Forgive us if we conclude that a newspaper led by someone who speaks this way to college seniors has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it.

It looks like the frat boys at Kappa Gamma Anal Speculum is having a war with Wai Beta Thanyo Mama to see if they can retain their status as Karl Rove’s favorite hemorrhoid.

And looky! Here’s your chance to bring your slingshots for a Preparation H fight. Though tomatoes, waterballoons and rotten eggs are acceptable alternatives.

As I noted in a comment to Glenn Greenwald, let’s stop fretting about the future and focus on getting the essential matter out to the public as simply, clearly and repeatedly as we can:

“The Republican Supreme Court determined Bush broke the law and said the president’s criminal behavior must stop.”

Nobody can counter that convincingly, so let it resound from the rooftops. If we argue theory or fret about what-ifs, we invite distraction and spin. Let’s promote a clear, sharp focus instead.

[EXCERPT]

Good morning.
Thanks for inviting me into your homes. You probably realize I could come in either way, since my friend makes keys.
God is great God is good let us thank him for our food.

My old praying buddy, Zarqie (God is great God is good let us thank him for our food) has booked his trip to Virginland and, God willing, is up for it. He is a marter now, and can now shop at the Wal-Mart in the sky…without money!

Diamonds cut diamonds. I am a king of diamonds. The great America is only a jack of diamonds. Do the math.
And your president is only like a 6 of hearts or some other boring card. And he will be gone in a couple of years. I, however, will still be here in Baluchistan with my nephew, Jimmy the Hydrant.

Not only is your illiterate president a low card, he is also a mere Methodist, and everyone knows that a Methodist is just a Baptist who can read. Yet still he doesn’t…except the Eggman’s daily talking points. Were only your Bush, “The Mediocre Satan”, a Socratic Methodist, you might stand a chance. But he is only a Kristol Methodist, damaged goods. Just watch what happens to his teeth. They will Anglify right before your eyes.
Have Karl add “maintain dentition” to his dailies and he may be spared much fingerpointing. Parsley is good to fix that odor problem, which some say he got from Ann Coulter whom everyone knows has a smelly yoni from her Nazi Youth League nights. God is great God is good let us thank him for our food.
—

When life gets you down, just remember that we’re standing on a planet that evolving and revolving at one hundred thousand miles an hour. Is that right? That fast! No wonder it seems so windy.

Before Monty Python there was, of course, the Bhagavad Gita. That part about viewing life and war as but a drama. You’ll feel better in your armchair. God is great God is good let us thank him for our food.
(He talks a lot about food.)

Some people say that if I didn’t exist, your president would have to invent me. Well, your president is not that inventive, even thought Neitzsche says we are all greater artists than we imagine. But he was talking about our tendency to live in the world of make-believe, which Bad Gump certainly does. But my polls are indicating that his little fling there with Condie gave him a boost to his manly self-esteem, much like Viagra gave Rush the manliness to share his Herpes with Chloe O’Brien, whom I hear is filing for a restraining order.

My check to the Supremes is in the mail, but tell George I’ve still not gotten mine. Well, I did get last month’s. God is great God is good let us thank him for our food. While you’re at it, tell him I still haven’t been thanked for the “trifecta” line.

Lastly, I don’t think it is asking too much to receive SAG wages, at least, for my spoken lines. Granted I’d rather be above the line, but royalty checks are too easily traced. I’m getting tired of eating pork and beans.
But to be fair, I do have a lot to be thankful for. Jack Bauer is going to China, and not coming here. This is a good thing. He is no sandal-wearing Jesus. Wouldn’t wanna meet up with that guy. Besides, I enjoyed Klute.
At least the Nintendo.

Oh, and BOO!

I just got off a blogger conference call with USAction about a poll they just released.   It’s a poll of swing voters in the "swingiest" districts in the country.  These are the conclusions:

Swing voters in swing districts and swing states overwhelmingly support a plan to invest more in clean energy, affordable health care for all, and education when it is paid for by rolling back tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. This support will be strongest and best survive attacks when it includes measures to increase government accountability and when the tax cut rollback leaves enough funds to reduce the deficit.

This survey reflects the views of the “swingiest” of voters in the country—the voters likely to decide the outcome of the 2006 election cycle—in a mood demanding fundamental change in the direction of the country. Their current political disposition suggests both intense anger at the ruling class in Washington coupled with, and related to, a broad sense of economic insecurity and inequity.

These voters embrace an agenda of change, an agenda that invests in the future and focuses on improving lives of average people, not subsidizing corporate special interests and the wealthy. The agenda’s focus on improving education (including child development, preschool, public schools and college aid) expanding affordable health care and addressing energy independence drive support for the agenda. These voters support paying for these investments by rolling back the Administration’s tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations.

Importantly, however, these swing voters hold concerns about government, particularly the current size of the deficit and accountability. Thus swing voters’ support of an investment agenda is strongest when it includes measures to increase government accountability and reduce the deficit.

The numbers, questions and a power point analysis of the data are all at US Action’s site.  I’ve only skimmed the report,  but the most interesting aspect of the whole thing to me so far is that this is all common sense:  Swing voters overwhelmingly support an investment agenda when it’s coupled with strict accountability of government spending.  It sells even better when they find out that we’re going to pay for it by rolling back tax cuts for the super wealthy.

Why do you think Grover Norquist has to rule his cadre of anti-tax lunatics with an iron fist?   Because people don’t mind paying taxes, if the money is spent wisely and they believe that everyone is paying their fair share.  Why do the GOP and the corporate media work so hard to distance the Democrats from God?  Because they know that traditional Democratic values (if not the current party leadership’s) more closely reflect the tenets of every major faith than do the kill-the-poor policies of the GOP.

Bottom line: this poll says that the candidate who can challenge the voters with that Big Idea that inspires us instead of terrifies and divides us, will grab the hearts and minds of swing voters in crucial districts.  (Paging John Edwards.)

I’m guessing that only the DLC will be surprised by these findings.  Michael Tomasky got a lot of positive attention with his TAP piece that asks the Democrats to ask Americans to "contribute to a project larger than themselves."   I’ve been saying that same thing
since the middle of 2004, (hint: it’s the Energy, stupid) which is why I think that that conclusions of
the poll are simply common sense.  If I can think of it, anyone can and yet …

The I Got Mine message of the GOP is doomed to fail.  The Ownership Society is a sham.  This poll proves it.  Americans are better than Republicans give us credit for being.  Americans are better than Republicans ever ask us to be.  And everyone knows it.

Full disclosure: I recently started working as a field director for PA Action, which is affiliated with US Action.  That’s not why I was on the call though.  US Action wants to start some buzz by talking about the poll results to liberal bloggers in the target states and I was on that list. 

Book sales no doubt are brisk:

But now we’re told newspapers have a right to commit treason because of “freedom of the press.” Liberals invoke “freedom of the press” like some talismanic formulation that requires us all to fall prostrate in religious ecstasy. On liberals’ theory of the First Amendment, the safest place for Osama bin Laden isn’t in Afghanistan or Pakistan; it’s in The New York Times building.

The Frag Hag will hiss again soon. Check for updates

George Bush gets to strike the righteous pose again when he declares,”There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital intelligence to leak it — and no excuse for any newspaper to print it.”

George Bush should look in the mirror. Nobody has done more to take credit and now point a finger to tell terrorists we are on to them, on the financial trail, a trail which in some ways is going cold.

George Bush, September 24, 2001

We have developed the international financial equivalent of law enforcement’s “Most Wanted” list. And it puts the financial world on notice.
. . . We’ve established a foreign terrorist asset tracking center at the Department of the Treasury to identify and investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks.

It will bring together representatives of the intelligence, law enforcement and financial regulatory agencies to accomplish two goals: to follow the money as a trail to the terrorists, to follow their money so we can find out where they are; and to freeze the money to disrupt their actions.

When someone doesn’t mention all the times he has revealed how we track terrorist finances and has the balls the temerity to accuse others, that person is guilty of certain um omissions. Bush is lying by omission. A lot. There are lots of omissions
Omissions? What omissions? More news from five years ago on who blabbed what and when on telling terrorists we are on to them:

• On September 24, 2001 Bush shouts out to the world in a speech news of a “foreign terrorist asset tracking center at the Department of the Treasury to identify and investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks . . . to follow the money as a trail to the terrorists.” Bush makes sure its all in writing with a follow up letter to Congress.
• The White House reveals the launch of the Treasury Department’s Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Center (FTAT) on the same day: “The FTAT is a multi-agency task force that will identify the network of terrorist funding and freeze assets before new acts of terrorism take place.”
• On September 26, 2001, Bush clues in the terrorists, “We’re fighting them on a financial front. . . . We will be relentless as we pursue their sources of financing.“
• On October 10, 2001, Bush tips off NATO nations are “sharing intelligence, coordinating law enforcement and cracking down on the financing of terrorist organizations.”

Bush speaks at the United Nations on November 11, 2001:

The most basic obligations in this new conflict have already been defined by the United Nations. On September the 28th, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1373. Its requirements are clear: Every United Nations member has a responsibility to crack down on terrorist financing. We must pass all necessary laws in our own countries to allow the confiscation of terrorist assets. We must apply those laws to every financial institution in every nation.

Not just Bush but others have trumpeted what the government does. George Glass, Director of The Office of Terrorism Finance and Sanctions Policy, December 15, 2003:

We have very successfully used other actions as well, including developing diplomatic initiatives with other governments to conduct audits and investigations, exchanging information on records, cooperating in law enforcement and intelligence efforts, and in shaping new regulatory initiatives.

On January 16, 2004, the Department of the Treasury unveiled a budget increase for FinCEN:

“FinCEN is on the front lines every day, tracking down those who attempt to use the U.S. and global financial system to plot, fund, and perpetrate acts of terrorism around the world. By proposing to substantially increase FinCEN’s resources, President Bush has reaffirmed the administration’s commitment to aggressively fight terrorism on every front,” said Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snow.

The last place money is likely to be is in banks, mostly because Bush told al Qaeda we be looking there.

So Bush blabbed and blabbed and blabbed. Why should he not be accused of a certain hypocrisy and um lying by omitting what he has said? His representatives have too. Certain defenders of George Bush pontificate: “This is not the point, as I explained here. The issue is not that the stories told the terrorists we were watching financial transactions, but that the stories told them how.”

In this pontification, accusers of Bush foolishly hold on to the simple truth that no terrorists actually do business with SWIFT, terrorists only with some of the banks SWIFT serves. Tapping into SWIFT simply reveals what terrorists have done elsewhere earlier. The United States government is using a huge shortcut when it accesses SWIFT and in the long run has access to all variety of financial information that is not terrorist related. All of this is done with an adminstrative subpoena, not a warrant. Those are some of the concerns those who pontificate choose to ignore.

A larger point can be made that much effort is being expended on tracking terrorist financing, but what are we getting for that? Media Matters additionally points to the work of a former State Department official working with the UN on a report on terrorist funding. Victor Comras makes several notes and conclusions:

• The success of freezing terrorist assets “was largely limited to halting money in the banking system.”
• Seeing opportunities to hide its assets, al Qaeda “money was quickly moved out of harm’s way” where it could be traced in banks.
• Preferred places to hide terrorist assets: easily liquideate commodities like diamonds and gold and investment in front companies.
• The assets are still around, they just morph into something less easily found.

On a basic level, following a money trail matters a great deal. Or does it? Researching the terrorist money trail, I came across an opus written by Steve Kiser of The Rand Institute entitledFinancing Terror: An Analysis and Simulation for Affecting Al Qaeda’s Financial Infrastructures Be warned: the document is 247 pages long, but makes some great points. Kiser makes some prescient
points about tracking terrorists, their financing, and free societies (page 15):

Terrorism is particularly vexing to liberal democracies; such states typically have greater restraint on their range of responses to terrorism than do authoritarian or dictatorial governments. The tension represented between security and freedom can be truly troublesome, especially when crafting counter-terrorism policies. What might be an effective counter-terrorism policy in instrumental terms may not be acceptable to a liberal democracy steeped in a tradition of limited government, individual rights, and an expectation of privacy.36 These works are particularly useful when examining terrorist financial networks. Will liberal democracies acquiesce to greater transparency in financial matters? Is there economic space that is large enough for terrorist organizations to acquire, move and use financial assets, but so small that only an extensive government involvement would create transparency in those
spaces? Would the citizens of a liberal state tolerate such an extensive government involvement, even in the face of a terror threat?

Transparency? Or transparent lies? What our government does to track al Qaeda has been no great secret, though the specific story of SWIFT is cited as evidence of some malevolence of the media. This goes to the heart of where our discussion is now engaged. We are simply nuking the messenger here. What Kiser cites earlier in his opus may be even more telling about where we are in this age of assymetrical warfare and how much financing a terrorist organization needs.

. . . a review of statements by prominent policymakers belies a conviction that financial deprivation can deliver a mortal blow to Al Qaeda. President Bush, Secretary of State Powell, former Secretary of the Treasure Paul O’Neil, Secretary of Homeland Security Ridge, other cabinet officials, and several Congresspersons have all indicated a belief that the United States and the international community has the capability to “succeed in starving the terrorists of funding,” that “starving terrorists of funding remains a priority and a success in the war on terrorists,” and “we will dismantle terrorist financial networks.” Furthermore, these same officials reflect a belief that without financial support, terrorist organizations will be unable to function effectively. For example, US Secretary of State Colin Powell flatly claimed “For money is the oxygen of terrorism. Without the means to raise and move money around the world, terrorists cannot function.”

The simple truth is terrorists need little money to do great harm. That’s not to say larger sums of money could do larger damage, but a little money goes a long way. And unfortunately such sums are hard to track.From the Congressional Research Service, December 2002:

the evident fragmentation of terrorist finances poses significant
challenges for law enforcement. Many small terrorist cells are virtually selfsustaining, deriving income from legitimate businesses or from assorted small criminal scams. In such cases, there is not much of a money trail to follow.
Moreover, terrorist operations tend to be cheap; a U.S. government report notes “the relatively modest funds needed to undertake them elude all but the most concentrated oversight.” Apparently the September 11 attacks, which cost an estimated $500,000, required a strategic infusion of funding from outside (much of it reportedly from a terror support network in the United Arab Emirates). Yet the highly destructive 1993 World Trade Center bombing, according to its “mastermind” Ramzi Yousef, cost less than $20,000.

Reportedly, the conspirators were able to fund the operation themselves from criminal activities such as check and credit card fraud, and through donations raised from a local charity.

Most wanted? A sense of reality. The depth and breadth of terrorist financing can not be denied, nor the passion and vehemence with which those who would do us harm find ways great and small to inflict pain upon us. But the truth is George Bush is shooting daggers at the media and the Times in particular not for reasons of national security, but because any stories that point out an impact on civil liberties or point to short cuts in procedure don’t look good for Bush. No concrete harm has been cited after all these revelations. However, the hysteria might chill what we learn about Bush next.

More on the outrage from Bryan Bender in the Boston Globe““Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume” their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. “We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing.”

What’s the point of all this McKrap TM anyway? Could it possibly be politics? WaPo: “President Bush rallied Republicans with another attack on the media last night, in remarks that highlighted efforts at the White House and on Capitol Hill to gain momentum from recent disclosures about classified programs to fight terrorism.” What a nice diversion. Plus if you (terrorist or not) want to know the latest on what the government is doing, go online. Check out all the government websites. Also note it looks like Joe Stalin is back in the house. And don’t miss what we missed earlier.

It’s Christmas in June for voting rights activists all over the country today. The Brennan Center report on the vulnerablity of voting systems is out. Here’s the nut:

The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security, an initiative of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, today released a report and policy proposals concluding that all three of the nation’s most commonly purchased electronic voting systems are vulnerable to software attacks that could threaten the integrity of a state or national election.

“As electronic voting machines become the norm on Election Day, voters are more and more concerned that these machines are susceptible to fraud,” said Michael Waldman, the Brennan Center’s Executive Director. “In fact, we’ve learned a lot from our study. These machines are vulnerable to attack. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we know how to reduce the risks and the solutions are within reach.”

That’s it. That is honest-to-goodness practically all you need to know to be an expert activist in this field. There are serious problems with paperless electronic voting. Everyone knows it. The consequences for our democracy are enormous. The fixes are easy: mandated voter-verified paper ballots and proper audits.

Keep your high-priced, planned-to-be-obsolete, unsecure and unverifiable voting machines, which are now installed throughout the country. (offer void in CT and NY) They can be used as million dollar calculators that give the preliminary election results in time for the 11:00 o’clock news. But for the official results, proper audits of voter-verified paper ballots must be used. It’ll take a little bit longer to find out who the winners are, but when you do, you’ll know they were the winners that the voters picked.

The Democrats are nowhere on this story. blogtopia (hail skippy) has been scooped left right and center, which is what happens when a story is starved of oxygen at the top. Thank goodness for the Bradblog. Even the corporate media has put the lefty blogs to shame. (I had to wash my hands after typing that.) This is a partial list of today’s coverage of the Brennan Report:

Washington Post (USA)- A Single Person Could Swing an Election (June 28, 2006)
The Beacon Journal (OH)- Report Cites Flaws in Electronic Voting (June 28, 2006)
The Globe and Mail (UK)- Many e-Voting Systems Flawed: Report (June 28, 2006)
WWMT (MI)- E-voting Gets Thumbs Down from Report (June 28, 2006)
Free Internet Press (USA)- Cybersecurity Experts Say Voting Machines Have Security Flaws (June 28, 2006)
Reuters (USA)- Study Shows US Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable (June 27, 2006)
USA Today (USA)- Analysis Finds e-Voting Machines Vulnerable (June 27, 2006)
Fox News (USA)- Report: Many E-Voting Systems Flawed (June 27, 2006)
Boston Herald (MA)- Report: Many e-voting Systems Flawed (June 27, 2006)
Guardian Unlimited (UK)- Report: Many E-Voting Systems Flawed (June 27, 2006)
Business Week (USA)- Report: Many E-Voting Systems Flawed (June 27, 2006)
Fox News (USA- Study: E-Voting Systems All Flawed, but Also Easy to Fix (June 27, 2006)
ABC News (NY)- Report: Many E-Voting Systems Flawed (June 27, 2006)
Computer World (USA)- Studies question e-voting security (June 27, 2006)
Canton Rep (OH)- Report Rips Security of Electronic Voting System (June 27, 2006)
Newsfactor Magazine (USA)- Report: E-Voting Machines Are Vulnerable (June 27, 2006)
Playsful Magazine (Romania)- Study Says E-voting Machines Pose Problems (June 27, 2006)
The Washington Times (DC)-Study Says e-Voting Machines Pose Problems (June 27, 2006)
Pierceland Herald (Canada)- Report: Many e-Voting Systems Flawed (June 27, 2006)
Short News (Germany)- Electronic Voting Flawed, Report Finds (June 27, 2006)
ZD Net (USA)- E-voting Gear at Risk of Hacking, Study Says (June 27, 2006)
Monsters & Critics (USA)- Study Says e-Voting Machines Pose Problems (June 27, 2006)
The Post Chronicle (USA)- Study Says E-Voting Machines Pose Problems (June 27, 2006)

Conspicuously absent is the NYT, whose reporting of the blockbuster story of the theft of our democracy via electronic voting machines has been among the worst in the country. Their editorial coverage, on the other hand, has been good. I’m predicting an editorial on this tomorrow with a fairly awful news story that casts the people opposed to unsecure paperless voting systems as conspiracy nuts and quotes voting machine vendor reps saying misleading stuff like this, which was a popular quote in the corporate media today:

To date, voting systems have not been successfully attacked in a live election,” said Bob Cohen, a spokesman for the Election Technology Council, a voting machine vendors’ trade group.

Ah, but they have been successfully attacked in quite a few demonstrations though. (via skippy) But even beyond that, the fact is that without voter-verified paper ballots and mandated proper audits of those ballots, we have no idea if a voting system was “successfully attacked” or not and anyone who says otherwise is either lying or so misinformed on the topic that s/he shouldn’t be talking to the press.

So it’s a good day. There’s even discussion in the House about legislation that will address the problem:

Republican Reps. Tom Cole (Okla.) and Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) in calling for a law that would set strict requirements for electronic voting machines. Howard Schmidt, former chief of security at Microsoft and President Bush’s former cybersecurity adviser, also endorsed the Brennan report.

Remember, though, that the Help America Vote Act was supposed to address the problem of faulty voting systems and we saw where that led. It is imperative that we keep our eye on any leglislation that gets moving through Congress. Left alone, you can be sure that the people in charge - on both sides of the aisle - will not write law that makes it easier for people to vote or for those votes to be counted. Democracy is not a friend of the powerful.

This is the story of the century and we’re writing it.

cross-posted at my place because I never met an eVoting story I didn’t love

The Delaware River is flooding in my neck of the woods (just outside Trenton, NJ) so like everyone else, I’m watching the river and waiting for news of the people who are being affected by the third major flood in less than two years. My neighbor who works in Yardley boro, which sits on the river, says that the first responders are doing an excellent job managing the disaster so far. That’s the kind of good work that government, run correctly, is capable of.

Our local paper’s online coverage of the disaster so far has been fantastic. There’s a headline box in the center of the homepage and the links inside it are all useful. I especially like the one that takes you to the National Weather Service’s Delaware River tracker. It lets you follow the flood at a few major points along the river, Reigelsville, New Hope, Washington Crossing, Trenton included. Select a checkpoint and check “local impact” and you get a description of what each flood stage means. So at 17.0 feet, flooding begins upstream along PA Route 32 in Yardley. At 18.5 feet water begins entering level 1 of the parking garage at state capitol building.

Right now, 8:15pm, it’s at 22.59 ft.

I know all that because as a citizen with internet access, I can take advantage of the amazing work that the National Weather Service does. That’s the same National Weather Service that Rick Santorum criticized and wants to privatize. Is it November yet?

Bruce Springsteen is at it again. He’s out there on tour stirring up the Democratic base singing about labor rights and civil rights, faith, perseverence, dignity and American Refugees. Soledad O’Brien doesn’t get why - even when he tells her. Or maybe she’s confused because she can’t figure out why he isn’t in jail. He’s naming names. He’s singing songs like How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live “in honor of President Bush’s visit down there where he managed to gut the only agency through political cronyism that’s supposed to assist American citizens in times like that. So it’s all in a day’s work … these days.”

It seemed the most popular question Springsteen got as he promoted We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions was “Is this a political album?” Here are some of the liner notes from it:

Mrs. McGrath: Strongly associated with the Irish Republicans and the Easter Uprising of 1916, this antiwar ballad was first published in 1815 as a Dublin broadside.

O Mary Don’t You Weep: One of the most important Negro spirituals, adapted by black Penecost churches, the song then made its way into the freedom song repetoire of the civil rights movement.

John Henry: Germinated from a true story of a man versus machine contest, which occurred during the building of Eastern railroads in the late 19th century.

Jacob’s Ladder: A Negro spiritual based on Genesis 28:11-19, Jacob’s prophetic dream of escape from bondage. A new chorus was written by striking textile workers in the 1940s; Pete Seeger created a new chorus.

My Oklahoma Home: Written with her brother Bill by Agnes “Sis” Cunningham, member of the Almanac Singers, union organizer, foudner-editor of Broadside magazine and herself a Dust Bowl refugee.

Eyes on the Prize: A Holiness hymm also known as “Gospel Plow,” “Paul and Silas” and “Hold On.” “Keep your eyes on the prize” in a 1956 rewrite by civil rights activist Alice Wine.

Shenandoah: An American pioneer’s homesick and lovelorn lament, from very early in the country’s history, probably the first two decades of the 19th century.

Pay Me My Money Down: Identified as a sea chanty but actually a protest song of the black stevedores in Georgia and South Carolina ports; unscrupulous ship captains would often try to slip out of the harbor with their workers unpaid.

We Shall Overcome: The most important political protest song of all-time, sung around the world wherever people fight for justice and equality. Originally a Baptist hymm, brought to the labor movement in the 1930’s, popularized among civil rights workers in the 1950s at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

Labor rights and civil rights, faith, perseverence, dignity and American Refugees. Is that political? Not according to the corporate media. “Political” is worrying if the 37% of Americans who still think that BushCo isn’t a miserable failure will feel alienated, not so much by your belief that he is, but by your belief that you have the right to say so. It’s all in a day’s work.

Do yourself a favor and take advantage of AOL’s collaboration with Springsteen. AOL is hosting seventeen live concert videos taped throughout the U.S. leg of the tour and chosen by Bruce. I’m not sure how much longer they’ll be online. Watch them and you’ll get a real appreciation for Springsteen’s greatest of his many gifts, which is his ability to reflect his times. He did it after 9/11 with The Rising, which is as perfect a collection of grief, despair, anger, faith, acceptance and healing that’s ever been. He did it with Devils and Dust, which should be our national anthem now that we’ve embraced the BushCo Doctrine of Eternal War. And he’s done it again post-Katrina, mid-BushCo when we desperately need songs of protest and faith and dignity.

Is that political? God, I hope so.

Via Glenn Greenwald: Bryan Bender writes in today’s Boston Globe that, um, the program to track terrorists through financial transactions, was not exactly a secret secret.

News reports disclosing the Bush administration’s use of a special bank surveillance program to track terrorist financing spurred outrage in the White House and on Capitol Hill, but some specialists pointed out yesterday that the government itself has publicly discussed its stepped-up efforts to monitor terrorist finances since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks….

…a search of public records — government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 — describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.

“There have been public references to SWIFT before,” said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. “The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before.”

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. “A lot of people were aware that this was going on,” said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.

“Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume” their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. “We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing.”

Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database.

I can hear the righties now – the UN Security Council are traitors, too.

Dan Froomkin tells more:

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the international banking cooperative that quietly allowed the Treasury Department and the CIA to examine hundreds of thousands of private banking records from around the world.

But the existence of SWIFT itself has not exactly been a secret. Certainly not to anyone who had an Internet connection.

SWIFT has a Web site, at swift.com .

It’s a very informative Web site. For instance, this page describes how “SWIFT has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organisations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities.”

(And yes, FATF has its own Web site, too.)

Yet yesterday press secretary Tony Snow said he was “absolutely sure” terrorists didn’t know about SWIFT. Sure.

As explained by Ron Suskind on Monday’s Hardball, some time back terrorist organizations deducted that their financial transactions were giving them away.

MATTHEWS: Well let me just tell you what you said. “Eventually not surprisingly,” and we‘re talking about electronic transfer surveillance, “our opponents figured it out. It was a matter really of deduction. Enough people got caught and a view of which activities had in common provides clues as to how they may have been identified and apprehended. We were surprised it took so long,” said one intelligence official.

So in other words, the bad guys figured out how we were catching them.

SUSKIND: Right, it‘s a process of deduction. After a while, you catch enough of them, they‘re not idiots. They say, “Well, we can‘t do the things we were doing.” They‘re not leaving electronic trails like they were.

Matthews was quoting from page 279 of Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Solution. If you start reading on the previous page, you see that Suskind was writing about all manner of “electronically traceable activities — from satellite phone calls to bank account withdrawals.”

And that’s largely how we managed, from early 2002 to late 2003, to know a great deal about al Qaeda, get a sense of who was connected to whom, and capture quite a few suspects, most of whom have vanished into overseas U.S. prisons or similar, maybe worse destinations inside Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Egypt. …

Eventually, and not surprisingly, our opponents figured it out. It was a matter, really, of deduction. Enough people get caught and a view of which activities they had in common provides clues as to how they have have been identified and apprehended.

“We were surprised it took them so long,” said one senior intelligence official. …

…The al Qaeda playbook, employed by what was left of the network, its affiliates and imitators, started to stress the necessity of using couriers to carry cash and hand-delivered letters. This slows the pace of operations, if not necessarily their scale, and that was, indeed, a victory. …

Incarnations of terror cells, meanwhile, were taking shape. Stealthy, diffuse, and largely unconnected to a centralized network, these were self-activated, often self-funded, and ready to download key operational guidance from an explosion of jihadist Web sites. There was no money to trace; no calls up and down the chain of command they needed to make …

There’s been some speculation about why the White House doesn’t seem interested in going after who in government leaked the program to the New York Times. Maybe it’s because there was no leaker.

Yet the pile-on continues. The Hill reports that House Republicans leaders are expected to introduce a resolution condemning the New York Times for “leaking” information about the SWIFT program. Howie Kurtz concedes –

President Bush calls the conduct of the New York Times “disgraceful.” Vice President Cheney objects to the paper having won a Pulitzer Prize. A Republican congressman wants the Times prosecuted. National Review says its press credentials should be yanked. Radio commentator Tammy Bruce likens the paper to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Even by modern standards of media-bashing, the volume of vitriol being heaped upon the editors on Manhattan’s West 43rd Street is remarkable — especially considering that the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal also published accounts Friday of a secret administration program to monitor the financial transactions of terror suspects. So, in its later editions, did The Washington Post.

That’s because this isn’t about national security. It’s about politics. Republicans are out to smear everybody who stands still long enough to get smeared in order to deflect public dissatisfaction away from themselves. And if GOP party operatives plus the usual useful idiots like Tammy Bruce keep repeating the story that media is the enemy, that will make future propaganda efforts sooo much easier. Although it’s not as if media were getting in the way of the propaganda catapults up to now.

Though it failed by one vote yesterday, I’m breaking with most of the Left to say I’m in favor of the flag anti-desecration amendment. But for a very important reason none have advanced at all. And there’s a far more important backdrop to that conclusion, which most conscientious Americans will find deeply disturbing.

Several fresh readings have led to these fresh conclusions, so don’t skip over the links; they’re vital to a complete understanding:

1) Prior to the invasion of Iraq, not only were many in the blogosphere aware that Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11, but it had become common knowledge among online political activists that the invasion was the culmination of the PNAC strategy that had been advanced a decade before. The greater public was unaware of both.

Because of deliberately misleading statements by the Bush administration, it took more than two years for the majority of the public to understand the non-connection of Saddam to 9-11. Now there’s multiple signs that the general public is starting to understand the PNAC agenda and are learning what the ‘neocon’ label really means.

2) But beyond the Straussian ideology of PNAC, it seemed like there had to be other reasons. Did Bush invade Iraq for the oil? Was it a crony war-profiteering deal? Have we ’stayed the course’ because the Right felt that withdrawal was the real failure in Vietnam?

Only one thing was certain since before the invasion; it was never about an imminent threat of a nuclear attack, which has always been the only real WMD.

Ask historians and military strategists what lessons were gained from Vietnam, and you’ll find unanimity about the standards and proper aims of well-designed offensives. But the folks driving military matters in the Bush administration learned something else entirely from Vietnam.

More than the War on Terrorism, more than the illegal attack on Iraq, that lesson, and their attempt to ‘fix’ what they feel went wrong has been the chief driving force that has motivated so many failures in policy implementation and so much outrage across America and the world. It’s an ideology in itself that surpasses neocon doctrine.

You may have heard of it before, but it deserves greater scrutiny now. It’s the ‘unitary executive’ doctrine, or, as I like to call it, the American Revolution Reversal doctrine. Its promoters essentially believe George Washington was wrong because we really do need a king. And the pursuit of that is the overriding, silent war that’s been waged by a handful of mostly unelected men against almost all the elected representatives in Congress. At the center is a little known lawyer:

“The joke around here,” says a senior congressional staffer with a chuckle, “is that Addington looks at the Constitution and sees only Article II, the power of the presidency.” Berenson, Bush’s former associate counsel, says that’s because Addington is so intensely security minded: “He’s absolutely convinced of the threat we face. And he believes that the executive branch is the only part of the government capable of securing the public against external threats.” Addington, Berenson adds, is a national security conservative with a twist. “He’s not the intellectual legal conservative of the Federalist Society type,” Berenson says, referring to the group of conservative lawyers esteemed by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, “for whom judicial restraint is the holy grail. He’s much more of a Cold War conservative who has moved on to the next battlefield.”

Addington began his government career 25 years ago, after graduating summa cum laude from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and with honors from the Duke University Law School. He started out as an assistant general counsel at the CIA and soon moved to Capitol Hill and served as the minority’s counsel and chief counsel on the House intelligence and foreign affairs committees. There, he began his long association with Cheney, then a Wyoming congressman and member of the intelligence panel. Addington and Cheney–who served as President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff–shared the same grim worldview: Watergate, Vietnam, and later, the Iran-contra scandal during President Reagan’s second term had all dangerously eroded the powers of the presidency. “Addington believes that through sloppy lawyering as much as through politics,” says former National Security Council deputy legal adviser Bryan Cunningham, “the executive branch has acquiesced to encroachment of its constitutional authority by Congress.”

Rather than quoting extensively from the US News & World Report article I’ll just opine that it’s mandatory to read it in its entirety, to fully comprehend the secret and central war being waged, larger than all the worrisome components that have previously been viewed by many as stand-alone policies.

Coupled with the revelations in Ron Suskind’s latest book, it becomes even clearer that this War to effect the American Revolution Reversal is not the brainchild of Bush. Dick Cheney - as Edgar Bergen - is the head promoter of this push to make the president an elected king. And Addington is the architect supplying the legal specifics to make the theory real.

Any student of presidential history from 1964 through 1988 understands that presidential powers were expanded at several points and Congress acted in each case to try and reverse those expansions. There was LBJ’s Gulf of Tonkin resolution, based on a falsely reported incident, which led to the massive expansion and the active phase of our Vietnam War. Government officials insisted to its bitter conclusion that it wasn’t really a war, but a police action. The purpose of that denial was to bypass the Constitutional provision that only Congress could declare a war. So the President could authorize a ‘police action’, even a pretend one that led to the deaths of 58,000+ Americans and approximately one million Vietnamese.

Continuing that linguistic parsing, President Nixon’s ‘police’ forces tried to bomb the North Vietnamese into submission with the fiercest conventional bombing campaign in history, which failed to meet its goal. As opposition to the war spread from draft-age young men to numerous anti-war groups and ultimately to the majority of Americans, Nixon utilized several intelligence agencies to spy on peaceful antiwar groups - which were by far the majority of war dissenters - and a few more radical organizations. All were publicly tarred as Communist sympathizers, traitors and hoodlums, including mainstream news organizations like the New York Times, priests, nuns, rabbis, and especially, college students.

Growing drug use, heavily supplied in part by returning US troops, and rock and roll musicians were branded as direct Communist plots. And beyond the spying, some intel agents and police infiltrators acted as agent provocateurs, instigating and participating in lawbreaking endeavors designed to entrap formerly peaceful protestors.

As Nixon’s popularity waned, he developed a growing private Enemies list that included all the aforementioned, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (including John Kerry), and Democratic politicians. From his inner circle, that spawned the effort to spy on Democrats that became known as Watergate and led to Nixon’s resignation, which successfully staved off his certain impeachment.

In the wake of these expansions of Presidential power, as well as others involving American corporations and CIA plots to overthrow Latin American leaders who opposed our government’s aggressive policies, Congress investigated and produced a set of reforms designed to limit future presidents from committing the same misdeeds.

Then, during the 1980s, Reagan deliberately bypassed Congressional refusals to expend funds for brutal anti-democratic forces in Central America, and secretly utilized funds from illegal drug smuggling to fund those wars and to sell missiles to the anti-American government of Iran…. while publicly supplying arms to Iran’s war opponent, Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein.

That presidential power expansion, another deliberate effort to bypass Congress’ constitutional power to wage war, resulted in another Congressional response, the Iran-Contra investigations. A principal legislator leading that effort was a young Senator, John Kerry. There was plenty of evidence that pointed to the likelihood that Reagan’s vice-president, the current president’s dad, was also involved. And just as President Ford pardoned Nixon to prevent his potential indictment, Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush, pardoned almost all the principals involved in those illegal Iran-Contra schemes.

So, contrary to the current Cheney-Addison team’s claim that these events eroded presidential power, the reality was that Congress acted each time to restrain presidential power expansions and roll them back to former levels. Congress encroached on nothing. It merely performed its constitutional duty to check executive power grabs and maintain a balance of Constitutionally assigned duties. The third branch of government, the judiciary, regularly concurred, further restoring balance and constitutionality.

Read the rest of this entry »

I started a post for this site yesterday, interrupted myself a few times and then, the last time I returned to write, well, I hadn’t yet saved my work. When I went to save it before leaving again? Wordpress told me that I’d expired. Imagine my distress.

But, when I was at the point of saving and then damning myself for having not saved the work, I was in the midst of adding links to all kinds of posts related to sweeping and sweepingly inaccurate comments by Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken Blackwell, Blackwell’s poor, narrow defense of his statement , and then very inappropriate and un-Christian (to say the least) posts here at Right Angle Blog and here at Scott Pullins’ The Pullins Report, both conservative Ohio blogs.

Why in the Wal-Mart world we live in would I put this cluster of commentary together for a post on this blog?

Because together, those items represent the insanity that was my echo chamber swirl of chat around religion and politics in Ohio when I read the New York Times’ article last week, In Wal-Mart’s Home, Synagogue Signals Growth. (See also this Writing on the Wal entry about the piece.)

And reading that article made me say, There’s hope! There is hope! We need this in Ohio. Why can’t this be the story we keep hearing, that the politicians want to highlight, that people want to be a part of, here in Ohio? Instead of the discriminatory, hate-filled innuendo being whipped up right now by people like Ken Blackwell and those who support him, in the name of what they believe to be religion?

What, specifically, in that article gives me hope, especially since the article discusses the evolving conflict within the two-year old synagogue whose members are transplants to Bentonville from cities like Chicago, New York and Atlanta where the Jewish life is fullly evolved?

First, the article points to nine specific ways or occasions that demonstrate how this Bible Belt town of approximately 28,000, with - according to the NYT article, 39 Baptist, 27 United Methodist and 20 Assemblies of God churches, has integrated the newcomers and allows them to feel comfortable in pursuing Judaism. There’s not a single comment about the negative ways in which the Jews there have been treated. Now, maybe there are some examples of that and the reporter didn’t include them, but that seems unlikely, though I grant, it’s possible. Wouldn’t make for quite as good - or hopeful - copy.

The nine ways were:

1. Two years ago, the first synagogue in Benton County, Congregation Etz Chaim, opened.

2. The first bar mitzvah celebrated there included two djays who, “by their own admission, …had only a vague idea of what a bar mitzvah was.”

3. A Hanukkah presentation made by one Jewish parent to his son’s kindergarten class was so successful that “the school’s librarian taped it for future classes.”

4. The restaurant, Eat This!, opened up “next door to a new 140,000-square-foot glass-enclosed Baptist church,” and serves knishes, matzo ball soup and latkes.

5. The first renewal of wedding vows ceremony occured in the shul.

6. Etz Chaim received a Torah from a temple located a few hundred miles away that was closing due to loss of congregants.

7. Etz Chaim has hired its own rabbi, from Tulsa, OK, who will be with the shul once a month with his wife who is a cantor.

8. PTA meetings no longer are scheduled for the night before Jewish holidays.

9. The high school choir has been encouraged to weave Jewish music into the “largely Christian linup.”

Second, the growing pains that the synagogue is experiencing are no different than anything going on anywhere else in this country connected to Judaism. As a member of a suburban Cleveland Conservative congregation, I can tell you that our concerns about Chabad and the differences among new and older members of the shul, and interfaith families (yes, there are families who belong to my shul in which both parents are not Jewish but have chosen to have the child educated as a Jew) and how much each member believes a Jew needs to observe are debated routinely.

And this debate, by the way, is encouraged. Which makes me believe that the Etz Chaim is actually maturing, if they’re able to have these debates and still continue. Breaking up is the easy way out, and Jews like the hard way most of the time, despite the stereotype of the Jewish American Princess - we much prefer to be dramatic, don’t you think?

Three, the folks who’ve moved to Bentonville are, if nothing else, industrious, intelligent, hard-working, motivated, survivor-type people. How else could you describe their making the move to the town and then starting a synagogue with strangers from every spot on the Jewish spectrum? That’s some chutzpah, don’t you think!?

Fourth, as Gary Compton, the schools superintendent, is quoted as saying, “We need to get better at some things….You just don’t go from being noninclusive to being inclusive overnight.” President Bush and his Iraq-planning crew could learn a few things from Mr. Compton.

Finally, and this may be due only to the way in which the reporter writes the piece, but I will put some trust in the editors and believe that the portrait is accurate: the article describes a community that, whether it wanted to or not, got some new residents and is figuring out a way for them to all live there in a way that they want to live, without disenfranchising, disrespecting or negatively distinguishing any one group from the community as a whole.

How can that not be a politically acceptable, a politically required way to look at life in these United States these days, including Ohio? No one’s ethnicity or uniqueness is being challenged. No one’s religion is being threatened or demeaned or belittled. No one is being forced to follow or not follow what they believe.

For those of you in Ohio or those who are familiar with Ohio’s gubernatorial race, can you not see how dramatically and depressingly different some politicians who will remain unnamed but have the initials KB want us to see religion?

If the people of Bentonville, all the people of Bentonville - including the “Wal-Mart Jews” - what a misnomer that is! a shanda for sure! - can figure out ways to make it work without attacking and dividing and putting down others in order to make certain groups seem superior, then I cannot for the life of me see why we shouldn’t have hope that with the right leadership in Ohio, we can do the same.

And if Ohio’s turnaround on this front is due to Wal-Mart and all the citizens of Bentonville, Arkansas, so be it.

Cross-posted in its entirety at The Writing on the Wal, and as a link only at Writes Like She Talks.

Thermate, with a pen tip to Peter at Blondesense… Many people don’t want to address the issue of what really happened on September 11,2001, or they will dismiss any questioning as ” tinfoil hat conspiracy theories”. However, The fact remains that there sure are lots of interesting questions that remain largely unexamined by the Corporate Media Conglomerates. Hey! Look over there! Isn’t that Natalie Holloway trying to kidnap Britany Spears baby?!?

political, political cartoons, cartoons, Bush, satire, Apocalypse Now, parody, 9/11, September 11th

Zencomix

Roger Ailes, meet David Neiwert.

Yeah, if only Ailes had a brain.

Though I’d rather see David writing for Knight Ridder, Newsweek, MSNBC, or partnering with Greg Palast. His work on discrimination, hate crimes and eliminationist rhetoric is unsurpassed and should be mandatory in high school social studies classes, if our nation is to come to grips with the dangerous paths its trodding today.

Steve Gilliard adds to the takedown of the next Alan Keyes.

The GOP can’t even come up with a convincing Milli Vanilli performance because they keep thinking it has something to do with artificial vanilla flavoring.

From Orin Kerr, Justice Scalia’s latest death penalty affirmation:

One cannot have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly. That is a truism, not a revelation. But with regard to the punishment of death in the current American system, that possibility has been reduced to an insignificant minimum

.

Among all the reasoned legal minds weighing in on that opinion, allow me to toss in the Improvised Non Sequitur Device.

When the leader of our country (or the puppetmaster, ‘Edgar’) can utilize forged documents, coerce and cherrypick intelligence, utilize PR and propaganda techniques instead of moral or enlightened or effective strategic leadership, and mislead Congress and the nation into an illegal war that has effectively enacted an easily predictable death sentence on 50,000 Iraqi civilians - a majority of them innocent - then “the American system” has not reduced wrongful deaths “to an insignificant minimum.”

And because Scalia’s offhand remarks and legal decisions have steadily supported the wrongful imposition of this illegal president on us, and his passage of that massive death sentence inflicted on Iraq, I cannot trust Scalia’s interpretation of what “an insignificant” number is for lives any state is permitted to murder. Every number above zero is significant.

A failsafe system for applying capital punishment CAN be built. And must be, if states remain insistent on applying this barbaric and unecessary method of retribution.

I never was a Clinton fan, though I defended him from the witchhunters with Ken Starr manning the dunking stool. He seemed pretty likeable at times and was incredibly smart, but he never lived up to his potential in office, he sold out workers (NAFTA) and the working poor, and by allowing the execution of a retarded black boy to demonstrate he was tough on crime, he demonstrated a callousness that ate at me and in 1996, I voted for Nader.

But when he entered office, I still had enormous respect for Hilary. The attacks on her in those days were clearly motivated by sexism against a strong woman. And I’ve always felt bad for her because of what she had to endure because of her husband’s philandering. Not only the betrayal, but the further acts of stereotypical sexists who blamed her for her husband’s infidelity.

But then I saw her blow an issue that 70% of the country supported: healthcare. That took her down a big peg, in my estimation. As a Senator - a position I would have voted her in had I lived in New York, she also voted to go to war against Iraq.

I supported Kerry and Edwards in 2004, though both also voted yes on the illegal war. For Kerry, it was his record prior to that vote - especially on Iran Contra and the BCCI scandal - that convinced me. For Edwards, it was his support of the poor. And I enjoyed the attitudes and efforts of both of their wives. And for both candidates, it also helped that their election would hasten the end of the illegal president, the worst in US history.

Both of them have since wised up on Iraq and have acknowledged their mistakes. Hilary hasn’t. She still won’t support the withdrawal of our troops. She comes across like a Likudnik, easily overlooking 50,000 dead Iraqis.

Now, the best things I can say about Hilary are: she’s a strong woman. She’s been a good mother to Chelsea. She’s done some good for her constituents as a Senator. But she falls well short of the standards I seek in a President. And the alternative won’t be GW Bush.

I have and will retain, enormous respect for Peter Daou. But his work will not convince me to support Hilary. There’ll be Nader or some Independent, or maybe I’ll have to consider a real Green (which I never felt Nader was). I wish we could have a woman president. But I require a qualified one. I’m with Molly Ivins on this one. Speaking of which, is Molly available?