Climbing Everest

"The Exceptional Decline for the Exceptional Country" by Tom Englehardt is a brilliant article I paste below to which I dispute nothing.  The question becomes is our future that truly bleak?  Can this nation once the dream of many become the dream of even some once again?  We the people still have power BUT when we allow shameful dark money to control it all including us then truly the majority have nothing and only ourselves to blame. 

Yes, I know the two parties are Tweedledee and Tweedledum as the loathsome George the Segregationist Wallace once said.  He had a point ONLY on that though.  BUT it is what we have.  Use your vote as your ONLY source of power and forget ever on planet earth voting Republican.   No one lives forever.  Overturn Citizen's United by changing the Court when we can IF Democrats keep the presidency, keep the Senate, take back the House and make damn well sure the Democrats whom you elect do YOUR bidding and NOT the bidding of the corporate state. It is really that simple but remains seemingly an Everest mountaintop to climb!



An Exceptional Decline for the Exceptional Country?

The Empire as Basket Case

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

For America’s national security state, this is the age of impunity.  Nothing it does -- torture, kidnapping, assassination, illegal surveillance, you name it -- will ever be brought to court.  For none of its beyond-the-boundaries acts will anyone be held accountable.  The only crimes that can now be committed in official Washington are by those foolish enough to believe that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.  I’m speaking of the various whistleblowers and leakers who have had an urge to let Americans know what deeds and misdeeds their government is committing in their name but without their knowledge.  They continue to pay a price in accountability for their acts that should, by comparison, stun us all.

As June ended, the New York Times front-paged an account of an act of corporate impunity that may, however, be unique in the post-9/11 era (though potentially a harbinger of things to come).  In 2007, as journalist James Risen tells it, Daniel Carroll, the top manager in Iraq for the rent-a-gun company Blackwater, one of the warrior corporations that accompanied the U.S. military to war in the twenty-first century, threatened Jean Richter, a government investigator sent to Baghdad to look into accounts of corporate wrongdoing.

Here, according to Risen, is Richter’s version of what happened when he, another government investigator, and Carroll met to discuss Blackwater’s potential misdeeds in that war zone:

“Mr. Carroll said ‘that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq,’ Mr. Richter wrote in a memo to senior State Department officials in Washington. He noted that Mr. Carroll had formerly served with Navy SEAL Team 6, an elite unit. ‘Mr. Carroll’s statement was made in a low, even tone of voice, his head was slightly lowered; his eyes were fixed on mine,’ Mr. Richter stated in his memo. ‘I took Mr. Carroll’s threat seriously. We were in a combat zone where things can happen quite unexpectedly, especially when issues involve potentially negative impacts on a lucrative security contract.’”

When officials at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world, heard what had happened, they acted promptly.  They sided with the Blackwater manager, ordering Richter and the investigator who witnessed the scene out of the country (with their inquiry incomplete).  And though a death threat against an American official might, under other circumstances, have led a CIA team or a set of special ops guys to snatch the culprit off the streets of Baghdad, deposit him on a Navy ship for interrogation, and then leave him idling in Guantanamo or in jail in the United States awaiting trial, in this case no further action was taken.

Power Centers But No Power to Act

Think of the response of those embassy officials as a get-out-of-jail-free pass in honor of a new age.  For the various rent-a-gun companies, construction and supply outfits, and weapons makers that have been the beneficiaries of the wholesale privatization of American war since 9/11, impunity has become the new reality.  Pull back the lens further and the same might be said more generally about America’s corporate sector and its financial outfits.  There was, after all, no accountability for the economic meltdown of 2007-2008.  Not a single significant figure went to jail for bringing the American economy to its knees. (And many such figures made out like proverbial bandits in the government bailout and revival of their businesses that followed.)

Meanwhile, in these years, the corporation itself was let loose to run riot.  Long a “person” in the legal world, it became ever more person-like, benefitting from a series of Supreme Court decisions that hobbled unions and ordinary Americans even as it gave the corporation ever more of the rights and attributes of a citizen on the loose.  Post-9/11, the corporate world gained freedom of expression, the freedom of the purse, as well as the various freedoms that staggering inequality and hoards of money offer.  Corporate entities gained, among other things, the right to flood the political system with money, and most recently, at least in a modest way, freedom of religion.

In other words, two great power centers have been engorging themselves in twenty-first-century America: there was an ever-expanding national security state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less overseen by anyone, ever more deeply enveloped in secrecy, ever more able to see others and less transparent itself, ever more empowered by a secret court system and a body of secret law whose judgments no one else could be privy to; and there was an increasingly militarized corporate state, ever less accountable to anyone, ever less overseen by outside forces, ever more sure that the law was its possession.  These two power centers are now triumphant in our world.  They command the landscape against what may be less effective opposition than at any moment in our history.

In both cases, no matter how you tote it up, it’s been an era of triumphalism.  Measure it any way you want: by the rising Dow Jones Industrial Average or the expanding low-wage economy, by the power of “dark money” to determine American politics in 1% elections or the rising wages of CEOs and the stagnating wages of their workers, by the power of billionaires and the growth of poverty, by the penumbra of secrecy and classification spreading across government operations and the lessening ability of the citizen to know what’s going on, or by the growing power of both the national security state and the corporation to turn your life into an open book.  Look anywhere and some version of the same story presents itself -- of ascendant power in the boardrooms and the backrooms, and of a sense of impunity that accompanies it.

Whether you’re considering the power of the national security state or the corporate sector, their moment is now.  And what a moment it is -- for them.  Their success seems almost complete.  And yet that only begins to tell the strange tale of our American times, because if that power is ascendant, it seems incapable of being translated into classic American power.  The more successful those two sectors become, the less the U.S. seems capable of wielding its power effectively in any traditional sense, domestically or abroad.

Anyone can feel it, hence the recent Pew Research Center poll indicating a striking diminution in recent years of Americans who think the U.S. is exceptional, the greatest of all nations.  By 2011, only 38% of Americans thought that; today, the figure has dropped to 28%, and -- a harbinger of future American attitudes -- just 15% among 18-to-29-year-olds.  And no wonder.  By many measures the U.S. may remain the wealthiest, most powerful nation on the planet, but in recent years its ability to accomplish anything, no less achieve national or imperial success, has shrunk drastically.

The power centers remain, but in some still-hard-to-grasp way, the power to accomplish anything seems to be draining from a country that was once the great can-do nation on the planet.  On this, the record is both dismal and clear.  To say that the American political system is in a kind of gridlock or paralysis from which -- given electoral prospects in 2014 and 2016 -- there can be no escape is to say the obvious.  It’s a commonplace of news reports to suggest, for example, that in this midterm election year Congress and the president will be capable of accomplishing nothing together (except perhaps avoiding another actual government shutdown).  Nada, zip, zero.

The president acts in relatively minimalist ways by executive order, Congress threatens to sue over his use of those orders, and (as novelist Kurt Vonnegut would once have said) so it goes.  In the meantime, Congress has proven itself unable to act even when it comes to what once would have been the no-brainers of American life.  It has, for instance, been struggling simply to fund a highway bill that would allow for ordinary repair work on the nation's system of roads, even though the fund for such work is running dry and jobs will be lost.

This sort of thing is but a symptom in a country of immense wealth whose infrastructure is crumbling and which lacks a single mile of high-speed rail.  In all of this, in the rise of poverty and a minimum-wage economy, in a loss -- particularly for minorities -- of the wealth that went with home ownership, what can be seen is the untracked rise of a Third World country inside a First World one, a powerless America inside the putative global superpower.

An Exceptional Kind of Decline

And speaking of the “sole superpower,” it remains true that no combination of other militaries can compare with the U.S. military or the moneys the country continues to put into it and into the research and development of weaponry of the most futuristic sort.  The U.S. national security budget remains a Ripley’s-Believe-It-Or-Not-style infusion of tax dollars into the national security state, something no other combination of major countries comes close to matching.

In addition, the U.S. still maintains hundreds of military bases and outposts across the planet (including, in recent years, ever more bases for our latest techno-wonder weapon, the drone).  In 2014, it still garrisons the planet in a way that no other imperial power has ever done.  In fact, it continues to sport all the trappings of a great empire, with an army impressive enough that our last two presidents have regularly resorted to one unembarrassed image to describe it: “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.”

And yet, recent history is clear: that military has proven incapable of winning its wars against minor (and minority) insurgencies globally, just as Washington, for all its firepower, military and economic, has had a remarkably difficult time imposing its desires just about anywhere on the planet.  Though it may still look like a superpower and though the power of its national security state may still be growing, Washington seems to have lost the ability to translate that power into anything resembling success.

Today, the U.S. looks less like a functioning and effective empire than an imperial basket case, unable to bring its massive power to bear effectively from Germany to Syria, Iraq to Afghanistan, Libya to the South China Sea, the Crimea to Africa.  And stranger yet, this remains true even though it has no imperial competitors to challenge it.  Russia is a rickety energy state, capable of achieving its version of imperial success only along its own borders, and China, clearly the rising economic power on the planet, though flexing its military muscles locally in disputed oil-rich waters, visibly has no wish to challenge the U.S. military anywhere far from home.

All in all, the situation is puzzling indeed.  Despite much talk about the rise of a multi-polar world, this still remains in many ways a unipolar one, which perhaps means that the wounds Washington has suffered on numerous fronts in these last years are self-inflicted.

Just what kind of decline this represents remains to be seen.  What does seem clearer today is that the rise of the national security state and the triumphalism of the corporate sector (along with the much publicized growth of great wealth and striking inequality in the country) has been accompanied by a decided diminution in the power of the government to function domestically and of the imperial state to impose its will anywhere on Earth.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

The Price of Ignorance

Brilliant piece by former Senator Gary Hart (the man who should have been president!)

Ignorance of History, and Its Price

Posted: 07/07/2014 6:40 pm EDT Updated: 07/07/2014 10:59 pm EDT

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it," is usually attributed to George Santayana. Harry Truman's version was: "The only new thing in the world is the history we have not learned." And, in the House of Commons in 1935, Winston Churchill observed: "...that long, dismal catalog of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong-these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history."

All this is brought to mind by the recent book Lawrence in Arabia, by Scott Anderson, a startling narrative of the events of the World War I in the Middle East that produced political chickens now coming to roost a hundred years later. It is a tragic tale of late colonial overreach by Britain and France, the worst kind of treachery, deceit, and diplomatic betrayal, and fateful political decisions based on misinformation, wishful thinking, and almost total ignorance of Arab culture and history.

All of it now rests on America's doorstep, a nation late to enter the World War I jungle of old 19th century European intrigue and guided only by a dreamy Wilsonian idealistic hope for the end of bloodshed and a liberated world safe for democracy. Even as they were secretly carving up the Middle East, his British and French allies scoffed at his naiveté.

It says much that one of the few Americans on the scene in Cairo and elsewhere was a young employee of the Standard Oil Company named William Yale who was taken on board as an adviser to the secretary of state simply because he had spent time in the region locking up oil concessions for his company. This is a predictor of the future of U.S. interests in the Middle East if there ever was one.

For, from 1941 onward, U.S. policy in the region was to keep Arabian, Persian, and Iraqi oil out of the hands of the Nazis and then the Soviets. It was, after all, our oil. We overthrew a democratic prime minister of Iran according to that logic and guess what that got us. U.S. policy toward Saudi Arabia has been dominated by oil. And don't think for a minute that the invasion of Iraq wasn't guided in major part by access to oil reserves, though the clever invasion plotters somehow never found it convenient to admit it. (Their charade went like this: "Oil? Gee whiz, is there oil there?")

"All that is history" is the casual way of dismissing uncomfortable truths -- that is, until those truths come back to haunt us. It is a pity George W. Bush had not studied more history. But the lessons of history are best learned before, not after, becoming president.

Why did Santayana say "cannot" instead of "will not"? Will not is a failure of choice. Cannot is a failure of ability. Are Americans incapable of learning history? If so, our nation's future is not a pretty one. A mark of statesmanship is the ability to learn from history and apply its lessons to current conflicts and to skillful avoidance of future crises. But genuine statesmanship is in short supply. According to reviewers, a memoir by a recent secretary of state contains few lessons learned.

In part, we cannot learn from history because we are a pragmatic people. We make it up as we go along. Each new day offers a new experience and a new chance to try something different. It is refreshing, but it is also innocent and child-like. But there is little that is truly new and different and the circularity of human experience gives fate the opportunity to come back and bite us.

Had we known Vietnamese history, we would have known the guiding principle to its conflict was nationalism not communist ideology. Had we known Iranian history, we would have known the people wanted self-determination not an oligarchical shah. Had we known Russian history, we would have known the critical importance of Crimea's ports to Russia's access to the sea. Had we known Middle Eastern history, we would have known the deep territorial and theological divide between Sunni and Shia for more than 13 centuries.

Are there lessons in Chinese history that might guide us in understanding its offshore territorial ambitions? Are there further Russian history lessons that might help anticipate its maritime interests in the Arctic? Should we study Hindu-Muslim relations in the Indian subcontinent to prevent war between Pakistan and India?

Eventually, British duplicity undid the Arab revolt and denied Arab ambitions for self-determination in the region. But, T. E. Lawrence had studied Arabic and Arab history before riding his camel into the desert and eventually helping to kindle a semblance of unity among disparate Arab tribes to overthrow Ottoman domination and inspire Arab hopes. Based on his studies of history, he believed and helped inspire the Arab dream.

But what could he know? He was only 29 years old when his nation's senior statesmen and politicians betrayed him and the Arabs and left us with the bitter outcome a century later.

A New Suit--RepubliCON Subterfuge!

Due to hand maladies the sentiments are mine but not the written word sent by Rep. Wasserman-Schultz. 

Heed and forward to all you know and contribute when you can.  Suing the president -- INSANITY PLUS.  We MUST unseat these unpatriotic mendacious maladies from our midst and crush them in November, 2014 by signing EVERYONE up we can.

“I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something while they’re doing nothing.”
-- President Obama, 6/26/14

Dear Natalie,

Speaker Boehner has said that he’s going to sue the President for… well, he hasn’t said what he’s going to sue the President for, but he promises he’ll let us know soon.

John Boehner’s planned lawsuit is ridiculous. And it’s merely the latest example of Republicans wasting time bashing the President and playing Tea Party politics instead of actually doing their jobs.

As long as Republicans control the House, we can expect more of the same. That is why we need your help to push back -– so I can continue to call out the Speaker and the Tea Party for playing partisan politics instead of helping America’s middle class.

Deserving of No Less

The extremist "conservative" Supreme Court decided to allow a business, Hobby Lobby, the ability to impose its religious views on its employed as to contraception of all things. I thought contraception was settled law -- silly me.  I say go ahead, Republicans, DO IT and see how they alienate women, a vote they need, among numbers of other groups, to win elections.

Moreover, the issue of children on the US border foments a Niagara Falls of hate from Marietta, CA where nativists are spewing it. I maintain it is wonderful for Democrats.  It will and should sign up Hispanics as it should sign up ALL minority groups to vote Democratic.  Republicans, one can easily see, are NOT the Party of the 98%, this fact said so many times by me I repeat it in my dreams. 

In addition, Republican once presidential contender, Chris Christie, has refused to meet with the Sandyhook parents whose CHILDREN were killed by a senseless act of gun violence.  The fact that the killer could not get his extra magazine clips loaded in time and some children escaped the slaughter shows one how important it is, at the very LEAST, to limit the number of bullets the magazine clips hold!  Christie is against even that apparently fearing a rejection of him for the 2016 presidential Republican primaries as if Bridgegate were not enough to remove him from consideration.  SHAME on him and ALL Republicans for not embracing sensible gun regulations.  If Democrats are elected you will get that and it could save lives -- YOUR CHILDREN'S lives.

Yes, conservative hate runs deep. November should put that hate the Republican and Tea Party politics engenders where it belongs -- in the ash bin of history. REGISTER minorities, Hispanics, women, the disabled and the young Democrats or those leaning Democrat and even Republicans who want to switch over to Democrat because they cannot stand Republican Party politics anymore.  Sign Democrats up across the nation and do not forget what a right wing Republican religious fanatical extremist Supreme Court can do. We need Democratic presidents to obviate that. The mendacious Republicans possess no humane, ethical or moral scruples and possesses no thoughts of policy change.  How can they? They believe in a postage stamp size government. 

One simply has to hear the venom toward buses of CHILDREN needing refuge from certain death but instead are greeted with fuming American nativist right wing Republican hate in Mariata, CA. Lady Liberty says: "Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." except NOT in Marietta, CA. Republicans need to be electorally crushed. They deserve no less. 

SIGN UP DEMOCRATS EVERYWHERE and PASS THIS AROUND TO ANYONE YOU CHOOSE.

Chalmers Johnson, Portrait of a Sagging Empire

I find this opinion eminently interesting.  I suggest you read it and click on its links to get more.  It is somewhat lengthy but, in my opinion, worth it.  It is prescient, eerily correct in most ways, and alarming because of that.  We can, as a nation, though, change course.  Will we is another question entirely.  In hope that we do GET OUT THE DEMOCRATIC 2014 VOTE -- immigrants, Hispanics, African Americans, women, youth, the disabled and the elderly ALL OVER THE NATION.  OUR FUTURE HANGS ON THE HOPE THAT WE DO. 

July 5, 2014 Best of TomDispatch: Chalmers Johnson, Portrait of a Sagging Empire [Note for TomDispatch Readers: It’s summer and in this season my mind turns to Chalmers Johnson, "Mr. Blowback,” who died in November 2010 and who, each year around this time, I like to remember at TomDispatch. Certainly, given recent events in Iraq and Syria, I have to resist the eerie urge to pick up the phone, dial his number, and get his thoughts.  He was a towering figure at this site (and in my life) and recently, with that in mind, I went back and looked at the last piece he wrote for TD just months before his death.  “The Guns of August” he called it.  Perhaps sensing that the end was already closing in on him, he focused on the fogginess of the future and a particularly human inability to predict it.  (Just check out any Tomorrowland or past World’s Fair to see how far our visions of the future stray from the surprises reality holds in store for us.)  Yet he couldn’t help himself, as we generally can’t, our brains being prediction machines.  The urge may, for all I know, be hardwired into us. So, in those last moments, having fessed up to all that, “Chal” still had the urge to peer decades into the future and imagine what the world he would never see might turn out to be like.  Rereading his piece almost four years into that fog of the future, I was not only moved, but struck by how on target he’s been thus far.  Nothing in it seemed, as yet, discordant -- not so surprising for such a canny observer of our disastrous world -- and so much of his essay remains perceptive and filled with wisdom. I’ve left in place as well the introduction I did that August, a little look at how he and I first met “on the page” and a little tip of the cap to someone who I undoubtedly feared wouldn't be around that long.  This is the first of the summer’s “best of” pieces that will pop up from time to time.  I hope you enjoy going down TomDispatch’s version of memory lane.  The next new TD piece will be posted on Tuesday. Tom] In September 1998, I was handed a submission for a proposed book by Chalmers Johnson.  I was then (as I am now) consulting editor at Metropolitan Books.  9/11 was three years away, the Bush administration still an unimaginable nightmare, and though the prospective book’s prospective title had “American Empire” in it, the American Empire Project I now co-run with my friend and TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser was still almost four years from crossing either of our minds. I remembered Johnson, however.  As a young man, I had read his book on peasant nationalism in north China where, during the 1930s, Japanese invaders were conducting “kill-all, burn-all, loot-all” operations.  Its vision of how a revolution could gain strength from a foreign occupation stayed with me.  I had undoubtedly also read some of Johnson’s well-respected work on contemporary Japan and I knew, even then, that in the Vietnam War era he had been a fierce opponent of the antiwar movement I took part in.  If I didn’t already know it, the proposal made no bones about the fact that he had also, in that era, consulted for the CIA. I certainly turned to his submission -- a prologue, a single chapter, and an outline of the rest of a book -- with a dubious eye, but was promptly blasted away by a passage in the prologue in which he referred to himself as having been a “spear-carrier for empire” and, some pages in, by this passage as well: ”I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export ‘people’s war’ to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam.  In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times.  It proved to be a disastrously wrong position.  The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense.  I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework [on the history of communism in East Asia]… As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow.  They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive.  In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement.  For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.” I was little short of thunderstruck.  I knew then -- and I think it still holds today -- that no one of prominence with Johnson’s position on the war and in his age range had ever written such a set of sentences.  At that moment, knowing nothing else, I made the decision to publish his book.  It was possibly the single most impulsive, even irrational, and thoroughly satisfying decision I’ve made in my 30-odd years as an editor in, or at the fringes of, mainstream publishing. Though I didn’t have expectations for the book then, the rest is, quite literally, history.  After all, its title would be Blowback, a term of CIA tradecraft that neither I nor just about any other American had ever heard of, and which, thanks to Johnson, has now become part of our language (along with the accompanying catch phrase “unintended consequences”).  On its publication in 2000, the book was widely ignored.  In the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, it seemed nothing short of prophetic, and so, in paperback, stormed those 9/11 tables at the front of bookstores, and soared to bestsellerdom.  That I ever edited Blowback or Johnson’s subsequent books was little short of a fluke, one of the luckiest of my life.  It led as well to a relationship with a man of remarkable empathy and insight, who was then on a no less remarkable journey (on which I could tag along).  Now, a new book of his, Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope, has arrived, focused on the many subjects -- from our empire of bases to the way the Pentagon budget, the weapons industries, and military Keynesianism may one day help send us into great power bankruptcy -- that have obsessed him in recent years. It’s not to be missed. Tom The Guns of August Lowering the Flag on the American Century By Chalmers Johnson In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.  She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting, as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, in the fog of war. So where are we this August of 2010, with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq?  Where are we, as we impose sanctions on Iran and North Korea (and threaten worse), while sending our latest wonder weapons, pilotless drones armed with bombs and missiles, into Pakistan's tribal borderlands, Yemen, and who knows where else, tasked with endless "targeted killings" which, in blunter times, used to be called assassinations?  Where exactly are we, as we continue to garrison much of the globe even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services? Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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Common Humanity

Recently I composed a response to a friend on an article written by a Jew sympathetic to the Palestinian plight and indignities Palestinians experience every day just as devastating for Palestinian parents who lose children, too, as it is for the parents who now mourn the deaths of the three murdered Jewish teenagers.  The one thing we do know is this event will mean more war and more will die.   

My friend wanted to know what I thought of the article and so I print my opinion entitled "Common Humanity" below.

After my opinion I paste an article "These murders reawaken Israel's deepest fears" by Anshel Pfeffer of the "Guardian" which I thought summarized the Jewish plight, conundrum and despair concerning the saga of bitter conflict and never ending hostilities between Palestinians and Jews.

Common Humanity

What can be said that has not been said before?  If the world were like we war would not be an issue but much of the world is not like we are.  I am truly glad I am not in a position of power and that I do not have to make the profoundly awful decisions sending the young out to kill and/or be killed. 

It is no secret to those who know me that Hitler's Holocaust of the Jews of Europe shaped my politics and it is no secret that honesty must dictate the admittance of my love for Israel as a Jewish state.  These are my, actually our (my friend is Jewish), people who for 2000 years have suffered the onslaughts of a hell that cannot be described.  I cannot abandon my essence. 

Having said that that does not mean I am impervious to suffering and injustice anywhere it exists and that is no less so for the Palestinian people irrespective of the constant monologue of rationales from both sides for war.  My heart aches for all those who grieve because I know what the loss of those whom I love is.

It means, too, that I support a two state solution, and an end to the settlements but just because I do it surely does not mean those settlements will end any time soon.  In the mix are my thought and deep conviction that I loathe religious fundamentalism wherever it exists.  Fundamentalists are uncompromising, cruel, bestial and extreme and that pertains to Jewish ultra-Orthodox fundamentalism as much as it does to Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism as well. 

In truth all fundamentalists would want me and those like me stoned to death.  Fundamentalists deny science, believe in the truth of myths and made up stories as divine, they eschew compromise, and, in the end, they negate the human decency that civilization has honed over centuries of uncivilized barbarity and brutality. Fundamentalists crush man's thirst for  knowledge through the questioning of everything and the advancement that new knowledge brings.

There are moderates everywhere and I surely hope they prevail.  It is, therefore, because of many realities that I support the Jewish state as a Jewish state but recognize the rights of Palestinians to live free and free from fear in their own state. 

In the final analysis, I abhor man's inhumanity to man wherever it exists because in reality it denies the common humanity of us all.

These murders reawaken Israel's deepest fears

By Anshel Pfeffer, The Guardian

For its citizens, the foundation of the Jewish state was meant to ensure their children would never again be taken away

'To Israelis, this wasn't just another round of violence in a never-ending cycle; it was a national tragedy and the epitome of an ageless struggle.' Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

In a small, close-knit society where family is everything, people are constantly glued to their mobile phones and trauma is an ever-present memory, the prospect of a child being kidnapped by Palestinians is an unspoken terror. And yes, a child in this context could also mean a 20-year-old soldier shouldering his rifle.

For Israelis, the nightmare of your son's phone ringing, unanswered, wipes away all the self-confidence that citizens of the Jewish state have built for themselves. That fear burrows into a national psyche that defines what Israel is about for its Jewish majority – a country that was founded and its entire military force built up so that no Jewish child should ever be captured and spirited away again. No other political arguments or realities apply. As far as they are concerned, that is Israel's core purpose.

That it is a technological superpower with one of the strongest militaries in the world doesn't matter. And neither do the rights and wrongs of its conflict with the Palestinians, the vast imbalance between a sovereign state and an occupied population suffering multiple injustices and humiliations. For the 18 and a half days between the abduction of Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaar and Eyal Yifrach and the discovery of their bodies north of Hebron, nearly every Israeli parent set politics aside and put him or herself in the place of those three mothers and three fathers.

Nearly every Israeli child and teenager imagined being in that car racing away through the night. Somewhere in their minds was the thought that this was just one more chapter in the long history of Jewish victimhood and the Palestinians are just the latest embodiment of the Jews' victimisers, as absurd as that may sound to an outsider.

Love or hate Israel, that is its core. You can't begin to grasp its society without understanding this. Israelis were deeply insulted by foreign media organisations which seemed to be downplaying the kidnapping, or, by describing the teenagers as "three settlers", to be putting them into a political context. To Israelis, this wasn't just another round of violence in a never-ending cycle; it was a national tragedy and the epitome of an ageless struggle.

Israelis are no strangers to the death and sacrifice of young people. But in many ways, the not knowing, the vulnerability of being at the mercy of anonymous captors, is worse than having to lay a soldier to rest. The Israel Defence Force has a standing order, the Hannibal procedure, that in case of a soldier being abducted, the fleeing vehicle must be shot at to prevent its escape, even if that endangers the captured soldier's life. Israelis can deal with a grave, but not with being at the mercy of those they see as cruel terrorists. That is why the capture and subsequent disappearance of airforce navigator Ron Arad in Lebanon, a mystery now in its 28th year, remains such a deep-seated trauma.

For British and American viewers, Homeland is an exciting television series about the war on terror, an upgraded and updated version of 24. In Israel, the original version – Hatufim – touched a deep nerve within its target audience, the yearning for the return of soldiers missing in action. This is why, three years ago, Israelis overwhelmingly supported the exchange of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one captured soldier held by Hamas – Gilad Shalit – despite many suspecting that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had signed off on the deal, was doing so for cynical political reasons. They weren't prepared to have another Ron Arad disappear. While Shalit had been taken prisoner from within his tank, the slogan of the campaign pressuring the government to obtain his release described him as "the child of all of us".

The national outpouring of grief now unifying Israel, which may provide the platform for a new military offensive against the Gaza Strip, does not, however, necessarily mean a further shift among Israelis towards the nationalist right. Even during the first days following the abduction, questions were raised asking what the hell the three were doing hitchhiking at night in the West Bank? These queries were subsumed in the collective feeling of support for the parents. But in the minds of many Israelis, they continue to linger.

Polling has shown a gradual decrease in the support of the Israeli public for the settlers. For now, the national mourning for the three teenagers is heartfelt and real. But as time passes, more Israelis will ask why their government is doing nothing to try to end a situation where Israeli teenagers are at constant risk of disappearing. And they won't be blaming only the Palestinians.

What's It All About Alfie

The very interesting article below by Professor Wilkenson in Huffington Post is I believe, very profound. The question is what can we do about it?  Elect progressive Democrats all over the nation in November, 2014 and in 2016.

Empire's Age-Old Aim: Wealth and Power

In his very excellent book, King Leopold's Ghost [My note: see summary of the book at http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-king-leopolds-ghost]: ; Adam Hochschild registers a chapter-long lament near the book's end that even though in the preceding pages he has chronicled in an unprecedented manner the crimes against humanity of Leopold's Congo enterprise, so what? Such crimes were almost a concomitant of colonial empire. Britain, France, Germany, the United States -- all the so-called civilized colonial powers -- were guilty of such crimes. Whether murder and plunder in India, slaughter in Algeria, devastation in Cameroon, or torture and massacre in the Philippines, few western powers can rightfully claim innocence. And, perhaps most worrisome, their national myths mask or even convert most of the crimes, and what the myths don't eliminate or alter poor education and memory lapses do.

 

Surely, however, at this opening to the 21st Century, we have made some progress. Our constant rhetoric -- particularly from Washington -- asserts that we have. International criminal justice and human rights are pursued with relish, are they not?

Not according to the example of Richard Bruce Cheney. As has been the case since humankind began to organize itself, Dick Cheney believes that wealth and power -- his and his cronies wealth and power foremost -- are still the relevant strategic objectives of empire. King Leopold of Belgium is not dead, simply reincarnated in a more modern form. Torturing people is dependent on a nation's supposed needs, killing people on the expediency of policy, waging war on monetary and commercial gain, and lying to the people is a highly reputable tactic in pursuit of each. Leopold would love Dick Cheney.

Cheney even models Leopold: never in the dangerous fray himself (five draft deferments, e.g.), a master of bureaucratic manipulation and intrigue, in love to a fault with secrecy, willing to undertake any crime under the sun so long as it leads to profit, deeply relishing every moment of evil he is able to engineer, and a master of masking it all through adroit, politically-attuned public relations aimed at people too stupid to question him -- all while paying absolutely no attention to what his past clearly demonstrates he has done, thus thoroughly frustrating the decent folks all around him. Leopold to a "T."

This modern man, Cheney, however needs no kingship, no ornate palaces, no personally-owned colony like the Congo; Cheney's writ is the world. It is all of humankind that Cheney would torture, enslave, murder, or plunder if it were required. And Cheney is the ultimate arbiter of whether it is required. Take a look at that face as he tells the American people and the world in 2002 that "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Now, wait a dozen years and envision the same face, somewhat leaner and -- if possible -- meaner, saying on the editorial pages of his Journal as Iraq implodes: "Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many." He is of course talking about President Obama, not President George W. Bush. Leopold, whom the American poet Vachel Lindsay, has "Burning in Hell...", must be yearning for Dick's arrival because no one, except perhaps for Leopold himself, would register such a claim in the face of such self-demeaning evidence to the contrary.

In the same chapter of his book referenced above, Hochschild writes: "The Congo offers a striking example of the politics of forgetting." He is right. But it is more than forgetting. It is an abject lack of political courage to hold people accountable [emphasis added.]

In King Leopold's case, Belgium and the wider world want to move on and not look back. Holding people accountable would mean holding themselves accountable. That central Africa is today still an unfolding tragedy of exploitation, commercial rivalries, and indigenous incapacity partly an inheritance of colonialism, matters little. The world moves on relentlessly to fulfill its oligarchies' desires for wealth and power. Suitable rhetoric is developed and delivered to keep the masses quiescent. The Leopolds and Cheneys of the world are privately lauded for their hard-headed realpolitik while appropriately tut-tutted in public. Presidents and prime ministers proclaim that it would be nationally disruptive to hold people accountable for their crimes and, besides, they are more concerned for the future than the past.

Which is why most people in America today live in the moment and in the moment alone. If they realized and cared about the past, if they used that realization and care to make the future better, they would not be able to live in the moment so well. In that respect, Leopold and Cheney are right: wealth and power is all that matters.

My NB: Burt Bacharach's/Hal David 1967 song "What's It All About, Alfie" Lyrics by Dionne Warwick says it all--Youtube sung by Dionne Warwick below.

Whats it all about Alfie
Is it just for the moment we live
Whats it all about
When you sort it out Alfie

Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind
And if only fools are kind Alfie
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel

And if life belongs only to the strong Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden ruler
As sure as I believe there's a Heaven above Alfie
I know there's something much more
Something even non-believers can believe in

I believe in love Alfie
Without true love we just exist Alfie
Until you find the love you've missed you're nothing Alfie
When you walk let your heart lead the way
And you'll find love any day Alfie, Alfie, Alfie

Listen to it on Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCZNzydsLzU

                                ____________

* Lawrence Wilkerson is Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He was Chief of Staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002-2005. He served 31 years in the U.S. Army.

HOBBLE

BOYCOTT HOBBY LOBBY AND ALL CORPORATIONS THAT DENY REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH CARE RIGHTS TO WOMEN!

Hobbied

There are no words to describe the noxiousness of the five "conservative" justices on the Supreme Court.  Keep electing Republican presidents that nominate these malignant decision- makers to the court with Republicans in the Senate who consent to them and these are the decisions you will get.  The Hobby Lobby decision will now allow employers in on your most personal health care decisions.

You will get a Citizens United and McCutcheon v. FEC decisions buying up the political process by billionaires staggeringly iterating corporations are people, you will get women's health care patients getting hurt or killed at clinics by anti-choice religious fanatics, you will get unions obliterated and you may even make abortion illegal again depending on the state so women can return to coat hanger abortions and then die.  The rich will never suffer but poor women having unwanted or malformed pregnancies with no available parental support for them wil.  Conservatives wax vaporous when they rail against using taxpayer money to pay for support of the poor.  They say “let em die.”  I say, good, let conservatives pay!

People die with these malevolent decisions handed down by a reactionary Court, they die and the conservatives on the Court do not give a damn! It's as simple as that!

It is why, no question, Democrats need to be elected everywhere if you care about a dying nation!

Mass. abortion clinic buffer zone law struck down -- TO LIFE?

ANOTHER BIG REASON WHY THE DEMOCRATS MUST KEEP THE SENATE, TAKE BACK THE HOUSE AND KEEP THE PRESIDENCY.  IF THIS DOES NOT PERSUADE YOU NOTHING WILL!

I paste the SCOTUS decision referenced above here or below.

Our country has gone reactionary insane.

Those so called "counseling" parameters the court talks about in yet another rancid decision striking down the 35 foot buffer zone for protesters at women's clinics were put in force by the Mass legislature for a reason -- so people will not KILL those providing safe treatment for women receiving reproductive care!

We in Massachusetts have had two clinic murders of full term human beings simply doing their job. The right wing is a violent part of our nation NOT a nice counseling body. They invade personal space of women making personal decisions. They are brutal, their signs are brutal and their speech is not a sweet dialogue. It is a screaming monologue.

Right wing anti choice speech is anything but gentle counseling it is hostile and intimating and more than a few times has lead to violence. This is yet another terrible political right wing SCOTUS decision based on so called "free speech" not decided on the merits not even on a state's rights issue of the ability of a state to regulate protest for safety at clinics.
If you do not like abortion by all means do not have one!!

To the Court: Forgive them for they know not what they do. I am waiting for the next right wing murderer to hurt those providing the most personal of medical services because it IS STILL LEGAL to provide those services at least for the next minute and one half.

The court seems to want to regress to the 1950's when women died from back alley abortions or committed suicide when they found out they were pregnant. Respectfully, the so called "conservative" justices are one thing and that is right wing political. Stare decisis? I think not.

The fact that the progressives on the Court joined them in this decision is mind numbing unbelievable. The Court should blame itself when the next violence to an innocent employee or patient at a clinic takes place! This is a despicable decision. Obviously, the Court rendering this decision cares little for life!

http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/06/26/supreme-court-throws-out-massachusetts-abortion-clinic-buffer-zone-law/VTTYHYD8oiVJJNreAPyKAN/story.html?p1=ArticleTab_Article_

A Time to Choose

Elect Democrats and sign them up across the nation.  Do NOT let Republicans
with their Tea Party violent fringe that suppresses the vote take the Senate!!

I post the web page for NARAL  here and below for more info.

NBC to Accept Ads for Obvious Child

NBC says it will accept ads for the film Obvious Child as submitted, including the word "abortion."

See http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/ for details.

Mississippi Avoids Madness

Even when Republican Tea Baggers win a few they are not where this nation ideologically is.  While many certainly call themselves conservative they are not a militia mad Cliven Bundy fanatical right wing fascist-like Ku Klux Klan electorate.

In general, this nation is center sometimes center left and sometimes center right.  When a question was posed to the Tea Bagger McDaniel in his run for the Senate against longtime-establishment Republican Cochran if a devastating storm like Katrina were to hit again would you accept federal help.  McDaniel actually said “I do not know I’d have to look into it” which is political double speak that means NO.  No? You would not accept aid for the victims of a catastrophic hurricane in your state? Are you kidding me?

It was, though, the answer a Bagger should give because that is exactly what they are about. They are about, as Grover Norquist, the conservative anti-government poster boy, said government should be so small one can sink it in the bathtub. 

The reality is when disaster hits the Federal government, we have learned from our collective historical experience, should play an important role.  Government is the only entity that has the size, organizational resources and the ability to help with the funding to deal with massive catastrophes to our nation.  Whether it is help with healthcare or help to repair tornado devastated communities government supplying help NOT for a hand out but for a helping hand up, is in Goldwateresque prose, no vice but a virtue.  FDR knew as all Democrats in our era now know that is truth.

No matter how much Republicans Rove-like election fraud steals elections Republicans will NOT prevail.  Vigilance and voting is what will ultimately defeat Tea Baggers and Republicans throughout the nation whose ideology is sink or swim.  If one has no health insurance too bad, they say, "let him die." This nation, as rugged individualistic as its political mantra has been, still has a heart and each one of us knows that no one is immune from catastrophe whether an economically Wall Street driven crash destroying jobs or catastrophic illness destroying lives. No one is completely safe.

Tea Bagger Republicans left their hearts in the arctic polar vortex.  A nation needs empathy for others’ hurt because, quoting Bette Davis "old age ain't for sissies." She also said “... hold on to your hats; it may be a bumpy ride” and we know it may.  Good fortune can turn in a sour second.  

Thank you, indeed, President Roosevelt, for Social Security. Where would the middle class and the recent poor be without it?  Many Tea Baggers can and do say that too then they step on their own toes and vote a Republican in to eradicate all safety nets.  Do not let them.  When we are in trouble we need help, yes, – often government help – when our maladies are big enough to warrant it and its help that should be there when we need it to help us all!

REGISTER TO VOTE DEMOCRATS, INDEPENDENTS AND DEMOCRATIC LEANING OPPOSITION PARTY OTHERS.  ESPECIALLY REGISTER WOMEN, HISPANICS AND OTHER MINORITIES, THE ELDERLY AND THE DISABLED ACROSS THE NATION.  DO IT AS IF YOUR LIFE DEPENDS UPON IT BECAUSE IT, IN FACT, DOES!

A Happy Ending

This is an amazing video. I post it here and below. STICK with it if you can as it has a MOST happy ending. It will warm your heart.

I sobbed and then I cheered. I wanted to hold that rescued pup in my arms and never let go as he gets a transformation by wonderful humans from certain death to life. The organization Hope for Paws needs your help. They restore my faith in humanity while the bestial humans who left this pup on the street to die earn my wrath. I would love to see these sub-humans who left a pup abandoned to certain death on the street prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Watch and see what empathy and kindness human beings can deliver. It made me so happy to see what goodness there is still left in us who call ourselves human but when the evil in us triumphs it stops my heart.

The pup WILL have a good life and Hope for Paws will see to it that he does. I wish I could adopt him but I cannot so I hope that many will contribute to this wonderful organization, adopt and give a great life to an abandoned pup if you can. I also hope Hope for Paws gives us updates on Theo's condition and when he is adopted I hope it monitors where he is placed and how he is treated. I trust they will find him a good home!!

Please, Hope for Paws, give him many hugs for me!

Forward this to anyone you choose.

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxEQFTpwJG0

Election Rigging, Dark Money in Cantor's "Upset" Loss to Koch Stealth Candidate

In case you have not seen this article in TruthOut.org.  It is exactly why Democrats must be registered in every state and why they must win.  Monitor fraud i.e. Republican election fraud everywhere!

Sunday, 22 June 2014 00:00 By Ben-Zion Ptashnik and Victoria Collier, Truthout | News Analysis

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) during a news conference at the Capitol in Washington, Feb. 5, 2013. Cantor will resign as majority leader within weeks, according to leadership aides a day after he was defeated in the 2014 primary election by David Brat. (Photo: Christopher Gregory / The New York Times)

November's political races will feature an all-out battle for control of the US Senate. Eric Cantor's "upset" Virginia primary defeat raises two integrity issues barely covered in the media that are red flags for those concerned about vote manipulations.

Political races this November will feature an all-out battle for control of the US Senate. The "upset" Virginia primary defeat of Eric Cantor raised two critical election integrity issues that few in the mainstream media have covered, but which should set up serious red flags for those concerned about manipulations of the 2014 and 2016 elections.

The first alarm is the hidden connection that Professor David Brat's victory had to the Koch Brothers dark money network: hundreds of millions of dollars in "charitable contributions" to inoculate American academic institutions and media with extremist libertarian philosophy, promoting the Ayn Randian culture of greed while boosting radical Tea Party candidates. The net effect has been to undermine the civility of American politics, divide the Republican Party, stalemate Congress and hobble government institutions.

Most pundits reflecting on the Virginia race have myopically ignored the money-in-politics corruption, because outwardly, Cantor outspent Brat by a huge margin. Instead they focused analysis on immigration issues, intraparty Republican division, Cantor's complacency as a candidate, or the possibility of Democrats in the open primary crossing over to vote for his radical opponent.

David Brat was not just any economics professor. He was director of Randolph-Macon's Moral Foundations of Capitalism program, a curriculum underwritten by John Allison's BB&T Bank's charitable foundation. Allison is on the Board of Directors of the Ayn Rand Institute, which means Rand's thousand-page ode to antigovernment libertarian capitalism, Atlas Shrugged, is usually included in the curriculum. Allison is also the CEO of the Cato Institute, the Koch-funded, far-right think tank working closely with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to set back the social reform and safety net programs of the 20th century.

ALEC has promoted legislation for voter suppression and antilabor laws, and its legislative members have pushed extreme gerrymandering in states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina and Michigan.

"The virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programmer could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It's the electoral equivalent of a drone strike."

Meanwhile Koch Industries and related front charities are engaged heavily in financial "sponsorship" of right-wing radio talk jocks who push climate change denial and play a heavy-handed role in supporting Koch-backed political candidates. A number of these, particularly Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, vigorously boosted Brat's campaign while denigrating Cantor. Combined, these factors prove that Brat is not just a benign professor who luckily caught the Republican House Leader offguard; he is a construct and pawn of Koch industries' deliberate and methodical transformation of the Republican Party and American democracy.

Computerized Election Rigging - the "Hidden" Voter Suppression

The Virginia primary not only displays the nefarious role of dark money in promoting extremism, it also raises yet again the question of vote rigging - specifically the proven vulnerability to error and insider manipulation of the computers that register and tabulate our votes.

Brat won by 7,000 votes. But at least 37,000 votes in Virginia district 7 were cast on ballotless Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting machines, providing no ability to recount, audit, or verify that these votes were counted as cast. Seventeen states use the same DRE technology in at least some of their districts.

Nationwide, electronic voting machines are programmed on proprietary software that cannot be publicly examined, and sold to voting districts by private corporations known to have lied to public officials, employed convicted felons, and maintain ties to right wing partisan and religious extremists.

As explained in the 2012 Harper's Magazine article, "How to Rig an Election":

"The virtual vote count can be manipulated in total secrecy. By means of proprietary, corporate-owned software, just one programmer could steal hundreds, thousands, potentially even millions of votes with the stroke of a key. It's the electoral equivalent of a drone strike."

The Virginia primary brings to the foreground how likely it may be that, if all else fails, this cabal of right-wing libertarian-anarchists could hack the voting machinery, as has been suspected in a number of recent elections. A prime example is the evident manipulation of the voting technology in the 2010 Democratic primary race in South Carolina.

In that remarkable election, Alvin Greene - an unemployed, often incoherent man facing obscenity charges - became the Democratic candidate for the US Senate. As described by election watchdog VoterGA, Greene ran absolutely no campaign; no debates or fundraisers, and did not even deploy a yard sign, yet he mysteriously - miraculously - beat former National Guard Colonel, judge, and four-term state legislator Vic Rawl, by a stunning 18 percent margin. This ensured the landslide victory in November of Tea Party Republican and fundamentalist Christian, Jim DeMint.

Voters reported that "defective" Touch Screen machines "flipped" votes in the primary to Greene in a number of SC voting jurisdictions. Half of South Carolina's counties reported large disparities between absentee ballot counts and those tallied by the suspect machines on election day. According to VoterGA, In 20 out of 24 SC counties, Rawl won the verifiable absentee vote tally but lost to Greene on the total computerized counts - statistically a highly improbable occurrence.

Greene declined to explain where he got the $10,400 needed to file as a candidate and denied that he was a GOP plant.

Immediately after the story of his controversial election broke again into the mainstream media, Jim DeMint abruptly resigned his Senate seat in December of 2012 and was hired to head up the Koch-backed rightist Heritage Foundation. Filmmaker Jason Smith made DeMint's scandalous 2010 election subject of an in-depth documentary on computerized election fraud, I Voted?

Why Has Nothing Been Done to Safeguard Our Elections?

For decades, democracy activists have sounded the alarm on the dangerous spread of e-voting systems through dozens of books and films, and thousands of articles. The growing attention certainly has raised the risk to would-be criminals, and may have entirely thwarted some rigging attempts (in 2012, legal action and even counter-hacking was credited with preventing the stealing of the presidential race in Ohio). Unfortunately, during the quiet interim between elections, this issue falls back into obscurity.

Much of the blame falls on the media, both mainstream and alternative. When election "upsets" and anomalies occur - such as Cantor's race in Virginia - media pundits and analysts engage in whatever contortions are necessary to rationalize and explain the outcome. Rarely do they question the faulty and vulnerable technology, even in shocking turnarounds that defy polling gravity.

As noted by Election Integrity journalist, Brad Friedman: "Three days ago, The Washington Post reported that Cantor's internal polling showed him 34 points ahead of Brat. Tonight, it's a given among the pundit class, that those numbers were simply wrong, and tonight's completely unverified computer-reported results are correct, showing Cantor losing instead by more than 11 points."

Progressive media has largely ignored the evidence that recent election "upsets" have favored extreme right-wing candidates so consistently that some Election Integrity activists have coined the phenomenon, the "red shift."

Alvin Greene's glaring election fraud was certainly not the first example. In 2002, the GOP regained control of the US Senate with the crucial defeat of popular Georgian Democratic Senator, Max Cleland, a Silver Star recipient who lost three limbs in Vietnam. Early polls had given him a solid lead over his Republican opponent, Saxby Chambliss, who was supported by the Christian right and the NRA. Two days before the election, a Zogby poll gave Chambliss a one-point lead among likely voters, while the Atlanta Journal - Constitution reported that Cleland maintained a three-point advantage.

Cleland lost by seven points; a "red shift" of 10 points.

However, just prior to the election, Diebold Voting Machine employees had applied a mysterious, uncertified software "patch" to 5,000 voting machines that Georgia had purchased in May. Diebold consultant and whistleblower, Chris Hood, later confessed: "We were told that it was intended to fix the clock in the system, which it didn't do. The curious thing is the very swift, covert way this was done . . . It was an unauthorized patch, and they were trying to keep it secret from the state . . . We were told not to talk to county personnel about it."

Two years later, John Kerry lost his 2004 presidential bid in Ohio; a key swing state crucial to George Bush's reelection. A blitz of right-wing voter suppression and dirty tricks tactics were reported by thousands of voters, including voting machine anomalies and "flipped" votes. The Republican secretary of state, J. Kenneth Blackwell, a fundamentalist Christian who also served as cochair of Ohio's Committee to Re-Elect George W. Bush (yes, you just read that), oversaw the controversial election.

Four years later, Ohio attorney (and former Republican) Cliff Arnebeck began gathering evidence to file a racketeering claim against Karl Rove, which included the charge that Rove's computer operatives had masterminded the theft of the 2004 election. Specifically, the investigation focused on the unusual computer architecture of election night, designed by top GOP tech-guru (and zealous anti-abortion Christian) Michael Connell. It was discovered that this system funneled electronic vote data to the servers of a right-wing, Rove-connected company in Tennessee, which could have tampered with results before displaying them on the Ohio Secretary of State's website. Connell was fighting Arnebeck's subpoena to testify in open court against Rove, when he was killed in the crash of his single-engine Piper Saratoga he was piloting alone.

Lou Harris, long regarded as the father of modern political polling, stated: "Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen."

John Kerry showed an insurmountable lead in exit polling late on Election Day. Yet the final vote tallies in 30 states deviated widely from the polls, with discrepancies favoring George W. Bush in all but nine. Some of the greatest disparities were concentrated in Ohio; in one precinct, exit polls indicated that Kerry should have received 67 percent of the vote, but the certified tally gave him only 38 percent. The odds of such an unexpected outcome occurring only as a result of sampling error are 1 in 867,205,553.

Other victories that contradicted the polls, where electronic vote rigging has been suspected, include Chuck Hagel's US Senate 1996 win in Nebraska, where it was discovered that Hagel had not disclosed his prior role as chairman of ES&S, the voting machine company that counted his own votes.

Computer manipulations triggered George W Bush's first win in 2000, where programmed purging of voter rolls was topped off by a rogue memory card in Volusia County, Florida. At midnight, the card mysteriously registered 16,000 "negative" votes for Al Gore, allowing Bush's cousin at Fox News to call the election for him at the order of Governor Jeb Bush.

Where Do We Go From Here?

We can only speculate about the possibility of computerized rigging in the Virginia Republican primary - or in any election - but it would be insane not to embrace the truly overwhelming evidence that our system of voting is flawed and ripe for fraud and abuse by anyone with access - as proven by Argonne National Labs recent $26 hack.

We must immediately stop using DRE voting systems that do not even afford the ability of a recount or audit. That is the very least we can do to somewhat safeguard important upcoming elections - but it is not enough. In European countries, election technology that offers no public transparency has been outlawed. A fully transparent paper-based system, counted in public on election night, is internationally considered the Gold Standard of democratic elections.

As November approaches, American voters still lack the ability to know with certainty who wins any given race, or the true results of ballot initiatives and referenda affecting some of the most vital issues of our day.

Election Integrity remains a dangerously overlooked vulnerability in the overall populist and progressive strategy. Democracy activists must take the steps necessary to implement real reform and safeguard future elections.

Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

REGISTER DEMOCRATS IN EVERY STATE IN THE NATION AND MONITOR EVERY ELECTION FOR TRUE FRAUD I.E. REPUBLICAN FRAUD.

Socked

I never cared one wit about soccer and surely never called it football.  The Patriots were football but soccer was not a part of my life until it was one week ago.  I am now in love with that sport and seduced by the nationalistic feeling it engenders.  I usually eschew extreme nationalism and American exceptionalism as they are not part of my repertoire of thought.  I reject it for more intellectually careful well thought out politics and reject the often fascistic brutality that is part of the essence of extreme nationalism.

 

But I caught the FIFA World Cup soccer fever and built my Sunday around a game between the US and Portugal.  Portugal tied it in the last second and I thought I got hit by a truck as I watched the American team snatch a defeat-like tie from the hands of victory.  I actually cried.  I was at first sad and then childlike angry that the USA lost-like tie.

I do not like mindless, uncritical nationalism the kind where one accepts national behavior no matter who it hurts.  I am Nuremberg wary and careful to laud policy I think humane and decry policy I think viciously brutal.  But on this day I surprised myself.  I cried at the national anthem, I cried at the enthusiastic rooting of the USA supportive crowd and I cried when America tied.  It would have been a USA come-from-behind win that was not to be.  My disappointment was palpable.

So, is it just a silly game or was it something more?  I decided it meant something more.  I am tired of America losing; I am tired of the endless national discord, disputed foreign policy and wars that make things worse; that kill so many or maim them for life so that others can buy oil and make the oil barons and their political lackeys very rich.  I am tired of America getting kicked in the teeth; I am tired of hearing the curse of other nations when so many here have paid so much for policy that was so brutally bad over there. 

 

I watched the ceremonies during the Normandy remembrance when we were blessed and loved by the nations we lifted up from the jackboot of tyranny; when we saved the masses from a world that went viciously insane.  My father, a Republican at heart, loved FDR.  It was to be the only thing political upon which he and I agreed.  Though I never knew that president I loved him too.  I went to Hyde Park, and stood at his, Eleanor and their dog Fala’s graves and cried.  I want an America like that once again.  I want us to stand for something and not have to question the veracity of politicos who never served a day in their life sending men and women to their deaths based on lies.  I want an FDR again, I want a humane nation again, I want to feel pride about my nation again which stood then for what was moral, good and right.

I let FIFA World Cup Soccer allow me the privilege of fervent nationalism and cheered my country on wanting it to win.  I want it to win again and I want other nations to love us again.  I want to return to a WWII afterglow when it seemed all things were possible and most everything good was made in America.  I want things to be made in America again. 

But it felt like we lost today yet again.  The FIFA World Cup game was a metaphor allowing me to recapture a patriotism that lies just beneath the surface waiting for the next FDR to free us and the world to love us once more.  I want us to win again one more time before my own generation comes to its end.

Jon Stewart repairing the gay away!

The June 17, 2014 episode of the magnificent Jon Stewart is here or pasted below. It is absolutely hysterical and brilliant but a warning there is a bit of an ick factor.  Still worth watching for how he satirizes the idiotic gay reparative religious wacko therapy "cure" for homosexuality as the right wingnut morons own the ick.  If you easily blush then beware. Stewart reached a new height of satire that might have made even Lenny Bruce blush but be oh so jealous of the very talented great Jon Stewart!


http://thedailyshow.cc.com/full-episodes/6vda7v/june-17--2014---daniel-schulman