" to \"who he will choose for the Supreme Court.\" Two lies, about Ayers and about the Supreme Court, fueled by a Culture of Lies now fomenting rage.

McCain replied to the man saying Obama is \"a good and decent person and you do not have to be sacred of him being President of the United States.\"
On Saturday Gov. Sarah Palin was proving that the huge crowds are mostly interested in extreme right-wing abortion politics by tossing the crowds some red meat, and more lies about abortion. Palin said a vote for Obama is \"a vote for activist courts that will continue to smother the open and democratic debate that we deserve and that we need on this issue of life.\" She also misstated Obama's statements and positions on a range of abortion issues.

These are the lies that, because they connect to a core belief for so many, allow all the other lies to to take root and drive the anger and rage we now see on display.

McCain once welcomed the enthusiastic crowds to his lackluster campaign, a result of his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as running mate. Palin swept the far-right, anti-choice, extremists off their feet, creating a political phenomenon -- the Palinistas. She even seduced a few independents for a week or two, with her coy and carefully crafted banter.

What a difference a month makes. Rabid crowds now demand blood, and a bi-partisan report from Alaska confirms Palin is guilty of an \"abuse of power\". We should all pray for calm given that angry mobs amped up on lies, in the midst of global economic crisis, led by people comfortable abusing power, make for a volatile mix.

After only a few interviews with journalists Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, America has learned how woefully uninformed and unqualified Palin is, sending her poll numbers in a decline as steep as Wall Street, and explaining why Palin is a shero to the crowds of rabidly uninformed people \"scared\" about the Supreme Court. They are scared about the Supreme Court because of lies they have been told by the anti-choice extremists about sexual and reproductive health for a generation. They are scared because of lies about abstinence-only actually working, lies about what comprehensive sex ed is, lies about gay people, lies about condoms and contraception, lies about why women choose abortion, lies about abortion causing breast cancer, lies about \"post-abortion syndrome\", lies about late-term abortions, and lies about infanticide. All of these and more far-right myths are based on lies that motivate the same extremism and rage we see on display by the Palinistas now.

If you get people to believe lies about the most fundamental aspects of human nature, it is easier to get them to believe lies about political associations.

They have created a Culture of Lies designed to take over the Supreme Court and impose their narrow and extreme ideologies on every American, and their rage is growing as they, for the first time, realize that most Americans do not agree with their narrow values, that the Supreme Court is slipping from their grasp.

They believed the lies, and like an economy built on lies, political ideology built on lies is now tumbling before our eyes.

These lies show up in email forwards, videos, TV ads, and on talk radio and Faux News long before people start parroting them back to candidates at rallies. Seeing the lies come full circle, forcing McCain to address them, is rare indeed.

We now know that this Culture of Lies leads to \"abuses of power\" by Palin just as it did with ethically challenged, abstinence-only lobbyists and profiteers who now use money they made from the taxpayers to tell more lies about abortion. It's nothing new, this fundamental lack of respect and civility is what too many women face every day, what too many gay people have been beaten and died for, what too many people of color have bled and starved for. This Culture of Lies turned neighbor against neighbor, caused parents to turn their backs on gay children, delayed smart public health strategies based on medical science in the fight against HIV/AIDS -- and continues to do so 27 years into the pandemic -- all these lies in the name of \"traditional family values.\" All these lies in the name of Jesus Christ.

Forgive them.

Conservative, Catholic, Republican, pro-life, legal scholars are distancing themselves from these extremists, calling for a change in the dialogue around sexual and reproductive health, a hopeful sign. Other conservative writers are distancing themselves from Palin herself, while some are trying to say it's not her, it's the economy, that has caused the reversal in the polls, that she would still be a star if it weren't for the economy. More lies. Dangerous lies. Economic crisis is no time to foment anger and resentment based on ideology. Palin should accept personal responsibility for her abuse of power and McCain should accept personal responsibility for his lapse in judgment selecting her -- those bad decisions should not be compounded with myths and lies that their decline in the polls is only about the economy.

It will take a while for people to work their way back from the lies, and important for us all to distinguish between those who are genuinely pro-life, as an article of personal faith, and others who are anti-choice as a means to pursue partisan power and control over the decisions and lives of others.

McCain is being publicly humiliated by these \"agents of intolerance\", again. The first time was when he was the target of their lies and rage in 2000.

Humiliation is what these people do, it is who they are. They attempt to humiliate women at clinics. They \"abuse power\" at the Department of Health and Human Services using ideological lies and pseudo-science to justify making contraception inaccessible, if not illegal. These same extremists who have been directly responsible for bombings at clinics and murdering physicians, bashing gays and stoking racism, and are now so out of control that their own presidential candidate has to try to contain their rage; to prevent rallies from becoming riots.

I once wrote that the way McCain could exact his revenge on these \"agents of intolerance\" was to select a pro-choice running mate, as he wanted to do, with either Sen. Joe Lieberman or Gov. Tom Ridge, appealing to centrists that overwhelmingly support a pro-education, pro-prevention, pro-choice agenda.

Boy was I wrong.

The way McCain appears to be destroying the far-right, extremist, anti-choice movement, is by selecting one of their own, making her famous. We know her name. We see the crowds she hangs out with, and how she governs. Palin is an anti-choice shero, the personification of all their aspirations of power, their political manipulations, their Culture of Lies.

Maybe McCain has found his last ounce of maverick, and perhaps because of his long distinguished service to this country, his last act of patriotism for the country he loves is exposing extremist elements and making Americans more aware of how this Culture of Lies has taken root.

We'll see if that John McCain shows up consistently in the final weeks of the campaign.

We all know McCain has sold his soul to win. Big mistake: the Democrats are taking the GOP bait, especially on Palin. She is the ultimate distraction. If we're not careful she'll be the final distraction. The perfect new celebrity -- Sarah Barracuda -- to capture the message in the 24-hour spin orgy, all the while attacking Obama as an elite celebrity. Any narrative that focuses on her -- any -- is a win for Republicans, carrying an undercurrent of race wars, gender wars, class wars. All ending with a debate on God and a return visit to Rev. Wright.
Palin is a gateway drug to a back-alley brawl Obama can't win. A Joseph Conrad-produced reality show/sitcom with Palin replacing Roseanne Barr fighting for the little guy with sass and sex. Wonderful.

Watch McCain repeat \"maverick\" 300 times a day, like a mantra, 'til Election Day. Republicans and hockey moms against corruption and Lear jets. Orwell for second graders: distraction and chaos, phony scandals and bullshit patriotics from the crew that would install an inexperienced neophyte -- not even put through the crucible of the national stage -- a heartbeat away from the greatest nuclear arsenal the world has ever known, and not blink. Darkest reptilian politics that speak to the ultimate calcified cynicism of Republicans.

Democrats need to ignore her -- unless she speaks about policy -- maybe she can explain and solve the collapsing world markets -- and keep the focus relentlessly on the disastrous results of Bush/McCain/Republican rule. They need to remind voters of the disasters of the last seven-plus years. Specifically. And as people have been saying, we need to be mad as well as inspired.

John McCain is the Republican Party as much as Bush -- we need to be constantly reminded of the policies (and, yes, the crimes) that are threatening this country from within.

Obama must hit Republicans ten times harder. Let's hear about war profiteering, taxpayer-funded mercenary armies and privatizing core functions of state, habeas corpus and warrantless wiretapping and presidential signing statements, and Katrina and justice department politicization, and phony intel and Abu Ghraib, rendition and torture.

If the Democratic leadership wants to disregard its base and continue to disregard the rule of law, they deserve to lose...and will. Let's hope the Obama campaign doesn't come to this conclusion 10 days out. He needs to articulate his vision of the future, but he also needs to articulate a version of reality. The fiercest urgency is needed now.

But some other fundamentals seem to be lost in the frenzy. McCain is no maverick, but it is worth understanding why the rabid right wing is cheering his call for government \"reform\" and to change \"how government works at every level.\"

McCain won't just be more of the same -- it will be worse than Bush-Cheney -- using the disasters of the past eight years and the actual crises we face to double down on the American Enterprise/Heritage Foundation vision of government that desires, as Grover Norquist said, to shrink government until \"we can drown it in a bathtub.\"

I would recommend a return visit to the groundbreaking Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein.

McCain, who said he knows nothing about economics, will surely hand over the reins to the Friedmanites and neoconservatives who have sent the country on a path to ruin. Anyone looking at his team could tell you that. Palin and the interests she represents are even further to the right.

Now, no one in their right mind -- including reasonable independents and Republicans -- wants to double down on neocon ideology, but here comes the \"maverick\" and his economic advisers to use the crises we face to implement more \"change\" and \"reform\" to the system by privatizing everything in sight. Is this what the American people want? When they are aware of it, the answer is always no. It's the same bullshit re-branded.

It may happen in a shock therapy in the first 100 days, or financial chaos may force them to wait until things stabilize, but sooner or later they will follow their fundamentalist creed. Ruin the government you are purporting to run and turn it over to privatization frenzy, creating a shadow government of private corporate rule. That's the whole idea.

So let's brand bust this maverick gibberish but understand the coded language that belies their true mission... we should take them at the true meaning of their words.

Not just more of the same -- worse than the same. Times of crisis are great opportunities to implement the radical agendas we usually reject.

That's also the idea.

McCain and the neocon ideologues won't \"reform\" government, they will gut government and privatize everything in sight in the name of responding to the crises they helped engineer through Bush and Cheney. Their view of government is the reverse of the Hippocratic Oath: do harm and then when the patient is sick, give the wrong medicine, watch him die, and sell off the body parts.

They will destroy the Department of Energy, HUD and anything else they can get their hands on. With this crew, all you need to do is destroy government, privatize it and get out of the way, and then a magic utopia appears. Well, actually it doesn't, but a lot of connected people get rich, and in the privatized war business, blood money flows and a fuck of a lot of innocent people die. The numbers and the misery are staggering. The legacy of Bush/McCain is a legacy of shame. Any man that stood with this criminal administration should be forced to answer for it.

The Republicans have been ruinous and most of it stems from an ideology that leaves the government in ruins. McCain has been on board hook, line and sinker. He voted with Bush over 90% of the time. End of story.

It is fundamentally corrupt and dishonest to call it reform when leaders want to cripple government, then hand it over to private industry, usually subsidized by taxpayers, but for other people's profits. More like contempt for government.

Red meat for dummies... a horror show for the rest of us.

Obama needs to explain to the country what this will cost us in real terms -- however many billions a day in Iraq and what that could buy, repair, fix, and allow in human terms -- ask us if can we afford it, and Obama must -- to use imagery the neocons can understand -- knock them down, put his boots on their throats, and never let up.

I’ve been ignoring this blog (let’s be serious, that’s what it is) for the last year, which has been a real error on my part since this is such an interesting year. While contributing to other people’s much bigger blogs, I am recommitting myself to keeping this thing more up to date. I realize that with our small Idaho band following, with even fewer of those fans even giving a rat’s ass about political stuff, this really doesn’t get read that much, other than by nosey family members who want to keep tabs on my crazy pinko commie paradigm. So be it. The most right-wing of that group don’t know how to use the internet anyway. Maybe that’s why they’re voting for McSame. It would appear that the post-convention/Palin bounce for the GOP is over. Gallup just released a poll showing Obama gaining back 2 points of what he lost to it. I had a feeling it would happen. She’s had to open her mouth too much. Plus it doesn’t help that the deregulation of Wall Street by the GOP over the last 30 years has lead to the all out disaster that’s occurring right now. Even McCain is changing his tune, because he knows if he doesn’t, he won’t stand a chance of getting elected. With the economy being this bad, and the Republicans being in denial about it as much as they are, I don’t think he does anyway. It’ll be 1992 after Reagan and Bush 41 all over again.
What I don’t get is how the damn thing is so close. 49%-47% as of the most recent Gallup? What the hell is wrong with you people? Too much Faux News? Too much Limbaugh on the radio? Bush’s approval is at a record low, McCain has shown NO indication of running things any differently, and he chose Bush-in-lipstick as his running mate. And the race is still this close? Pundits on both sides are making the same observation-it should be a blow out for Obama. So why isn’t it?
Bob Cesca had a great piece on Huffington Post yesterday as to why it is this way. Basically, yeah, it is because of Fox, Limbaugh, Beck, and the rest of these racist bigots who a good portion of this great state listen to religiously for hours every day. I’m sorry guys, but don’t you think that’s a little unhealthy? Maybe not the best way to get a balanced view of the world? Talk to any of these right wingers. They’ll quote you verses from Jerome Corsi’s round two of swift-boating in his latest anti-Obama book. They believe the crap no one in their right mind believes-that Obama is a secret Muslim Manchurian candidate who hates America. Oh, and he’s black. That right there’s enough for most of them. They’d overlook it if Alan Keyes were somehow able to be taken seriously at all and rise to a government position, but for a candidate with a D by his name, that’s all they have to see. This propaganda has infected our national discourse and turned the conservative movement into a fear based, constitution shredding joke. Contrary to what they accuse, I DO love this country. I’m used to them calling me and everyone that is left of their far-right beliefs unpatriotic, but it doesn’t mean I’m not sick of it. But I have hope that while many Americans are stupid enough to be duped, time and again, into voting against their interests, the vast majority of them are in line with the most progressive issues. 2/3rds of the country want full on Universal Health Care. 80% are against the war in Iraq now. I haven’t seen any recent polls, but I’d guess a similar percentage now supports more regulation of Wall Street. For being against social programs, those rich Republicans sure love a government bailout when they’re on the receiving end.
What I’m saying is, like civil rights, women’s suffrage, and all other progressive issues before now, things are moving in the right (or left) direction. I’ve heard a lot of kicking and screaming lately from those GOPers I know and love. It always happens around election season. They get their knickers all in a bunch when I write a simple letter to the editor pointing out the local paper’s blatant right wing slant outside of its editorial page. But I think their real fear is that they got comfortable with the idea of that whole “permanent Republican majority” BS that Karl Rove had thought he mastered. It was a myth, and they’re now seeing that. I’m not saying the pendulum will not swing back if it got too far left. But they need to realize that their hard right positions are the minority. And if this proves to hold as a true democracy, that just won’t fly.

You guys want a new rant? Here ya go.
I’m a little confused. Let me see if I have this straight…..

If you grow up in Hawaii , raised by your grandparents, you’re “exotic, different.”

Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers: a quintessential American story.

If your name is Barack you’re a radical, unpatriotic Muslim.

Name your kids Willow , Trig, and Track: you’re a maverick.

Graduate from Harvard law School and you are unstable.

Attend 5 different small colleges before graduating: you’re well grounded.

If you spend 3 years as a community organizer, become the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, create a voter registration drive that registers 150,000 new voters, spend 12 years as a Constitutional Law professor, spend 8 years as a State Senator representing a district with over 750,000 people, become chairman of the state Senate’s Health and Human Services committee, spend 4 years in the United States Senate representing a state of 13 million people while sponsoring 131 bills and serving on the Foreign Affairs, Environment and Public Works and Veteran’s Affairs committees, you don’t have any real leadership experience.

If your total resume is: local weather girl (sports caster), 4 years on the city council and 6 years as the mayor of a town with fewer than 7,000 people, 20 months as the governor of a state with fewer than 650,000 people, then you’re qualified to become the country’s second highest ranking executive.

If you have been married to the same woman for 19 years while raising 2 beautiful daughters, all within Protestant churches, you’re not a real Christian.

If you cheated on your first wife with a rich heiress, and left your disfigured wife and married the heiress the next month, you’re a Christian.

If you teach responsible, age appropriate sex education, including the proper use of birth control, you are eroding the fiber of society.

If , while governor, you staunchly advocate abstinence only, with no other option in sex education in your state’s school system while your unwed teen daughter ends up pregnant, you’re very responsible.

If your wife is a Harvard graduate lawyer who gave up a position in a prestigious law firm to work for the betterment of her inner city community, then gave that up to raise a family, your family’s values don’t represent America ’s.

If your husband is nicknamed “First Dude”, with at least one DUI conviction and no college education, who didn’t register to vote until age 25 and once was a member of a group that advocated the secession of Alaska from the USA , your family is extremely admirable.

OK, much clearer now.

Can you guys believe this wanker? He gets busted, pleas guilty and tries to sweep it under the rug. Luckily it leaked out. Idaho's got a great rep lately when it comes to its congressmen.
A few weeks ago Bill Sali, one of our Representatives, said this after a Hindu leader was asked to give the daily invocation in the Senate. Mind you, he isn't even a senator.

“We have not only a Hindu prayer being offered in the Senate, we have a Muslim member of the House of Representatives now, Keith Ellison from Minnesota. Those are changes — and they are not what was envisioned by the Founding Fathers,” asserts Sali.

Sali says America was built on Christian principles that were derived from scripture. He also says the only way the United States has been allowed to exist in a world that is so hostile to Christian principles is through “the protective hand of God.”

“You know, the Lord can cause the rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike,” says the Idaho Republican.

According to Congressman Sali, the only way the U.S. can continue to survive is under that protective hand of God. He states when a Hindu prayer is offered, “that’s a different god” and that it “creates problems for the longevity of this country.”

And of course, Craig said this about Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky debacle.
\"Well, I don’t know where the Senate’s going to be on that issue of an up or down vote on impeachment, but I will tell you that the Senate certainly can bring about a censure resolution and it’s a slap on the wrist. It’s a, bad boy, Bill Clinton. You’re a naughty boy. The American people already know that Bill Clinton is a bad boy, a naughty boy.

I’m going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.\"

Ok, that's creepy in and of itself. Now, with this new revelation to Craig's closeted sexual orientation, it's especially damning. Not that he may or may not be gay. It's the hypocrisy of his sanctimonious attitude. It's funny how this happens again and again with Republicans, isn't it?

I'm sick of these jerks and their shitty supposed representation of me. In vain, I write them letters and plead with them to grow a brain, to quit rubber stamping Bush, and by some miracle to bring some good, home grown Idaho populism that I know we're capable of to the floors of the House and Senate. Some kick ass Frank Church-style progressiveness to united the masses. Alas, it's a pipe dream at this point. And because of this I have only this to say to Mr. Craig.

Buwahahahahahahaha!

I hope you enjoy getting your ass handed to you in '08. And if no one challenges and beats you all hope for this state is lost.

I was reading through my current copy of The Nation today while my kid was at swimming lessons. I came across something that not only immediately irked me, but put me in a somber state of thought for the remainder of the day. Their Deadline Poet, Calvin Trillin, a man for whom I have the deepest respect as not only a lyricist but a staunch offender to the Bush Regime, (we've even put some of his lyrics to one of our songs, to be released on the next album) submitted a poem titled Two Sets of Parents Hear That Ralph Nader May Run Again
Prefaced by this quote
In the 2000 Presidential campaign, Mr. Nader contended that the Republican and Democratic parties were so similar it would make little difference whether Mr. Bush or Mr. Gore were elected. - New York Times

You thought your kid might be assigned
To decent schools. Now, never mind.
Because Bush judges tipped the court,
All integration plans abort.
Take comfort hearing Ralph proclaim:
The major parties are the same.

You're worried sick about Iraq-
The war devised by Bush's claque.
Your son is there, and you believe
That he may die 'cause Bush won't leave.
Take comfort hearing Ralph proclaim:
The major parties are the same.

I will give the liberals who hate Ralph Nader this, and only this-he was wrong when he said there'd be little difference between Bush and Gore. He assumed Bush would be a do nothing, the same as Gore most likely would have been. Yes, contrary to what Republicans bleat through the MSM, Gore did a tremendous amount of work as a senator during his years in Washington before becoming VP. But for all that, and all his talk since he had the election taken from him by the Supreme Court, it is mostly true that during his 8 years as the VP he accomplished JACK SHIT. Look at how much Cheney has been able to destroy in his time there. Sure, he had 9/11 fear on his side, and it's much easier to tear down than build. But the liberals who are still butt-hurt at Ralph do so at the expense of another \"Inconvenient Truth\" they don't happen to want to hear-that Ralph Nader has been right about everything since day one, and when he says the Democrats did little more than the Republicans, he was exactly right.
Yes, Al Gore wasn't in office on 9/11. Maybe if he had, we would have avoided it altogether, as he would most likely read his PDB's. But I still saw PLENTY of Democrats in the Senate and House during the build-up to the war. They rubber-stamped that sucker just as fast as all the lock-step Republicans, and in spite of their constituents screaming at them at the top of their lungs, they ignored good judgment and put trust in Bush. Ralph Nader didn't cause that, did he? By the last count I saw, that tragedy, which continues to this day, has racked up multiple times the 9/11 casualties. What'd they do about all those schmucks who voted to give him the power? Well, they picked one to run in 2004, and with all he had on his side, still lost. Most of them are still in office thanks to the 2006 thumping of the Republicans by Americans who voted, like I always do, against those corrupt bastards and kicked them out of office. But that doesn't mean everyone's happy with the Dems in congress, and the polls show it.
Ralph understood, and still does apparently since he's thinking of running again, that the whole system is inherently flawed. The premise was great and worked for many decades, but as always, those in power have found workarounds for the checks which keep them in line, and those who were to be the watchdogs have let us down. This administration has abused, lied, cheated, and killed to the extent that it has not just because it was determined to, but because those who should have stopped them didn't.
So what's the result? The boat has rocked far right, a dreadful, bloody mess indeed. And now it's snapping back. The Republicans don't look to have a prayer in 08, not just for President, but their rank and file congressional followers will surely lose more seats. The odds are good they'll lose all branches of government for years to come. People are now open to ideas that were taboo a decade ago. Universal healthcare, with help from Moore's movie \"SiCKO\" is not only back on the table; people of all stripes are responding positively to actually having their taxes raised to help provide healthcare to all our citizens, like they have already been doing for years in every other 1st world Western nation. People are extremely wary now of war, as they were post-Vietnam. The military has proven itself as an insufficient tool for nation building, and the vast majority of Americans agree Iraq was wrong to go into and think we should get the hell out.
I know it sounds Stalinist, but things simply have to get worse sometimes before they get better. When a whole nation is brainwashed and complicit in something as flat out wrong as Iraq has been, the final realization of their mistake, like a splash of cold water, awakens them to the possibility that their other \"accepted truths\" may just be bullshit, and opens minds to accepting, and even thirsting for, change. Ironically, Bush may still go down in history as the catalyst for a great deal of good in the world-just not how he thinks he will in his mind. It will have been a horrible price to pay, our visit to the brink of Fascism (some dare say we are actually there) but like the post WWII rebuilding sparked a sort of Renaissance, so too may this. And Nader will have been proven right again.

Naomi Wolf - The Guardian
Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated today in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree - domestically - as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government - the task of being aware of the constitution has been outsourced from citizens' ownership to being the domain of professionals such as lawyers and professors - we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of \"homeland\" security - remember who else was keen on the word \"homeland\" - didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable - as the author and political journalist Joe Conason, has put it, that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realise.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the US.

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy

After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were told we were now on a \"war footing\"; we were in a \"global war\" against a \"global caliphate\" intending to \"wipe out civilisation\". There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the globe itself is the battlefield. \"This time,\" Fein says, \"there will be no defined end.\"

Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be based, like the National Socialist evocation of the \"global conspiracy of world Jewry\", on myth.

It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain - which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it. Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our freedoms.

2. Create a gulag

Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal \"outer space\") - where torture takes place.

At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as outsiders: troublemakers, spies, \"enemies of the people\" or \"criminals\". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and sent there as well.

This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard practice for closing down an open society or crushing a pro-democracy uprising.

With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without trial and without access to the due process of the law, America certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress recently announced they would issue no information about the secret CIA \"black site\" prisons throughout the world, which are used to incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.

Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people, innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.

But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a political prisoner: \"First they came for the Jews.\" Most Americans don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.

By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift. Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.

3. Develop a thug caste

When leaders who seek what I call a \"fascist shift\" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.

The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these contractors are immune from prosecution

Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and emergency management at home in US cities.

Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can imagine that there can be a need for \"public order\" on the next election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an election; history would not rule out the presence of a private security firm at a polling station \"to restore public order\".

4. Set up an internal surveillance system

In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.

In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens' phones, read their emails and follow international financial transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too, could be under state scrutiny.

In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about \"national security\"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.

5. Harass citizens' groups

The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.

Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500 \"suspicious incidents\". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track \"potential terrorist threats\" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as \"terrorism\". So the definition of \"terrorist\" slowly expands to include the opposition.

6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release

This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a \"list\" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.

In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and thousands of ordinary US citizens.

Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal. But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark, \"because I was on the Terrorist Watch list\".

\"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that,\" asked the airline employee.

\"I explained,\" said Murphy, \"that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution.\"

\"That'll do it,\" the man said.

Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution? Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of \"enemy of the people\" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.

James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.

Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.

It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on the list, you can't get off.

7. Target key individuals

Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.

Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not \"coordinate\", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given regime, they are also a group that fascists typically \"coordinate\" early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.

Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.

Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that \"waterboarding is torture\" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.

Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the civil service in April 1933, attorneys were \"coordinated\" too, a step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.

8. Control the press

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.

The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he threatened \"critical infrastructure\" when he and a TV producer were filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.

Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.

Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.

Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.

You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

9. Dissent equals treason

Cast dissent as \"treason\" and criticism as \"espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of \"spy\" and \"traitor\". When Bill Keller, the publisher of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called the Times' leaking of classified information \"disgraceful\", while Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the \"treason\" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is execution.

Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and \"beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death\", according to the historian Myra MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were \"enemies of the people\". National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy \"November traitors\".

And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly, foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the president has the power to call any US citizen an \"enemy combatant\". He has the power to define what \"enemy combatant\" means. The president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive branch the right to define \"enemy combatant\" any way he or she wants and then seize Americans accordingly.

Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners. That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's, in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)

We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. \"Enemy combatant\" is a status offence - it is not even something you have to have done. \"We have absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you might do something bad, so we're going to hold you,\" says a spokeswoman of the CCR.

Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just before those arrests is where we are now.

10. Suspend the rule of law

The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's governor and its citizens.

Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times editorialised about this shift: \"A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'.\"

Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act - which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: \"dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.\"

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are \"at war\" in a \"long war\" - a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president - without US citizens realising it yet - the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions - and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the \"what ifs\".

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack - say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us - staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody's help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

We need to look at history and face the \"what ifs\". For if we keep going down this road, the \"end of America\" could come for each of us in a different way, at a different moment; each of us might have a different moment when we feel forced to look back and think: that is how it was before - and this is the way it is now.

\"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny,\" wrote James Madison. We still have the choice to stop going down this road; we can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the banner the founders asked us to carry.

· Naomi Wolf's The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot will be published by Chelsea Green in September.

by Larry C Johnson

Breaking news! At least 32 Virginia Tech students gunned down. Cable news channels are wild with activity as they pump up the coverage a focus on the latest \"crisis\". The media is commenting that this shooting is overwhelming the local medical facilities. Crisis is in the air. Well, at least it ain't Iraq.

Okay. Big deep breath. This is horrible and this is tragic and this gives us an idea of what it is like to live just one day in Iraq. Consider the following:

04/15/07 Reuters: 19 bodies found in Baghdad on Saturday
Police found the bodies of 19 people in various parts of Baghdad in the past 24 hours, police said

04/15/07 Reuters: 20 Iraqi troops and policemen abducted
A group linked to al Qaeda said it abducted 20 Iraqi troops and policemen and demanded the release of all Sunni women held in Iraq's prisons, according to a Web statement

04/15/07 Reuters: 4 killed by suicide bombers in Mosul
Four people, including two Iraqi soldiers, were killed and 16 wounded when two oil trucks driven by suicide bombers exploded outside a military base in the northern city of Mosul, police said.

04/15/07 AP: Suicide bomber kills 5, wounds 11 in northwest Baghdad
a suicide bomber blew himself up on a minibus in northwest Baghdad, killing at least eight people and wounding 11, police and hospital officials said.

04/15/07 AP: 37 die as car bomb hits near Iraq shrine
A car bomb blasted through a busy bus station near one of Iraq's holiest shrines Saturday, killing at least 37 people, police and hospital officials said.

Let's total the score: at least 65 Iraqis dead in four attacks vs. 32 Americans shot at Virginia Tech. Whoops, forgot the 20 kidnapped policemen. Can you imagine?

The next time you hear Dick Cheney or George Bush blame the public attitude regarding Iraq on the media's failure to report \"good news\", examine carefully our reaction to the shooting at Viginia Tech. Look at our collective shock. Our horrified reaction. The public sorrow. Yet, in truth, this is an exceptional, unusual day in America. It is not our common experience. But we cannot say the same about Iraq.

The people of Iraq are living in a Marquis de Sade version of Groundhog Day. It is like the Bill Murray movie--the same horrible day repeated with some new, bizarre twists--only not funny. Multiple body counts and explosions and shootings are the daily experience of the people of Iraq. They have been living this hell for four years. Just keep that fact in mind as you mourn the deaths of 32 American students slain in Blacksburg, Viginia.

I'm not Buddhist. I did see the Dahli Llama last year in Hailey on 9/11 however, and I have a great respect for the peaceful nature of their religion. I am, however, becoming an increasing believer that some form of Karma exists in the universe. Here's why. You remember 1998, don't you? You remember how Clinton got a little on the side, cheated on his wife, got caught, and the Republicans had a field day, right? How could you not? I'm not going to side with the guy; never was a fan. But if I remember right, right about that time, when they thought they had a pretty good idea of where Osama was, he sent some cruise missiles his way in an effort to knock him out. I'm pretty sure that since he missed, he hit some innocent people who weren't Osama, so I'm also not in agreement with that action either. BUT! Who reamed him the most at the time for \"wagging the dog?\" Gingrich and the rest of the Republican assholes who were out for blood. Then the hypocrites have the nerve to go after him for \"not doing enough\" to stop Osama before 9/11, ignoring Bush's ignoring of briefings of the imminent threat.
Basically, the Republicans milked the most out of a good old American sex scandal, and through it all, the guy's approval rating never dipped below 65%.
Cut to last week. This Foley guy, a closet homosexual, is caught saying some naughty things to these boy pages. Not too good of news for the gay movement, but even worse news for the Republican leadership who knew it was going on and sat on their nuts. Deservedly, they're painted as gigantic hyprocrites, more devoted to retaining their power than some supposedly pushed moral agenda. I don't have a problem with people having morals. I have a problem with people saying they do, and that theirs are better than yours, when they are clearly not.
Bottom line, their main defense now is to blame the Democrats and the media for paying so much damn attention to it. Hmm. I don't remember them harrassing the media over Clinton.
Karma. It's a beautiful thing.

Oh yeah. Pate quit the band today. We wish him well.

I want to make something very clear, and I don't want my subsequent comments here to detract from this unavoidable, and likely unchangeable fact-I hate Qwest. My laundry list for doing so is long, and I'm not going to get into it here-if you want to know why, get on google and look around.
But Qwest surprised me this week, and though I usually rant against things in this section, I want to give them, as Stephen Colbert would say, a \"tip of the hat.\" Read this. I'm sorry that it's the full link. I'm just too lazy to make it a shortcut hyperlink.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/washington/12cnd-phone.html?hp&ex=1147492800&en=eb85158452eae01a&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Long story short, Qwest stood up to the NSA and told them to stick it when they requested phone records on American citizens, unlike Bell, Verizon, AT&T, and so many others. But again, here I can't help but wonder what their political motivations were. It goes back to my whole rant on Sempra; conservatives seem to get awfully upset about progressive issues when it involves them and their own backyards. The libertarian comes out in them, and they use their muscle to defend their own. Now, personally, I think it's hypocritical, but this is most likely the case with Qwest, which covers many a western red state. Like Butch Otter here in Idaho, these guys are pissed about the liberties this administration is taking with the constitution. At first that didn't seem to stop any of them from wanting to vote for Bush, but now his 29% approval ratings are indicating otherwise. What I'm saying here is, all you libertarian, small government conservatives out there who don't want big brother spying on you, stand up and vote against a Republican this fall! Send them a message. It used to be that the worst thing about a Republican was their ignorant bigotry, their incessant tax cuts, and their love for guns. This batch has shown us how much worse things can get. So stick with your morals and vote your side-with-Bush Republican out of office.

Man. Haven't bitched since Thanksgiving? Limp.
I just have a few things to mention. Illegal secret wiretaps. Scandal after Republican, stinking putrid scandal. Alito got confirmed. 2% approval rating with African Americans. Katrina shows how racist the administration is, and I still get questioned about the relevance of my \"Fight Racism\" hat by clueless after clueless Republican relative. Muslims riot and kill over stupid cartoons in Right-wing European news papers, and I'm left wondering who sucks more.

Cindy Sheehan gets arrested at the State of the Union bullshitfest for wearing a t-shirt. More torture proof surfaces. The congressional inquiry into Katrina shows what a joke the Administration is. Didn't they massively fail to protect us in a similar manner oh, say, about 4 and a half years ago?

Plan D goes into effect, paying back seniors in spades for being dumb enough to vote for these guys just cause \"they hate them fags too.\" (An ancient walmart employee with no pension told me that.)

CHENEY SHOOTS A 78 YEAR OLD MAN IN THE FACE! And the best part? The sychophant asshole says he's deeply sorry for the trouble it caused CHENEY!

Oh, and in case you hadn't heard, the growing trade deficit and loss of tech jobs to China and India is going to completely wipe out our dollar and delve us into the worst depression in the history of our dollar in 2016. Look forward to that.

I guess what I'm saying is, protest, write your deaf-ear senators and congressman, go vote this fall, and bitch to everyone you can all you want-it's going to make little difference. They don't care how many starving, homeless children we'll have within our own borders-just as long as Alito tips the scales and makes it illegal for their moms to get abortions. They don't care how many billions Iraq is costing us, our children, and our children's children. They're not going to have to foot the bill. In a nutshell, wipe any sense of nationlist pride from your mind and prepare for what's coming. Start saving your money, quit buying things on credit, and put as much money as possible into Swedish currency. Get ready for the hurt, because it's coming.

You know, my whole life growing up, as my extended conservative, traditionalist right-wing family would gather 'round on Thanksgiving to watch football and to chew on dead bird ass, a moment was usually spared in between the pre-christmas gluttony and capitalism to take turns around the table saying what each one of us was actually thankful for. I wasn't able to spend thanksgiving with my side of the family this year, and this particular tradition either isn't something my wife's family delves into, or they avoided at the risk of bringing politics up at a get together that included me, my wife, her social-work degree-seeking sister and social worker sister-in-law, or her liberal aunt and uncle employed by the public school system. Either way, other than the prayer over the food, no thanks was mentioned. However, since I believe that the desire to give thanks can be non-partisan and even secular, I would like to use this forum to share with you, the humble punk who probably ate tofu-rkey this week, what I am thankful for.

1. I am thankful that neither me, nor any of my conservative relatives that I love regardless of their views, have died or are about to die in that quagmire Iraq. That said, I mourn for the tens of thousands of Iraqis that have died for this screw-up, the over 2000 of our soldiers who have died in the roll-out of said screw-up, and all their families who remain to bury and mourn the dead. Remember Bush's big Turkey photo-op? Well, I'm sure it helped him get re-elected. To him, the mission was accomplished.

2. I am thankful for the freedoms that still remain that haven't been completely trampled by fear based legislation like the Patriot act. I wish all the second amendment lovers out there would just as passionatley defend the first.

3. I am thankful that the oil companies are under investigation for price-gouging, as this has promtly brought gas prices back down. Even with a hybrid, $3 was pretty high. That said, I hope the CEO's all go to jail and that gas jumps up past $5. Only then will the right finally take action on a sensible, Cheney-less energy policy. If I must pay $60 to fill up my 12 gallon hybrid tank to get to that point, so be it.

4. I am thankful Propagandhi is still a band. No other band out their, including yours truly, really understands how far gone we really are. I hope they don't kill themselves in the next 5 years it'll take them release another album.

5. Last, and definitely least, I am thankful that Bush was actually re-elected this time. Now, hear me out. The first time was a joke. It was obvious that the majority of this country wanted Gore (what a great couple of choices!) but he stole that election fair and square and everything he screwed up for the next four years could be squarely blamed on him and Satan aka Cheney. It still left me with a shred of faith in Democracy, that the majority of the people in this country weren't that dumb.
Now I know that they are. Bush was just barely re-elected last thanksgiving, and I wasn't calm enough to write anything lucid on the subject. But this year his administration has been shown as what we've been railing about for the last 5 years. Again, he's been proven inept at taking care of the homeland. This time it wasn't terrorists, it was hurricanes. Again, the reason for going to war in the first place has been gloriously brought into question as Libby was indicted and the whole administration is under investigation for leaking the name of a CIA agent who's husband just happened to write one of the best articles showing their reasons for war as B.S. His social security reform is dead.
They viciously defend their right to torture, even in the face of near unanimous bipartisan opposition in Congress. He nominated his own lawyer to be on the supreme court, and had to retreat when both parties cried foul. You know things are bad when even Ann Coulter says she thinks you've gone too far.
What I'm trying to say is, I am glad Bush got to stick around so that he might actually have to pay for his sins. If Kerry had won, he'd be made to look like a jackass because there's no real easy way out of this mess. Since Bush won, he's got to now drink his own medicine. Hopeful republicans think history will eventually look back on Iraq as visionary. I think a view of history will show it as the debacle it was, as an imperialist act by a nation who's founders abhorred imperialism. This will be his legacy. No one ever says to those of us who were against this from the beginning \"hey! You know what? You were right. This war was idiotic.\" I doubt anyone ever said that to the Vietnam war protestors too. And even though history has shown Vietnam to be a mistake, the pro-establishment never denounces its political motives. This is the moronic stubborness that is conservative militarism.
So I am thankful most of all that perhaps this Thanksgiving, besides all their wealth, power, and influence, the leaders of this country are having a hard time thinking of what they're thankful for.

Hey, this is Mike. Usually the Rant page is exclusively Sean's territory, but I felt it was important to pass along this little story I read the other day. You know, throughout this little Iraq adventure of Bush's, we've been given one rationale after another to justify it. Each and every one has been blown out of the water. The only justification that had a snowball's chance in hell of holding water was the humanitarian one. Never mind that Saddam's dictatorship posed no threat to us and had no connection to al-Qaeda whatsoever. Never mind that it diverted precious resources away from fighting actual terrorists and guarding the so-called \"homeland\" against disasters man-made and natural (for example, hurricanes). The bottom line, we were told, was that the US, a proud bastion of human rights, must intervene wherever despots crack the whip over their hapless subjects, actual alliances with not so human-rights-friendly countries such as Uzbekistan and Saudi Arabia notwithstanding. This was to be a noble crusade to bring freedom and democracy to a populace held under the boot of a dictator who, don't forget, gassed his own people 17 years ago!
Ooops:
**********
US forces 'used chemical weapons' during assault on city of Fallujah

Powerful new evidence emerged yesterday that the United States dropped massive quantities of white phosphorus on the Iraqi city of Fallujah during the attack on the city in November 2004, killing insurgents and civilians with the appalling burns that are the signature of this weapon.

Ever since the assault, which went unreported by any Western journalists, rumours have swirled that the Americans used chemical weapons on the city.

On 10 November last year, the Islam Online website wrote: “US troops are reportedly using chemical weapons and poisonous gas in its large-scale offensive on the Iraqi resistance bastion of Fallujah, a grim reminder of Saddam Hussein’s alleged gassing of the Kurds in 1988.”

The website quoted insurgent sources as saying: “The US occupation troops are gassing resistance fighters and confronting them with internationally banned chemical weapons.”

In December the US government formally denied the reports, describing them as “widespread myths”. “Some news accounts have claimed that US forces have used ‘outlawed’ phosphorus shells in Fallujah,” the USinfo website said. “Phosphorus shells are not outlawed. US forces have used them very sparingly in Fallujah, for illumination purposes.

They were fired into the air to illuminate enemy positions at night, not at enemy fighters.”

But now new information has surfaced, including hideous photographs and videos and interviews with American soldiers who took part in the Fallujah attack, which provides graphic proof that phosphorus shells were widely deployed in the city as a weapon.

In a documentary to be broadcast by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, this morning, a former American soldier who fought at Fallujah says: “I heard the order to pay attention because they were going to use white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military jargon it’s known as Willy Pete.

“Phosphorus burns bodies, in fact it melts the flesh all the way down to the bone … I saw the burned bodies of women and children. Phosphorus explodes and forms a cloud. Anyone within a radius of 150 metres is done for.”

Photographs on the website of RaiTG24, the broadcaster’s 24-hours news channel, www.rainews24.it, show exactly what the former soldier means. Provided by the Studies Centre of Human Rights in Fallujah, dozens of high-quality, colour close-ups show bodies of Fallujah residents, some still in their beds, whose clothes remain largely intact but whose skin has been dissolved or caramelised or turned the consistency of leather by the shells.
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So I think the lesson here is that you can't gas your own people, but it's OK to gas other people? Hmmmmmmmmm....

Those of you who live in our native Tragic Valley have to deal with friends and family who are diehard Bush loyalists, who insist on going down with his ship and still believe in this war. Hell, maybe you are one of these people. If so, this is what you're supporting. If not, pass this on to your friends and make sure they understand what's going on. Try and have a nice day. Peace. -Mike

To the kids to came to our show in Jerome last Saturday-
Thanks. It was an awesome show because of you.

I've already gotten way more this year than I could have ever asked for and, especially, more than I deserved-a broken wrist (not so much), a successful tour, my wife got a better job, I got a grant for school this year, my kid's just getting cooler, and my family and friends have been supportive of my move to Twin Falls-especially my band, since the distance makes keeping it together tough. And we've been lucky to still have massive support from the Jerome and Tragic Valley kids, which never seems to die down no matter how old we get.

But my birthday is this week, on the 29th. And there's one thing I really want this year, and I just might get it. Unfortunately, none of you can give it to me-the only guy who can doesn't even know me. His name is Patrick J. Fitzgerald. He's the special prosecutor investigating the White House-Valerie Plame leak that Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were the cause of. They have been gathering evidence on the case for years-with a big boost this summer from emails that were turned over by Time magazine that implicate Rove and Libby's involvement. So this is what I want. Fitzgerald is supposed to reveal this week who, and if, there will be indictments against. For my 29th birthday, will Mr. Fitzgerald PLEEEEAAASE indict those two assholes!? Convicting these guys could hopefully lead to doing to Bush what the Watergate boys did for Nixon-and you know he deserves it. He's been lying and weaseling us since election day 2000 and has damaged this country far more than Nixon ever wanted to. For my 29th birthday on October 29th, I want to see the beginning of the end of this administration. Those idiot Democrats couldn't take them down last November. If you're the religious type, please pray that they take themselves down this fall. That would make 2005 my BEST YEAR EVER!

Happy Halloween

Propagandhi's new album, "Potemkin City Limits" is coming out next Tuesday. In an effort to further expound upon their always intrinsic meanings, I will now include some definitions of what a Potemkin Village is. In short, we are living in one.
Potemkin village \puh-TEM(P)-kin\, noun:
An impressive facade or display that hides an undesirable fact or state; a false front.

When will the West have the guts to call Russia what it really is: a semi-totalitarian state with Potemkin village-style democratic institutions and a fascist-capitalist economy?
-- "Western Investors Defend a Potemkin Village," Moscow Times, January 9, 2004

It's a lie, a huge Potemkin village designed to give North Korea the appearance of modernity.
-- Kevin Sullivan, "Borderline Absurdity," Washington Post, January 11, 1998

Unless U.S. imperial overstretch is acknowledged and corrected, the United States may someday soon find that it has become a Potemkin village superpower -- with a facade of military strength concealing a core of economic weakness.
-- Christopher Layne, "Why the Gulf War Was Not in the National Interest," The Atlantic, July 1991

The "evil empire" had been a mighty facade at least since Kruschev, a termite-infested Potemkin village congenitally incapable of regeneration.
-- Frank Pellegrini, "Reagan At 90: Still A Repository For Our American Dreams," Time, February 6, 2001

Sorry to Cut and Paste. I haven't quoted this guy in a while, but right about now this reflects my dismay at those still loyal to who I like to lovingly refer to as "Captain Dipshit."
A Letter to All Who Voted for George W. Bush from Michael Moore

To All My Fellow Americans Who Voted for George W. Bush:

On this, the fourth anniversary of 9/11, I'm just curious, how does it feel?

How does it feel to know that the man you elected to lead us after we were attacked went ahead and put a guy in charge of FEMA whose main qualification was that he ran horse shows?

That's right. Horse shows.

I really want to know -- and I ask you this in all sincerity and with all due respect -- how do you feel about the utter contempt Mr. Bush has shown for your safety? C'mon, give me just a moment of honesty. Don't start ranting on about how this disaster in New Orleans was the fault of one of the poorest cities in America. Put aside your hatred of Democrats and liberals and anyone with the last name of Clinton. Just look me in the eye and tell me our President did the right thing after 9/11 by naming a horse show runner as the top man to protect us in case of an emergency or catastrophe.

I want you to put aside your self-affixed label of Republican/conservative/born-again/capitalist/ditto-head/right-winger and just talk to me as an American, on the common ground we both call America.

Are we safer now than before 9/11? When you learn that behind the horse show runner, the #2 and #3 men in charge of emergency preparedness have zero experience in emergency preparedness, do you think we are safer?

When you look at Michael Chertoff, the head of Homeland Security, a man with little experience in national security, do you feel secure?

When men who never served in the military and have never seen young men die in battle send our young people off to war, do you think they know how to conduct a war? Do they know what it means to have your legs blown off for a threat that was never there?

Do you really believe that turning over important government services to private corporations has resulted in better services for the people?

Why do you hate our federal government so much? You have voted for politicians for the past 25 years whose main goal has been to de-fund the federal government. Do you think that cutting federal programs like FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers has been good or bad for America? GOOD OR BAD?

With the nation's debt at an all-time high, do you think tax cuts for the rich are still a good idea? Will you give yours back so hundreds of thousands of homeless in New Orleans can have a home?

Do you believe in Jesus? Really? Didn't he say that we would be judged by how we treat the least among us? Hurricane Katrina came in and blew off the facade that we were a nation with liberty and justice for all. The wind howled and the water rose and what was revealed was that the poor in America shall be left to suffer and die while the President of the United States fiddles and tells them to eat cake.

That's not a joke. The day the hurricane hit and the levees broke, Mr. Bush, John McCain and their rich pals were stuffing themselves with cake. A full day after the levees broke (the same levees whose repair funding he had cut), Mr. Bush was playing a guitar some country singer gave him. All this while New Orleans sank under water.

It would take ANOTHER day before the President would do a flyover in his jumbo jet, peeking out the window at the misery 2500 feet below him as he flew back to his second home in DC. It would then be TWO MORE DAYS before a trickle of federal aid and troops would arrive. This was no seven minutes in a sitting trance while children read \"My Pet Goat\" to him. This was FOUR DAYS of doing nothing other than saying \"Brownie (FEMA director Michael Brown), you're doing a heck of a job!\"

My Republican friends, does it bother you that we are the laughing stock of the world?

And on this sacred day of remembrance, do you think we honor or shame those who died on 9/11/01? If we learned nothing and find ourselves today every bit as vulnerable and unprepared as we were on that bright sunny morning, then did the 3,000 die in vain?

Our vulnerability is not just about dealing with terrorists or natural disasters. We are vulnerable and unsafe because we allow one in eight Americans to live in horrible poverty. We accept an education system where one in six children never graduate and most of those who do can't string a coherent sentence together. The middle class can't pay the mortgage or the hospital bills and 45 million have no health coverage whatsoever.

Are we safe? Do you really feel safe? You can only move so far out and build so many gated communities before the fruit of what you've sown will be crashing through your walls and demanding retribution. Do you really want to wait until that happens? Or is it your hope that if they are left alone long enough to soil themselves and shoot themselves and drown in the filth that fills the street that maybe the problem will somehow go away?

I know you know better. You gave the country and the world a man who wasn't up for the job and all he does is hire people who aren't up for the job. You did this to us, to the world, to the people of New Orleans. Please fix it. Bush is yours. And you know, for our peace and safety and security, this has to be fixed. What do you propose?

I have an idea, and it isn't a horse show.

After September 11th, FEMA, the Federal agency in charge of natural disasters, stated that a hurricane the size of Katrina was not only possible, but probable, and that it could destroy as many or more lives as the 9/11 attacks. That was about 4 years ago. How did Bush handle the threat to New Orleans? He slashed the Army corp of engineers budget drastically for 2005. And where are all our National Guard troops and their helicopters that would normally come to the rescue of the thousands-yes, THOUSANDS- stranded on their rooftops in the floods from Katrina. Dude, you'll never believe this-they're over in Iraq, babysitting a country that didn't have weapons that threatened us, didn't want our liberation, and now can't come up with a constitution that will even guarantee the most basic of civil rights. 3000 people died on September 11th, and that was the worst terrorist attack of all time. Our war there has killed hundreds of thousands, including 1800 of our own boys and girls, and the hurricane that just hit us and it's sloppy response will likely kill well over 3000. Do the numbers, folks. Patriotism and anti-terrorism have nothing to do with it. It's like the old survey where people are more scared to speak in public than they are of death. So a one in a multimillion chance of dying in a terrorist attack is unacceptable, but screw keeping our National Guard troops here to actually do what their commercials say they do. I guess I wouldn't be as annoyed if Iraq had actually been a threat. But they weren't. I'm sorry, but if a country wants liberation for itself, they have to fight for it, not have it installed. If you disagree with that, well then, YOU'RE unamerican! How's it feel to be called that? Want proof?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

~George Washington

Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.

~Thomas Jefferson

We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.

~Thomas Jefferson

And best of all...
That we are to stand by the president, right or wrong is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

~Theodore Roosevelt

Think about that next time you decide to trash on a dissenting liberal.

Hey guys. I'm really sorry I haven't put anything here at all. In case any of you didn't already know, I ended up moving to Twin Falls. It's not so bad. I am going to school, working crazy long hours, and trying to figure out how I'm going to pull tour off. We have been working on a few new songs, but they're mostly on hold until after we get back from hitting some west coast towns at the end of the month. I have plenty to rant about, but since I've left this stale for 6 months I doubt many of you will read this. Back in June I took a trip with my wife to D.C. also known as the epitome of apartheid. I've never seen a place so full of people who despise the very man who sits in power in the middle of town. Though hot and muggy, it was a very refreshing trip. Plus, all the museums are free. That said, I'd like to give a shout out to my cousin Amy Caldwell and her husband Bob, a fellow history buff and punk/ska nerd, who showed us around town in an actual car and took us to dinner. I was supposed to write this 2 months ago, but better late than never. One last thing. If you're looking for some great late summer reading, I'd suggest "Assassination Vacation" by the great Sarah Vowell. She's hot, intellectual, and has that weird squeeky voice she used for Violet on "The Incredibles." I've never been so turned on by a historian, and I probably never will again. See you on the road.