Why is the fringe-kook left hated by most Americans?Read on...Ramsey Clarke to defend SaddamWednesday 29 December 2004 10:53 AM GMT Ramsey Clark said Washington should also be put on trial Former US attorney-general Ramsey Clark is to join Saddam Hussein's defence team, a spokesman for the ousted Iraqi president's lawyers says.Ziad Khasawna said on Wednesday that Clark, who held the office of attorney-general under US president Lyndon Johnson, had "honoured and inspired" the legal team by agreeing to help defend Saddam. The former top US justice official, who arrived on Tuesday in Jordan where the defence team is based, has become known as a left-wing lawyer and firm critic of US foreign policy since leaving office. He visited Saddam in Baghdad in February 2003 just before the US-lead invasion and has also been involved with the defence of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, on trial for war crimes at a UN court in The Hague. Clark comment Clark said in the Jordanian capital Amman that his principle concern was protecting the former president's rights, who only saw a lawyer for the first time this month - a year after his capture. "In international law, anyone accused of crime has the right to be tried by a confident, independent and impartial court, and there can be no fair trail without those qualities," he said. "The special court in Iraq was created by the Iraqi governing council, which is nothing more than a creation of the US military occupation and has no authority in law as a criminal court," he said. The Iraq Special Tribunal was established by the US-led administration in Iraq last December to try members of the former government. Clark also said the US itself must be tried for the November assault on Falluja, destruction of houses, torture in prisons and its role in the deaths of thousands of Iraqis in the war.AFPBy You can find this article at:http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/11388BFC-9290-4141-B0E1-BEA75A1B20F8.htm

dear Merci Moi,please post only your own thoughts - this is meant to be a discussion group ; instead of cutting and pasting, just put the reference down, in your case:CRACKED ICONSWhy the Left has lost credibility.by Victor Davis HansonNRO December 17, 2004

There is much talk of post-election reorganization and rethinking among demoralized liberals, especially in matters of foreign policy. They could start by accepting that the demise of many of their cherished beliefs and institutions was not the fault of others. More often, the problems are fundamental flaws in their own thinking — such as the ends of good intentions justifying the means of expediency and untruth, and forced equality being a higher moral good than individual liberty and freedom. Whether we call such notions “political correctness” or “progressivism,” the practice of privileging race, class, and gender over basic ethical considerations has earned the moralists of the Left not merely hypocrisy, but virtual incoherence. Democratic leaders are never going to be trusted in matters of foreign policy unless they can convince Americans that they once more believe in American exceptionalism and are the proper co-custodians of values such as freedom and individual liberty. If in the 1950s rightists were criticized as cynical Cold Warriors who never met a right-wing thug they wouldn’t support, as long as he mouthed a few anti-Soviet platitudes, then in the last two decades almost any thug from Latin America to the Middle East who professed concern for “the people” — from Castro and the Noriega Brothers to Yasser Arafat and the Iranian mullahs — was likely to earn a pass from the American and European cultural elite and media. To regain credibility, the Left must start to apply the same standard of moral outrage to a number of its favorite causes that it does to the United States government, the corporations, and the Christian Right. Here are a few places to start.1. There really isn’t a phenomenon like “Islamophobia” — at least no more than there was a “Germanophobia” in hating Hitler or “Russophobia” in detesting Stalinism. Any unfairness or rudeness that accrues from the “security profiling” of Middle Eastern young males is dwarfed by efforts of Islamic fascists themselves — here in the U.S., in the U.K., the Netherlands, France, Turkey, and Israel — to murder Westerners and blow up civilians. The real danger to thousands of innocents is not an occasional evangelical zealot or uncouth politician spouting off about Islam, but the deliberately orchestrated and very sick anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism that floods the airways worldwide, emanating from Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, to be sure, but also from our erstwhile “allies” in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. So both here and abroad, the Western public believes that there is a double standard in the moral judgment of our left-leaning media, universities, and politicians — that we are not to supposed to ask how Christians are treated in Muslim societies, only how free Islamists in Western mosques are to damn their hosts; or that we are to think beheading, suicide murdering, and car bombing moral equivalents to the sexual humiliation and roguery of Abu Ghraib — apparently because the former involves post-colonial victims and the latter privileged, exploitive Americans. Most sane people, however, privately disagree, and distinguish between a civilian’s head rolling on the ground and a snap shot of an American guard pointing at the genitalia of her terrorist ward.Moreover, few of any note in the Arab Middle East speak out against the racial hatred of Jews. Almost no major Islamic religious figure castigates extreme Muslim clerics for their Dark-age misogyny, anti-Semitism, and venom against the West; and no Arab government admonishes its citizenry to look to itself for solutions rather than falling prey to conspiracy theories and ago-old superstitions. It would be as if the a state-subsidized Ku Klux Klan or the American Nazi party were to be tolerated for purportedly voicing the frustrations of poor working-class whites who “suffered” under a number of supposed grievances. What is preached in the madrassas on the West Bank, in Pakistan, and throughout the Gulf is no different from the Nazi doctrine of racial hatred. What has changed, of course, is that unlike our grandfathers, we have lost the courage to speak out against it. In one of the strangest political transformations of our age, the fascist Islamic Right has grafted its cause onto that of the Left’s boutique “multiculturalism,” hoping to earn a pass for its hate by posing as the “other” and reaping the benefits of liberal guilt due to purported victimization. By any empirical standard, what various Palestinian cliques have done on the West Bank — suicide murdering, lynching without trial of their own people, teaching small children to hate and kill Jews — should have earned them all Hitlerian sobriquets rather than U.N. praise.2. “Imperialism” and “hegemony” explain nothing about recent American intervention abroad — not when dictators such as Noriega, Milosevic, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein were taken out by the U.S. military. There are no shahs and Your Excellencies in their places, but rather consensual governments whose only sin was that they came on the heels of American arms rather than U.N. collective snoozing. There really was no secret Afghan pipeline behind toppling the Taliban, nor a French-like oil concession to be had for the United States from the new Iraqi interim government. Many of Michael Moore’s heroic “Minutemen” of the Sunni Triangle are hired killers — hooded fascists in the pay of ex-Baathists and Saddamites, along with Islamic terrorists and jihadists who hate the very idea of democracy in the heart of the Arab world. The collective cursus honorum of these Saddamite holdovers during the last two decades — gassing the Kurds, committing atrocities against the Iranians, looting and pillaging in Kuwait, launching missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, slaughtering Shiites and again Kurds, and assassinating Western and U.N. aid workers — rank right up there with the work of the SS and KGB.Reformers like Allawi and Yawar of Iraq are not “puppets” but far better advocates of democratic reform than anyone else in the Arab world. Nor does “no blood for oil” mean anything when an increasingly small percentage of American-imported petroleum comes from the Gulf, and when an oil-hungry China — without much deference to liberal sensibilities — is driving up the world price, eyeing every well it can for future exploitation without regard for political or environmental niceties.3. It won’t do any longer to attribute American outrage over the U.N. to a vast right-wing conspiracy led by red-state senators and Fox News. All the standing ovations for Kofi Annan cannot hide the truth that the Oil-for-Food scandal exceeds Enron. Indeed, Ken Lay’s malfeasance never involved the deaths of thousands, while cronies siphoned off food and supplies from a starving populace. The U.S. military does not tolerate mass rape and plunder among its troops, as is true of the U.N. peacekeepers throughout Africa. There can be no serious U.N. moral sense as long as illiberal regimes — a Syria, Iran, or Cuba — vote in the General Assembly and the Security Council stymies solutions out of concern for an autocratic China that swallowed Tibet. Millions were slaughtered in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Darfur while New York bureaucrats either condemned Israel or damned anyone who censured their own inaction and corruption. Rather than faulting those who fault the U.N., leftists should lament the betrayal of the spirit of the liberal U.N. Charter by regimes that are neither democratic nor liberal but who seek legitimacy solely on their ability to win concessions and sympathy from guilt-ridden Westerners.4. So it is also time to take a hard look at the heroes and villains of Hollywood, liberal Democrats, and the Euro elites. Many are as obsessed with damning the senile dictator of Chile as they are with excusing the unelected President for Life Fidel Castro. But let us be frank. A murderous Pinochet probably killed fewer of his own than did a mass-murdering Castro, and left Chile in better shape than contemporary Cuba is in. And the former is long gone, while the latter is still long in power. Similarly, Nobel Prizes increasingly go to either unsavory or unhinged characters. Yasser Arafat was a known killer and terrorist, not a global peacemaker. Wangari Maathai’s public statements about AIDS are puerile and ipso facto would have eliminated any Westerner from consideration for anything. Rigoberta Menchu Tum herself was a half-truth, her story mostly a creation of a westernized academic publishing elite. Jimmy Carter’s 2002 award was not predicated on his past work on housing for the poor, but his critically timed and calculated opposition to George W. Bush’s effort to topple Saddam Hussein — as was confirmed by the receptive Nobel Committee itself. Recent winners Kofi Annan and Kim Dae-jung are now better known for having their own sons involved in influence-peddling and bribery while they oversaw bureaucrats who trafficked in millions with unsavory murderers like Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein. In short, such an august prize has come a long way from Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. — and precisely because it has privileged leftist rhetoric over real morality.If the moralizing Left wants to be taken seriously, it is going have to become serious about its own moral issues, since that is the professed currency of contemporary liberalism. Otherwise, the spiritual leaders who lecture us all on social justice, poverty, and truth will remain the money-speculator George Soros, the Reverend Jesse Jackson of dubious personal and professional ethics, and the mythographer Michael Moore. And we all know where that leads…

Get Involved. Be Involved.Inauguration Ceremony Protestor Coaltion Briefing http://www.c-span.org/( http://www.cspan.org/videoarchives.asp?CatCodePairs=, )Groups represented through the organization International A.N.S.W.E.R. hold a briefing at the National Press Club to speak about their plans to have an antiwar protest at Pres. Bush's inauguration next month and the difficulties they say they are having in dealing with the inauguration organizers.( rtsp://video.c-span.org/project/c04/c04121704_answer.rm?mode=compact )

The sex industry funded part of a campaign that opposes the construction of a new baseball stadium on the Anacostia waterfront. Opponents of a publicly financed baseball stadium spent roughly $50,000, trying to sway public opinion. In one method used to get their message out, opponents used an automated phone line. The person on the automated phone call says he's from a group called Friends of the Earth, and he's opposed to a stadium built with public money Friends of the Earth is part of a coalition called "No D.C. Taxes For Baseball." And, WTOP Radio has learned up to 20 percent of the $50,000 came from Robert Siegel, an Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner whose business would have to move to make way for the stadium. Siegel is a major landowner on the South Capitol stadium site, an area that Siegel calls "D.C.'s unofficial Red Light district." He owns 11 properties, several of which house gay nightclubs. He also owns a gay porn shop and adult theaters. He says he's spent $20,000 of his own money to keep from being displaced by a new stadium. The funding includes other efforts he undertook to keep out baseball, including neighborhood signs and lawyer fees. Some of the money went toward posters and radio ads, including one that ran on WTOP Radio. Siegel says he's staying in the background because he doesn't want to cloud the issue of baseball with sex. "No D.C. Taxes For Baseball" tells WTOP it wasn't trying to deceive anyone with its message. The group accepted money from Siegel's legal businesses to make its point. Other members of "No D.C. Taxes For Baseball" include the League of Women Voters of the District of Columbia, Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia and the Statehood Green Party.

WOW! Some revisionist history there, oh Multicultural Narcissist.some quick points: people that were "disappeared" by Pinochet and his henchmen number more than 1,000. The Chilean Government's Truth and Reconciliation Commisiion, even the Chilean Military acknowledges this. And thus, these are current crimes as since people don't really "disappear," they are kidnappings that are still ongoing.you also want to tutor us on who the victims were: why don't you tell us about Charles Hormann and his buddy Frank? Tell us what happened to Rodrigo Rojas and Carmen Quintana. Tell us who was General Carlos Pratts. Oh, and who was Ronnie Moffitt and what happened in Washington, DC in September 1976.You say that people in large numbers were imploring the military to intervene. Tell us, then, about the elections the summer of 1973. Tell us what General Pratts thought about that. Tell us what the Hinchey report is and what it reported.You also compare him to Castro. Yet how many people has Mr. Catro "disappeared"? How many times has Castro said, like Pinochet, that human rights violations were committed by his underlings and that he didn't know? Actually, how many times has Pinochet changed his mind about what actually went on?Groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch equally condemn the violations committed in Cuba as those in Chile.Another little pointer for you -- why don't you find out who Admiral Merino was and what his role was the night of the plebiscite -- come back and enlighten us please.Oh, and while you're at it, come back and tell us what General Leigh had to say about Pinochet. Or his niece and former Minister of Justice, Monica Madariaga.And what was the little bit about secret bank accounts at Riggs Bank...--Now, you also say it is English-speaking peoples that lead the way... WOW, what a jump, no? Is that what the CIA is doing with "ghost prisoners," leading the way on human rights? Or how about them good ole boys at Abu Ghraib, was that another example of good ole USA leading thew way on human rights? Or how about the current nominee to head the Justice Department, was he leading the way when he disparaged the Geneva Conventions?Was the CIA leading the way in human rights in Iran 1954, Guatemala 1954? or when they instigated the coup in Chile in 1973 ending more than one hundred years of democratic rule and leading to more than 4,000 killings, tens of thousands of torture victims? Was the CIA's Operation Phoenix in Vietnam another example of leading the way? Or the massacre at Mi Lai?No, my friend, you are not leading the way on anything, not in case, more than others. The point is we all - you included - have to work together.Castro can't lecture the USA on human rights but neither the other way around.And yes, Pinochet has to stand trial and assume responsibility for what he did. He is not above the law. If he is innocent, he will go free. If not, to jail he goes.

Justice never sleeps. Or rather the free-floating moralism that is the left never sleeps. The other day a Chilean judge, Juan Guzman Tapia, decided an 89-year-old man was competent to stand trial for human-rights abuses, though it has been 14 years since he left office, and when he did he handed his hitherto troubled country over to democrats and eventual prosperity. The 89-year-old man is, of course, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and his human-rights abuses are not even reported in the newspapers as "alleged" human-rights abuses. For the New York Times on Tuesday, Judge Guzman's decision was Page One news -- in fact, the day's major news story with a color picture of Judge Guzman embraced by Gen. Pinochet's emotional opponents. The photograph dominated three columns. In the body of the Times' article, the word "communist" never appeared, only "Marxists." For all the untutored reader might know, Gen. Pinochet's victims might have been the country's librarians or butterfly collectors. That word, "Marxists," appeared in a quote from Gen. Pinochet who said a year ago on a Spanish-language television show: "Everything I did I would do again. Who am I supposed to ask for forgiveness? They are the ones who have to ask me for forgiveness, them, the Marxists." The old boy came to power in 1973. For six months before he took over, politicians and private citizens in large numbers had been imploring the military to deliver Chile from President Salvador Allende, a romantic and incompetent Marxist pseudo-intellectual who spent his last year in a drunken haze while economic chaos spread. For the next 17 years Gen. Pinochet, his military and his secret police waged war against leftists, usually within Chile but occasionally abroad through a series of political assassinations. Gen. Pinochet's political assassinations were not as numerous as those practiced by Soviet satellite countries. Nor was his war as bloody as Generallisimo Francisco Franco's war against communists and other leftists in the 1930s, but it was brutal enough to offend civil libertarians everywhere, including me. Yet, like Franco, he did return his country to democracy. How many communists have done that? Moreover communism accounted for scores of millions of innocent victims in the 20th century. Gen. Pinochet's regime allegedly accounted for 4,000, not all of them peace-loving progressives. How many has Fidel Castro murdered, tortured, and jailed? Today Mr. Castro remains a bloody tyrant and far more of a problem beyond his shores than the general with the absurd sunglasses and 18th-century uniforms ever was. Finally, when Fidel ultimately croaks, he will have left what was once the most prosperous country in Latin America in a heap. Do any of Gen. Pinochet's current tormentors demand Mr. Castro's prosecution for crimes against humanity? There are two points worth noting here. One is that the left -- whether communist or simply glassy-eyed reformist -- never tires in hunting down its enemies. The other is that its enemies are always on the right -- or at least the perceived right. The old Soviet Bloc countries are filled with retired brutes who did far more damage to the civil liberties and the prosperity of their countries than Gen. Pinochet ever did. There is no effort to prosecute these enemies of freedom commensurate with the effort against Gen. Pinochet. If indeed the prosecution of Gen. Pinochet would elevate regard for human rights worldwide, I would be among the first to celebrate Judge Guzman's decision. Yet it is not the opponents of Gen. Pinochet who have made great strides in elevating human rights worldwide. Rather it has been North Americans and Europeans, most notably the English-speaking peoples. Right now those people are leading the world in a struggle against tyrants who, unlike an 89-year-old retired general, can actually shoot back. How prominent have Gen. Pinochet's opponents been in the struggle against Islamofascism and the sadistic Saddam Hussein? The answer is not very. In fact, many of those cheering for Gen. Pinochet's neck today blithely lump Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush into the same category they reserve for Gen. Pinochet. There is a great deal of posturing about civil liberties and justice in the campaign against Gen. Pinochet. There is also something else. It is difficult to explain but it is observable. The left worldwide reserves its hostility for people on the right and for America and its allies, who are the real guarantors of the rights of man.

I checked that website. There's no info there on who's running it or who's involved in this effort. Anyway, any protest led by John Conyers is lost before it's even begun.Is there no Member of Congress from Ohio who would take this on? It's their state. Where's Kucinich -- not that he's any better than Conyers. But at least he's coherent most of the time.Someone wants to straighten out any problems, fine, I'm all for it. But if Ohio's been certified, the game is over. Afraid we're going to have to spend four years dealing with the government we have rather than the one we'd prefer.

Again, clearly there were serious irregularities. If there were no problems, then an in-depth look shouldn't matter, correct? But if there were problems, isn't it in everyone's interest to sort this out? The Democrats have been known to play the same electoral games (Nixon-Kennedy in Illinois, for instance). So if people truly believe that democracy and voting are important, then we should support every effort to ensure that the irregularities did not skew the election.So here's the call making its rounds on the internet:Rep. John Conyers has requested ONE MILLION emails to support his coalition's effort to contest the recent Presidential election.When Congress reconvenes in January, at least 14 members of the House of Representatives will challenge the validity of the 2004 election. They will request an immediate investigation into many problems and irregularities encountered in the election.According to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, one senator and one House Representative are required, in order to contest an election prior to inauguration. To write Rep. John Conyers that you support the representatives who seek to contest the election, please write an email to: http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/contact.htmlWe also, need at least ONE Senator to Contest the Vote. No matter what state you live in, please let Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) know that we want her to be that senator:http://www.contestthevote.org/Please also contact your local Senator to request that he/she Contest the Vote on January 6th:http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_info...on/senators_cfm.cfmGandi said, "First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they fight us, then WE WIN!"PASS ON THE WORD! We CAN Do This!

It is no surprise that the Republicans are sore winners. They have spent the better part of the past month beating their chests, threatening to send to Siberia any Republican who doesn’t toe the line (poor Arlen Specter), and promising everything short of martial law if the Democrats don’t do what they are told.What’s worse is to watch the pathetic sight of the DLC (the conservative, pro-corporate group of Democrats) apologizing for being Democrats and promising to “purge” the party of the likes of, well, all of US! Their comments are so hilarious and really not even worth recognizing but the media is paying so much attention to them, I thought it might be worth doing a little reality check.The most people the DLC is able to get out to an event of theirs is about 200 at their annual dinner (where you have to pay thousands of dollars to get in).Contrast this with the following:*Total members of Move On: More than 2,000,000*Total Attendance at Vote for Change Concerts: An estimated 280,000*Total Union Members in U.S.: Around 16,000,000*Total Number of People Who Have Seen “Fahrenheit 9/11”: Over 50 million*Total number of you reading this: Perhaps 10 million or moreThe days of trying to move the Democratic Party to the right are over. We lost a very close election (a one-state difference) by running the #1 liberal in the Senate. Not bad. The country is shifting in our direction, not to the right. But the country was attacked and people were scared. They were manipulated with fear. And America has never thrown a sitting president out during wartime. That’s the facts. Oh, and our candidate could have run a better campaign (but we’ll have that discussion another day).In the meantime, while we reflect on what went wrong, I would like to pass on to you an essay that a friend who works with abuse victims sent to me. It was written by a woman who has spent years working as an advocate for victims of domestic abuse and she sees many parallels between her work and the reaction of many Democrats to last month’s election. Her name is Mel Giles and here is what she had to say… Watch Dan Rather apologize for not getting his facts straight, humiliated before the eyes of America, voluntarily undermining his credibility and career of over thirty years. Observe Donna Brazille squirm as she is ridiculed by Bay Buchanan, and pronounced irrelevant and nearly non-existent. Listen as Donna and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer take to the airwaves saying that they have to go back to the drawing board and learn from their mistakes and try to be better, more likable, more appealing, have a stronger message, speak to morality. Watch them awkwardly quote the bible, trying to speak the ‘new’ language of America. Surf the blogs, and read the comments of dismayed, discombobulated, confused individuals trying to figure out what they did wrong. Hear the cacophony of voices, crying out, "Why did they beat me?" And then ask anyone who has ever worked in a domestic violence shelter if they have heard this before.They will tell you: Every single day.The answer is quite simple. They beat us because they are abusers. We can call it hate. We can call it fear. We can say it is unfair. But we are ed into the cycle of violence, and we need to start calling the dominating side what they are: abusive. And we need to recognize that we are the victims of verbal, mental, and even, in the case of Iraq, physical violence.As victims we can't stop asking ourselves what we did wrong. We can't seem to grasp that they will keep hitting us and beating us as long as we keep sticking around and asking ourselves what we are doing to deserve the beating.Listen to George Bush say that the will of God excuses his behavior. Listen, as he refuses to take responsibility, or express remorse, or even once, admit a mistake. Watch him strut, and tell us that he will only work with those who agree with him, and that each of us is only allowed one question (soon, it will be none at all; abusers hit hard when questioned; the press corps can tell you that). See him surround himself with only those who pledge oaths of allegiance. Hear him tell us that if we will only listen and do as he says and agree with his every utterance, all will go well for us (it won't; we will never be worthy).And watch the Democratic Party leadership walk on eggshells, try to meet him, please him, wash the windows better, get out that spot, distance themselves from gays and civil rights. See the Democrats cry for the attention and affection and approval of the President and his followers. Watch us squirm. Watch us descend into a world of crazy-making, where logic does not work and the other side tells us we are nuts when we rely on facts. A world where, worst of all, we begin to believe we are crazy.How to break free? Again, the answer is quite simple.First, you must admit you are a victim. Then, you must declare the state of affairs unacceptable. Next, you must promise to protect yourself and everyone around you that is being victimized. You don't do this by responding to their demands, or becoming more like them, or engaging in logical conversation, or trying to persuade them that you are right. You also don't do this by going catatonic and resigned, by closing up your ears and eyes and covering your head and submitting to the blows, figuring its over faster and hurts less if you don't resist and fight back.Instead, you walk away. You find other folks like yourself, 57 million of them, who are hurting, broken, and beating themselves up. You tell them what you've learned, and that you aren't going to take it anymore. You stand tall, with 57 million people at your side and behind you, and you look right into the eyes of the abuser and you tell him to go to hell. Then you walk out the door, taking the kids and gays and minorities with you, and you start a new life. The new life is hard. But it's better than the abuse.We have a mandate to be as radical and liberal and steadfast as we need to be. The progressive beliefs and social justice we stand for, our core, must not be altered. We are 57 million strong. We are building from the bottom up. We are meeting, on the net, in church basements, at work, in small groups, and right now, we are crying, because we are trying to break free and we don't know how.Any battered woman in America, any oppressed person around the globe who has defied her oppressor will tell you this: There is nothing wrong with you. You are in good company. You are safe. You are not alone. You are strong. You must change only one thing: Stop responding to the abuser.Don't let him dictate the terms or frame the debate (he'll win, not because he's right, but because force works). Sure, we can build a better grassroots campaign, cultivate and raise up better leaders, reform the election system to make it fail-proof, stick to our message, learn from the strategy of the other side. But we absolutely must dispense with the notion that we are weak, godless, cowardly, disorganized, crazy, too liberal, naive, amoral, "loose,” irrelevant, outmoded, stupid and soon to be extinct. We have the mandate of the world to back us, and the legacy of oppressed people throughout history.Even if you do everything right, they'll hit you anyway. Look at the poor souls who voted for this nonsense. They are working for six dollars an hour if they are working at all, their children are dying overseas and suffering from lack of health care and a depleted environment and a shoddy education.And they don't even know they are being hit. How true. And that is our challenge over the next couple of years; to hold out our hand to those being hit the hardest and help them leave behind a party that only seeks to keep beating them, their children, and the kid next door who’s on his way to Iraq.

There are doubtless many Americans, perhaps millions, who wonder to themselves, "How did we get into this?". They look at Americans waging what they firmly believe is an unnecessary, and perhaps illegal war, and wonder how this came to be, and perhaps equally as important, what will be the repercussions of this dangerous and precipitous action? Perhaps they grit their teeth at the sight of the 'Boy King' as he lumbers about on the world's stage, and blame him for this present state of affairs, and long for days past, when things seemed simpler, or, at the very least, safer. It is hard to resist such a temptation, but resist it we must. Why? Because this tragic national fit of distemper did not begin with Bush. It will not end with him. What ails the American body politic is not personal, but institutional. One need only take a deep look at American history; not that taught in our high schools, or which thickens our almanacs. But the history beneath those safe sources, which reflects over 200 years of American conflicts, to find the roots of our imperial appetites. Over 150 years ago, in an otherwise nonde case before the nation's Supreme Court, a man was challenging the constitutionality of the law which prohibited the selling of lotteries in Washington, D.C. Again, it was not the case that was especially important, but the words used in that case, by a Chief Justice of the United States, which are indeed memorable. In *Cohens v. Virginia* (1821), Chief Justice John Marshall described the powers of the states in an interesting way: That the United States form, for many, and for most important purposes, a single nation, has not yet been denied. In war, we are one people. In making peace we are one people, in all commercial respects, we are one and the same people.... The people have declared, that in the exercise of all powers given for these objects it is supreme... The constitution and the laws of a state, so far as they are to the constitution and laws of the United States, are absolutely void. The states are constituent parts of the United States. *They are members of one great empire*-- for some purposes sovereign, for some purposes subordinate.The words are unmistakable -- "...one great empire..." -- the United States. It is well to remember here the name of the first federal gathering of the American colonies in 1776; the 'Continental Congress.' Why not 'National Congress'? Or 'American Congress?' To those who began to organize the state, their intentions were to dominate the entire continent. It was not for naught that the Americans fought wars with England for Canadian territories, and Mexico for what is now about a third of the American national territory. Before the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, Arizona, California, and New Mexico were part of Mexico. Before the war, Texas was part of Mexico, but Texans had set up their own country, the Republic of Texas. Americans wanted all of these lands, from the frigid forests of northern Canada to the tropics of southern Mexico. Again, 'empire.' This does not mean that Marshall was speaking for everybody when he said what he said; he was speaking for the wealthy, white elites of which he was a part. Millions of other people would have violently disagreed with his 'one people' argument. For millions of Blacks, millions of women, for millions of Indians, Chinese in the mines of California, Mexicans in the southwest, they knew they were not included or counted among the 'one people' that Marshall claimed to speak for. It's been over 175 years since Marshall's imperial dreams, and still he does not speak for everyone. There are millions of people who are just as opposed to that idea. Many of them stage demonstrations against the war. Some of them stage protests against this deeply-held notion of 'empire.' They may feel comfortable as part of a nation, but have no wishes to lord it over people in other parts of the world. They want to be neighbors, not masters. They see themselves as people who want to help heal the nation's ills, before tackling the troubles of the wide and threatening world. They know that their jobs aren't safe; that their schools aren't working; that their streets aren't safe; and that their neighborhood cops are out-of-control. They know that the nation is in deep trouble. They have no time for empire.

Re: Sour Grapes... Denial....Denial....Denial...(Sc)AirAmerica....PASS ON THE WORD! We CAN Do This!....Kook Fringe Rantings....

BWAHAWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Get over it. MoveOn.....

Have a nice day looooosers

This seems much better than the exceedingly lame moveon.org letter to congress to "just do something"...Rep. John Conyers has requested ONE MILLION emails to support his coalition's effort to contest the recent Presidential election.When Congress reconvenes in January, at least 14 members of the House of Representatives will challenge the validity of the 2004 election. They will request an immediate investigation into many problems and irregularities encountered in the election.According to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, one senator and one House Representative are required, in order to contest an election prior to inauguration. To write Rep. John Conyers that you support the representatives who seek to contest the election, please write an email to: http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/contact.htmlWe also, need at least ONE Senator to Contest the Vote. No matter what state you live in, please let Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) know that we want her to be that senator:http://www.contestthevote.org/Please also contact your local Senator to request that he/she Contest the Vote on January 6th:http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfmGandi said, "First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they fight us, then WE WIN!"PASS ON THE WORD! We CAN Do This!

For the first time since before the New Deal, Republicans are now the majority party from the top of the ballot to the bottom. That's reality -- and we delude ourselves if we take false comfort in the closeness of our loss. This was the second national election in a row -- 2002 was the first -- in which Republicans won a majority of the votes cast. That broke a string of three presidential elections and three congressional elections in a row in which neither party won a majority. Moreover, this election was the latest chapter in a four-decade swing to the Republicans that began after Lyndon Johnson's 1964 landslide victory. The dimensions of that swing -- and our decline -- are staggering. In 1964, Johnson won 60.6 percent of the popular vote and 90 percent of the electoral votes, and Democrats held 2-to-1 advantages in both the House of Representatives and the Senate and among governors and state legislators. Today, the Republicans not only control the White House and both houses of Congress, but a majority of statehouses and state legislatures. In the 10 presidential elections since 1964, the Democratic candidate has won a majority of the popular vote only once -- Jimmy Carter won 50.1 percent in 1976. President Clinton slowed our slide in the 1990s, but even he never reached that magic 50 percent mark. The trend in the vote for Congress has been the same. After 40 straight years of domination, Democrats have not won a majority of the cumulative national vote for the House since 1992. In 1964, according to the University of Michigan, more than one-half of all Americans -- 52 percent -- identified themselves as Democrats, compared with 25 percent who identified themselves as Republicans and 24 percent as independents. In the 2004 election, party identification was dead even: 37 percent Democrat, 37 percent Republican, and 26 percent independent. We cannot assume this trend will end on its own. We know the Republicans will do everything they can to keep it going. It is up to Democrats to stop it. Analysts who believe changing demographics will lead to a new Democratic majority should take a careful look at this election. According to that theory, women and the increasing number of minority voters will lead to an emerging Democratic majority. In this election, the percentages of women and minorities in the electorate indeed increased. But President Bush made significant gains among both groups. He won white women by 11 percentage points, 10 points more than his 2000 margin. Among Hispanics, Bush cut a 27-point deficit in 2000 to just 9 points this time. In the critical battleground state of Ohio, Bush secured his victory by winning 16 percent of the African-American vote, nearly double what he won in 2000. We got out our base, but our base is not what it once was. The biggest blow in this election is how badly we lost the middle class. It's no surprise for Democrats to lose white men and evangelicals. But in this election, we also lost white women, married people, couples with children, high school graduates, college graduates, people over 30, and, by our estimate, voters in every annual household income category above $40,000. Our coalition consisted of high school dropouts (though we won them by only 1 point) and those with postgraduate educations. That coalition is not the foundation for building a durable Democratic majority.Is the 3rd party option finally a realistic one? I think the time is now to organize in a big way. 2008 is closer than we think.

Here's the latest on the Pinochet caseTop Stories - AP Judge Indicts Chile's Ex-Dictator Pinochet By EDUARDO GALLARDO, Associated Press Writer SANTIAGO, Chile - Gen. Augusto Pinochet (news - web sites) was indicted Monday for the kidnapping of nine dissidents and the killing of one of them during his 1973-90 regime, and the former dictator was placed under house arrest. MORE: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=3&u=/ap/20041213/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/chile_pinochet_2

Killed by an anti-war activist, RIP Dimebag Darrell.When will it stop?

Upon hearing that the people had lost confidence in the government, the East German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht quipped that it would be better to dissolve the people and appoint another one.My friend Peter Beinart has a similar solution in mind for what ails the Democratic Party. A truly tough-minded and intellectually honest liberal, Beinart reads his party the riot act in the latest issue of The New Republic, the magazine he edits, in what will surely be a much-discussed article.Beinart wants the Democrats to become a "fighting party" along the lines of the anti-Communist liberals that defined the Democratic Party from Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy. Back then, American liberalism was split between "hards" and "softs." The hards were willing to draw bright lines between themselves and Communists, up to and including purging from their ranks "soft" liberals who couldn't bring themselves to denounce totalitarianism. The softs, meanwhile, may not have been Communists, but they believed their only enemies were on the right.By 1949, Beinart notes, "three years after Winston Churchill warned that an 'iron curtain' had descended across Europe," American liberalism had been - in Arthur Schlesinger's words - "fundamentally reshaped" in order to deal with the totalitarian threat.Beinart continues, "Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not 'been fundamentally reshaped.' by the experience."Beinart marshals a wide array of evidence that the Democratic rank-and-file doesn't take terrorism or even foreign policy seriously. Exhibit A: the vexatious popularity of goons like Michael Moore who believe Bush is a bigger threat than Bin Laden. "There is no terrorist threat," Moore writes in "Dude, Where's My Country." "Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?"The Moore & MoveOn.org crowd is not merely skeptical of American military power, it is downright hostile to American motives. America, says Moore, brings "sadness and misery to places around the globe." He tells foreign audiences that Americans are "possibly the dumbest people on the planet." MoveOn.org is more thoughtful than Moore (a very low bar), but its opposition to the war and Bush has pushed it toward isolationism and common cause with real America-haters like the Stalinist front group ANSWER.Meanwhile, John Kerry's logical loop-de-loops defending his foreign policy were in many respects the rational result of a Democratic Party that has become reflexively anti-war. Kerry couldn't avoid being the anti-war candidate because to be anything else would have meant not getting the nomination.What Beinart wants instead is a party that first understands the very real threat of jihadism but, just as important, also understands that a morally serious fight against totalitarianism "provides a powerful rationale for a more just society at home." During the early Cold War, after all, liberals argued that Jim Crow undermined our credibility fighting Communists.An ironic note is that Beinart's argument brings The New Republic back to where it began. Its founder, Herbert Croly, was a relentless advocate for the First World War, in part because it would provide a "moral tonic" for Americans at home. Walter Lippmann hoped the war would bring a Nietzschean "transvaluation of all values."Beinart's not so ambitious, but I suspect he's destined for disappointment because there are no Bertolt Brechts in the Democratic Party. Beinart laments that the "foreign policy elite" of his party basically agrees with his prescriptions. It's those darn Democratic voters who disagree, dagnabbit.The desire to remake the Democratic Party isn't new either. In the 1970s, the sainted Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson led a coalition of intellectuals and activists who wanted to beat back the blame-America-first pacifists taking control of the Democratic Party. They failed, and most of them are now "neocon" Republicans, like Jeane Kirkpatrick and Richard Perle. And the remaining 1940s-style union Democrats Beinart wishes to reincarnate left too. We called them Reagan Democrats.Beinart seems to think it's possible for the Democrats - now soaked with multiculturalism - to stand up to Islamic totalitarianism, although, ever since Vietnam, they'd been unwilling or unable to get their act together to fight Soviet totalitiarianism. I think that's wishful thinking on steroids. If you think that's unfair, ask yourself why Beinart has to go back to the 1940s to find a Democratic Party he wants to emulate.That raises another reason why Beinart can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. The Democratic Party in the 1940s wasn't nearly so democratic. Today, because of the primary system, mass media, and campaign finance reform, the party elders and elites have much less power. The Democrats of the 1940s could purge people. Today, even if they wanted to, party leaders cannot cull their ranks for fear of the lawsuits alone. Not all Democrats are the problem. But the activist base of the party is. Unfortunately for the Beinart feather of the Democratic Party, you can't just dissolve the base and appoint a new one.

Actually, the Harris piece has some similarities to what Friedman has been saying in the NYTimes.

The kind of article you will never see in the NYThttp://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20041201-090801-2582r.htm'Mired in a religious war'Washington Times (12/2/04)By Sam HarrisPerhaps it is time we thought the unthinkable about Iraq. Perhaps it is time we considered the possibility that we will break everything we touch in that country — or everything we touch will break itself. However mixed or misguided our intentions were in launching this war, we are attempting, at considerable cost to ourselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people. Despite the numbers of Iraqi dead and the travesty of Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi insurgents know that we did not come to their country to rape their women or to kill innocent civilians. Every thinking person in the Muslim world understands that if our goal had been to kill Iraqis and steal their oil, millions of Iraqis would now be dead and their oil would be flowing. The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on Earth, we should still expect tomorrow's paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself to bits for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women and children. The Iraqi people have been traumatized by this war and by decades of repression. But this does not explain the type of violence they wage against us on a daily basis. War and repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the United Nations, foreign workers and Iraqi innocents. War and repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. We are now mired in a religious war in Iraq, and elsewhere. Our enemies, as witnessed by their astonishing willingness to slaughter themselves, are not principally motivated by political or economic grievances. Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for terrorism by Muslims must explain why there are no Palestinian Christian suicide bombers. They, too, suffer the ordeal of the Israeli occupation. Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers for that matter? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal than any we or the Israelis have imposed on the Muslim world. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that directly inspire Muslim terrorism. Unless the world's Muslims can find some way of expunging the metaphysics that is fast turning their religion into a cult of death, we will ultimately face the same perversely destructive behavior throughout much of the world. Wherever these events occur, we will find Muslims tending to side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior. It is time we admitted that we are not at war with "terrorism." We are at war with Islam. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us. Every American should read the Koran and discover the relentlessness with which non-Muslims are vilified in its pages. The idea that Islam is a "peaceful religion hijacked by extremists" is a dangerous fantasy — and it is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge.It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of devout Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is, after all, little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the September 11 hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. It is not at all clear how we should proceed in our dialogue with the Muslim world. But deluding ourselves with euphemisms is not the answer. Our press should report on the terrifying state of discourse in the Arab press, exposing the degree to which it is a tissue of lies, conspiracy theories and exhortations to recapture the glories of the 7th century. All civilized nations must unite in condemnation of a theology that now threatens to destabilize much of the Earth. Muslim moderates, wherever they are, must be given every tool necessary to win a war of ideas with their coreligionists. Otherwise, we will have to win some very terrible wars in the future.