Author: Madman in the Marketplace

a cry in the wilderness from Liberal Street Fighter

Word is coming from the tough boys of the DLC from the conclave in Ohio that, in order to win, the Democrats must become more, well, Republican:

Centrist Dems Urge Military Enlargement

Centrists who contend Democrats cannot retake the White House until voters trust the party to protect them said Sunday the Army should expand by 100,000 soldiers and that colleges should open their campuses to military recruiters.

“A Democrat has to show the toughness to govern,” said Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council. “People don’t doubt that Republicans will be tough.”

From argued that national security and safety are threshold issues for swing voters who increasingly are trending Republican.

A smart Democratic Party couldn’t win over Americans by talking about how to use our military WELL. It takes toughness to be honest about our national security. Toughness to face how terribly vulnerable our current militaristic government has made us with their unnecessary war. Not that kind of toughness will work, according to Mr. Frum and the rest of the chest thumpers in Ohio.
Only by building a bigger military, more weapons — becoming MORE REPUBLICAN — can the Democratic Party hope to regain the reins of government.  

Hundreds of centrist Democrats gathered in Ohio for the annual meeting of the DLC. From and DLC President Bruce Reed argued that Democrats should be more aggressive in pushing values issues and take an unrelenting, hard-line stance against terrorism.

“No political party deserves to win unless it lays out a plan for Americans to win,” said From.

Once again, the DLC proclaims from on high that there is only ONE solution to the party’s problems. Once again they make clear that voices on the left are not welcome in the party. Toughness means more soldiers, it means more cops, it means a thriving prison/industrial complex and paramilitary police forces.

There is no voice for the principled left in the political conversation of this country. There is only the far-right Republican party, and the center-right Democrats. Those of us who feel otherwise are not welcome in the conversation:

From said Democrats should also push hard for a reduction in dependence on foreign oil.

“We ought not to pay for both sides in the war on terror,” said From, who also called for “new ideas that value families.”

“We can help parents raise kids by adopting a uniform media rating system and banning marketing of violence to children,” said From.

There were few who quibbled with the argument that the party needs to move toward the middle.

“I think this country is becoming more and more moderate and more and more conservative,” said Leroy Comrie, a councilman in the New York City borough of Queens.

We’ll ban marketing of violence, but we’ll celebrate violence in our news media. Our most ostensibly “liberal” city, New York City, entertains heavily armed National Guard and police in it’s transportation system as it institutes random bag searches for subway riders. In a hot and precarious summer, the police in another large city shoot first and ask questions later in multiple incidents.

Instead of offering a true alternative to voters, not to mention all of the non-voters, the push continues apace to move more and more to the right. There will be, of course, nothing gained from this course. Why bother switching parties, or joining this one, if they are so much the same? The argument that the Democrats will just be smarter about it isn’t very convincing. When this leads inevitably to continued losses, or at best modest gains as a reaction against the corrupt Bush administration, From and his cronies will blame the left for the disappointing results, just as they always do.

From said the simple math of elections means Democrats must do better among moderates.

“We have to win about 60 percent of the moderates to break even,” he said. “There has never been a time when there were more liberals than conservatives in the electorate.”

We all know that weak children will try to emulate stronger children by aping their aggressive behavior. Sadly, it seems that we don’t outgrow that tendency as we get older. Violence and anger lie just under the surface of our increasingly militaristic society, and it is dangerous that BOTH the major political outlets in this country feed the militarism.

I fear to think where this is leading us.

toy soldiers via International Toy Soldiers Gallery
dove cartoon via Badger Herald

More confrontation from Liberal Street Fighter

It is frustrating, this game of “Lifeboat” that the Democratic Party and Pravda/dailyKlark are playing.

What to do? Ridicule them. Shame them. Say NO every chance you get. Confront the lazy misogyny whenever you see it. They’ll call you “shrill”. I get called an “angry loner” a lot in threads by these people. Doesn’t matter. YOUR ridicule, YOUR comdemnation is more powerful than theirs. What can they take away from you? You know the stakes, even though they don’t. We all know that this is a question of life and death, that they are willing to retreat on a gain that, in the grand course of history, has only existed in the western world for a mere glimmer of time. Women, and men of decency, fought for this freedom, this vital leveling of the playing field. All of the new wonder, new creativity, that has entered our daily lives THANKS to women’s righteously won freedom will all be lost again. Control of one’s body is a necessary and primary requirement for a human being to be free. Any intellectually honest person, claiming to live in a free society, must be able to see this, I don’t care what the men spouting superstitious exceptions to that basic truth say.

So laugh and ridicule. Laugh with the biting angry laughs of Margaret Cho and Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks. Confront them with facts. Confront them.

I can’t believe we’re back here. I can’t believe that people are so blind, but I also know that NOTHING blinds people more than the herd morality so enthusiastically practiced in this country.

I’m sorry for the lack of focus in this rant, but I woke up SO ANGRY about what I’m seeing, about the enthusiastic reception this charicature of a human being has gotten, when it’s quite easy to see that he’s another person who’s fully in the grip of the idea that people must be CONTROLLED, that the wild beauty and creativity of unfettered humantity is something to be snuffed out under rules and shame and iron and condemnation.

Laugh at them. Sling your truth at them with a bitter smile. Ridicule their fear and their lazy reliance on authority.

Most of all, keep fighting, because there is nothing else to do.
Check out a wonderful disection of the problems with the Roberts nom at BOPnews:

But because he doesn’t have a lot of judicial opinions he ordered written for him by his clerks we’re supposed to think we don’t know where he stands? We know who loves him. We know who he’s chosen to work with all his life. We know who he sleeps with. We have seen not a single decision from the bench that indicates that any of the other things we know is wrong.

We know he’s a telegenic, smarter, version of Thomas or Scalia – at best, Rhenquist.

Bush and his allies aren’t subtle people. They tell you what they’re going to do, often years in advance, and then they do it. They do this time in, time out. And yet, for some reason, people still don’t believe them.

So let’s bring it back. Any failure to recognize that Roberts is Scalia prettied up is just gutless timidity and an unwillingness to look the facts full in the face. It isn’t some intellectually principled ‘we must wait till all the evidence is in’, it’s the exact opposite – an unwillingness to operate on the strong evidence which already exists.

And compromising on Roberts, being unwilling to filibuster him, is just another way of saying “I don’t really give enough of a fuck about civil liberties, about a woman’s right to control her own body, about the imperial presidency, about habeas corpus, or about torture to put up more than a token fight.”

Thanks to TrueBlueDem at Our Word for the link.

another dispatch from the culture wars from Liberal Street Fighter

The truly remarkable thing about the recent announcement that Judge John Roberts is Bush’s pick to serve a lifetime appointment on the highest court of the land was this — how incredibly shallow the coverage of it was. It was as though all the television channels had become E! Entertainment and all of the publications had become People magazine, only in some twisted Republican universe where Ozzie & Harriet’s America had never “disappeared”.  Oh the cultural buttons that were pounded on by the infobots on the “news” shows:

Nominee’s Son Shows Family’s Playful Side
Steps away as the president introduced John Roberts as a choice for the Supreme Court, the nominee’s young son danced the heart out of his saddle shoes.

The boy’s mother had a less-than-approving look on her face as she watched. At one point, she even held 4-year-old Jack by the arm of his light blue short-pants suit.

Judge Roberts did not seem to flinch.

“It was classic and it showed John being able to maintain his composure while his son was dancing in front of the president,” said David Leitch, a former deputy White House counsel to Bush who worked with Roberts at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson.

Roberts and his wife, Jane, also have a daughter, 5-year-old Josie.

With the children, Roberts “has this real element of playfulness in his life,” Leitch said.

Judging by the coverage, and the all-out media enabled charm offensive, one must wonder if this was an important appointment, or a casting announcement for a new Dobson-pandering made-for-tv movie.
The culture war proceeds apace, and even fulfilling some idealized image is more important than actually having a proven record. In fact, we heard over and over that this nominee is a really “nice guy” with a “great sense of humor.” Several Democratic “leaders” were quick to announce that a filibuster is unlikely:

“This is a credible nominee, and not one that — as far as we know now — has a record that in any sense could be described as extremist,” said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn. Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said Bush had “made a wise choice.”

Asked whether a filibuster was likely, Nelson said: “I think it’s fair to say I don’t see anything coming out right now.”

“My sense is so far, so good,” summed up Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark.

So, we can see what the media and the politicians see in those “all-American” good looks, with the perfect, pretty and smart wife, the two adorable children (with the added plus that the two anti-abortion activists adopted them). A new nuclear family for a new Xtian Century. We can see that the culture wants to gaze into those perfect blue eyes and see the American Family Man that we left behind, even though that picture was always a fiction. The entire Republican movement since the end of WW2 has sought to create this perfect, happy and safe world.

That’s not what I see when I look into those blue eyes. I see a man who has been a Republican warrior since the Reagan administration. I see a man with a troubling inclination to put the demands of law enforcement before individual liberties. A man who has ruled that the President can subvert the Constitution and International Law with impunity. I see a man who has given the anti-woman theocrats some reason to cheer, and not just because of his arguments before the Supreme Court on abortion. I see a partisan who worked with Ken Starr to bring down a President and a man who worked with the Governor of Florida to steal an election.

When I look into those eyes I see the dark side of that American past that Republicans claim to champion. I see the eyes of misogynists who wanted to keep women in their place. I see the managers who hired Pinkertons for Robber Barons to bust up unions. I see the insurance executive and the banker who redline inner city neighborhoods. I see the law-and-order authoritarians who lock up the poor indefinitely while looking away from white collar criminals. I see the flashing blue eyes visable through the holes in white hoods.

Is that an unfair attack? Is that too much of a caricature of someone who may very well be a very nice and tolerant man? It’s certainly no more of a distortion than this weird projection of the idealized 1950’s that we’ve seen over the last couple of days. I suspect my version is closer, because I’ve found that you can judge a man by the company he keeps, and he’s kept the company of the greediest Corporatists and Religious Zealots in the Republican coalition.

This wasn’t a nomination, it was the casting of a role, filled by a member of the troupe who’s been groomed for this part. Behind those blue eyes I see glimpses of the darkest reaches of the American Right, glimpses that are apparent in the causes he’s supported and the briefs and decisions he’s written or signed onto in his relatively short career.

The Democrats in the Senate should keep their mouths shut about strategy until he’s sitting at a table in front of him. They should work closely with civil liberties and women’s health activist groups, and they damned well better ask some hard questions. Some would say he’s going to be confirmed anyway, so why fight now? How can anybody expect the American People to turn back toward a Party that won’t, ever?

As Erwin Chemerinsky put it in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

For example, Roberts must be asked detailed questions about how he believes a Supreme Court justice should interpret the Constitution. Does he agree with Justices Scalia and Thomas that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was adopted? Or does he believe, as do a majority of current justices, that there is a living Constitution? Does he believe in the protection of rights not mentioned in the Constitution, such as privacy and its protection for such rights as access to contraception and abortion? Undoubtedly, Roberts will try to sidestep questions that might generate opposition. But it is up to the Democrats to insist on answers to these and similar questions. The Constitution creates no presumption in favor of presidential nominees for the Supreme Court. President Bush undoubtedly chose Roberts because of Roberts’ conservative views. The Senate needs to know these views before deciding whether to confirm him.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this seat on the Supreme Court. In the last few years, Justice O’Connor has been the fifth vote in 5-4 decisions to strike down laws restricting access to abortion, to uphold federal campaign finance laws, to allow colleges and universities to take actions to ensure diversity, to invalidate death sentences for ineffective assistance of counsel and to limit the presence of religious symbols on government property. Roberts has the chance to change the law in all of these crucial areas.

Roberts is 50 years old. If he remains on the high court until he is 85, the current age of Justice John Paul Stevens, he will be there until the year 2040. The Senate and the American people need to know what they’re getting in Roberts. Senate Democrats should ask probing and detailed questions and make clear: no answers, no confirmation.

Sometimes it’s important to fight, even to a loss. That’s how one LEARNS how to fight even better next time. I know damned well that this is a fight the Senate Democrats must make, because we’re all going to be looking into those blue eyes for the next thirty years.

note: Find a good overview of recents stories and posts about the nomination from How Appealing and an overview of the Judge’s record from People for the American Way

radical rants shouted from Liberal Street Fighter

I learned from a blogger I have come to respect that I’ve been radicalized.

This observation came after I made several statements, statements that seemed obvious to me, starting with:

I have a problem with an opposition party that won’t oppose.

I have a problem w/ a class of corporate mercenary lawyers running everything for both parties and on k-street while our entire social infrastructure rots away.

I have a problem w/ everyone saying that since it can’t be won, it’s better not to fight.

In the long run, Sitting Bull & Crazy Horse didn’t stop the westward march, but they at least went down fighting.

In the long run, the Light Brigade rode into the guns, but their example inspired those who came after.

In the long run, the defenders in the Alamo fell under Santa Ana’s assault, but fueled a revolution.

In the long run … sometimes you have to fight and lose in order to inspire those who come after to fight the next battle. All morning long, one voice after another … “the Dems have nothing to say against him …”

My only question is how long it will take them to fold, how long until the shut up and allow a voice vote so his confirmation looks unopposed on the record.

I’m expecting not long.

Yup, that’s pretty radical.
So what exactly IS worth fighting for? If you want to ask why no one trusts the Democrats anymore, one can start with understanding how Americans see themselves, the stories Americans like to tell about what it means to be an American.

When we’re kids, we all learn about how General Washington, after a string of disasters, with starving and freezing and dying troops, launched a suprise attack, about how he held together his troops and helped to create this nation. That our nation was founded by brave fighters who kept fighting, against overwhelming odds.

We love stories about the Alamo, about brave families building homesteads, about pilgrims and fighters and “Give me liberty, or give me death!” John Brown, Martin Luther King, Elizabeth Cady Staton, Susan B. Anthony, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, “Rocky” and numerous others. That’s how Americans like to think of themselves, and how they want to see their leaders.

The Republicans recognize this, and play to it. The Dems make lots of noise about how important an issue or a fight is, then …

… well, then nothing. The leaders of this party in DC are like whipped curs, quivering, afraid to bare their teeth, for fear of their master’s hand, a hand they also love to appease. As I put it in the booman thread, regarding the idea that the Dems need to be careful, pick their battles:

(this) is triangulating)
and any Dem who votes to confirm this troglodite-in-Prince-Charming’s-clothing should be on the left’s hit list. They should be hounded in their next primary, jeered in the public square. Their name should be mud, though I think we all know which whipped curs (aka Vichy Dems) will be JUST FINE with this guy, this enabler of criminal corporations and a police state.

This is EXACTLY why the party telling us we should support Casey and Langevin is WRONG. Those are EXACTLY the kind of assholes who cross the aisle, who put a bipartisain stamp on the dismantling of our nation’s freedoms.

THIS is why Reid shouldn’t have been minority leader … he AGREES with Judge Roberts on so many issues. How can you “oppose” if you’re ON THE SAME SIDE in the culture war?

Don’t need to wait and see. I know exactly what this guy is. No matter how many times some infotainment talking head assures me there is no record, I know damned well there are PLENTY of records.

I won’t win this battle, but frankly I’m ready for the party to split if the whipped curs in DC continue as they have been. Let’s break the fucking party if Dr. Dean isn’t successful in reforming the party, in overcoming all of the obstacles they’re placing in his way. Lets form a new party around the Progressive Caucus if we can get them to join us. I’m sick of this. I’m sick of “centrism”, I’m sick of a lack of conviction, a lack of spine, a fundamental lack of ANYTHING remotely admirable about so many of “my” party’s leaders in DC.

Fight dammit!

This is, of course, the observation that renders me “radicalized”.

It’s radical to stand up, (or type), a demand that a political party that represents you fight for what they claim to believe. It’s radical to expect that a radical jurist who believes our body of law was frozen in Amber in the 18th Century should be opposed. It’s radical to expect that POLITICS happen in Washington, that the two party system actually express itself in more than comforting soundbites as America is dragged back to the Robber Baron era by a coalition of wackjob Fundamentalists, out-of-control greedheads and reactionary legal scholars.

The electorate will never rally to a political party that stands for nothing. A political party that won’t bloody it’s knuckles, that won’t risk a loss after a bruising fight, will never be trusted as “American”. No one wants someone on their side who won’t “have their back.” As the party has tacked with the wind-driven polls, trying so hard to keep to the “center” (wherever THAT is), as it’s abandoned the poor, labor, women and minorities, is it any wonder that people aren’t eager to rush to their side? To “our” side?

Great movements grow out of noble battles lost. When the hell are we going to pick a battle to fight?

a hearty cheer from Liberal Street Fighter

I’ve added a great new blog to my bookmarks: Our Word, where I happily find some voices that are absent from the dailyCLARK post Piegate. Their mission:

Our Word is a community where women’s voices are valued and respected, a space for telling the truth of women’s lives and working together to improve them. This site is owned by all members who post here. It is the aggregate of all of our words, all of our ideas, all of our experiences.

I haven’t registered yet (so many blogs, so little time), but I’ve found some great stuff there in its short time on the web, as well as some discussions that can make a madman squirm. That is a GOOD thing … it’s important and vital that we all get knocked off our pins once in a while, the written equivalent of a zen teacher striking a meditating student near their shoulder blades. Knock out stuck perception, break free the mind … WHACK WHACK.
However, the proliferation of focused sites sometimes worries me. Does the bullying on some sites serve to drive people into blog ghettoes? Some of this worry is mitigated by the very nature of the blogoverse — the contant crossposting, linking and trackbacking helps to keep communication lines open. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not blaming anybody who goes off and creates a new forum in response to rabid pack behavior and bullying. I blame the bullies, their childish taunts and mocking comments of “well, if you don’t like it blogger is free, start your own damned blog!” This very attitude is contrary to the power that we all like to ascribe to the blogosphere.

That is a worry, and I’m curious to see what others think about it. I do applaud that communities like Our Word are there, having the vital discussions that are increasingly being silenced on big blogs focussed on “party activism” (i.e. fundraising). As a feminist, as a humanist, I do believe that the only way out of the cul-de-sac this culture is trapped in is to confront one another, communicate with one another and try to empathize with one another. I think that is the true power of blogs … not in fundraising. Start direct fundraising, and you invite in the pros, the ward heelers and political fixers. One can only wonder if that is the reason so many voices considered inconvenient are being driven to create their own sites.

I’m glad that people with something to offer aren’t being driven into silence, that vital new communities are springing up, and I’m glad that Our Word is one of them.

submitted to the jury from Liberal Street Fighter

Well, not the law itself, but the books that are its physical embodiment have a musty, dusty, old, leather, decaying paper, slightly-dampish-like-an-old-person’s-house kind of smell. You see, I was taken on a tour of the Marquette University Law School Law Library today, and that smell was lingering down every aisle, every section we walked through. It wafted up out of 19th Century Wisconsin Reports as I opened them to scan the cases within.

I was enchanted. There were case law books going back over a couple of centuries.  Old books with pages fragile to the touch. Some books w/ beautiful leather covers, others with printing so small one gets the sense that they were trying to cram as much of the case law into them as they could, to save space and money. Regional recorders with Indian Territory included as one of the regions covered, before it became the state of Oklahoma.

All of this history, this ongoing work-in-progress that is American Jurisprudence, housed in Sensenbrenner Hall …
… named for a benefactor of Marquette University, also the grandfather of one of the Republicans most avidly doing his utmost to trash the independence of the Judiciary and the protection of every American citizen’s privacy, Rep F. James Sensenbrenner Jr.

As Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep Sensenbrenner has pushed for the renewal of USA PATRIOT Act, supported the Bankruptcy Reform Act Usurers Protection Act, the REAL ID Act (which Governors have warned will drive up the costs of getting drivers licenses) and the Flag Burning Amendment to the Constitution.

Perhaps most egregiously, he has recently sent a letter to the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals demanding that the judges change a sentence that Sensenbrenner didn’t like, in defiance of legal precedent and the Separation of Powers, the two very things that underpin our civil society. As the American Judicature Society put it in a statement released last week:

“Our concern is . . . that this incident is another in a distressingly long series of incidents that demonstrate Mr. Sensenbrenner’s ignorance of the proper functions of Congress with respect to the federal judiciary and his arrogance in purporting to speak for the American people when attempting to bully federal judges,” Stephen Burbank, chairman of the society’s Task Force on Judicial Independence and Accountability, said in a prepared statement.

The Washington Post also condemned his meddling in a strongly worded editorial today:

As a matter of law, Mr. Sensenbrenner is simply wrong. An age-old legal principle — reaffirmed in 1999 by a unanimous Supreme Court — holds that you cannot get relief from an appeals court without appealing. Courts make mistakes all the time, and when parties don’t appeal, they’re out of luck. Indeed, Mr. Sensenbrenner’s committee is busy writing legislation to make it harder for federal courts to entertain such questions when convicts raise them.

Even were he right on the law, however, the intervention in a pending matter is an intolerable affront to the independence of the courts. The government is represented in criminal cases by the executive branch, not by Congress. For the powerful chairman of a congressional committee to demand a particular result from a court in the name of “oversight” contains at least an implicit threat of retribution. Mr. Sensenbrenner, at the end of his letter, asks for “a prompt response.” Judge Flaum acknowledged receipt of the letter but declined to address the merits of the issue, citing the ethical bar to publicly commenting on “pending or impending judicial proceedings.” We have, for Mr. Sensenbrenner, a two-word response: Back off.

The assault on our legal system by the Republican Party has been relentless, and Representative Sensenbrenner has been one of the worst abusers. I learned today that the law smells, but it’s a warm smell, a smell born of age and faith in reason and tradition. The stench coming off of Sensenbrenner and his cadre of barbarians is the rot of corruption, of blind mindless faith in ideology.

The law may smell, but Rep. Sensenbrenner’s actions reek, and are unbecoming of a legislator and a member of the bar.

another rant from Liberal Street Fighter

“Who will watch the watchers?”

Billmon offers up that question in his latest piece about Jooody’s stint in the slam:

Left to their own devices, corporate journalists seem increasingly inclined to act as an arm of the government, not a watchdog of it. Which means the licence granted by the traditions of the profession — which in some ways extend even further than the legal rights guaranteed by the First Amendment — can and are being used against the public interest, not to protect it. We seem to have run into yet another variation on the old Roman question: Quid custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall watch the watchers?

That’s too big a topic for me to tackle today.

The tendency to glorify our military, to obsessively cover violent car chases — and in Jooody’s case, eagerness to help a corrupt government SELL a war of aggression to a willing public — has to make any serious citizen ask just what we mean by a “free” press. Billmon declined to tackle it, so I’ll take a stab.

The increasing militarization of our society has been underway for quite some time. Too much sex and violence in video games, movies and music are to blame, insist some politicians. They tend, of course, to attack the creators of these materials, while turning a blind eye to the companies that profit from them. However, I would submit that the real celebration of violence comes from the corporate news complex. Car chases, shootouts and war coverage with splashy graphics … nothing gets people to tune in like some good violent news coverage. The great weight of violence we witness flickering across our TV screens is perpetrated by our government, with a cooperative media cheering them on.

Our police forces in many cities are paramilitary units, providing not law enforcement, but the constant threat/promise of overwhelming force. Most tragically, this resulted in the recent death of 19-month-old Susie Peña, a siege covered live on television:

The fatal sequence of events that has L.A.’s police chief lining up on one side, the little girl’s family, their attorney and a string of community activists on another side, with the mayor somewhere in the center striving to calm the waters, began on Sunday just after 3 p.m., when Raul Peña left his used-car dealership, located at 10420 S. Avalon Blvd., and went to the home of the baby’s mother, Lorena Lopez, a half-block away. There, according to Lopez and her sister, he picked up the couple’s plum-cheeked toddler, Susie, and brought the girl back to work with him. “When my dad was under stress, he’d be with the baby to relax,” says stepson Ronald. “Right now his business was going bad, and there were some debts. So that’s why he took the baby to work with him Sunday.”

Nonsense, say police, contending that a combustible situation had been building in the family all weekend, that at 2 p.m. the day of the shooting, Lorena Lopez made a “domestic-terror report” to the police about Peña. And that after the shooting, Peña’s 16-year-old stepdaughter told police that he was jacked up on alcohol and cocaine that day, and had threatened to kill her, and baby Susie, and the girls’ mother, Lopez.

Why did the situation escalate the way it did? Why was the army outside that autoparts store in such a hurry to end the situation. Could it be because the whole city was watching?

A tactical alert was called at 5:40 p.m. The number of officers had swelled to 80 or 100, maybe more. Police say they last talked to Peña on the phone at 5:30 p.m. but still used the PA system to urge him to surrender his weapons. In response, a witness reports hearing Peña shout over and over, as in a B movie, “I’m not going to jail! You’re not going to take me alive!”

Finally, a few minutes after 6 p.m., it all went bad. Police say that they saw Peña at the back of the property and that shots were exchanged, but then he disappeared inside the building. “Truthfully, we aren’t yet entirely sure what went on,” says Deputy Chief Paysinger. “You’d think we’d know it all by now, but we don’t. We will unravel all the facts, but it takes a while.”

Why the hurry? For that matter, why are agencies of our government so quick and willing to shoot first, ask questions later? Is our press truly acting as a fourth estate anymore, as called for in the Constitution, if they help the government sell its actions?

Indeed, who is watching the watchers, other than the American public, passively cheering on the death and destruction from the safety of their couches? As the system of checks and balances continues to fall apart under the weight of corporate money buying its way into power, perhaps we’re left only with lawyers and the courts to protect us from their continued irresponsible actions. Perhaps the system is already so badly broken that only drastic action by prosecutors and principled judges can divert a media so negligent in its duties.

Perhaps, but I know that Jooody rotting in a jail cell for the part she played as a propagandist for the Bush Administration is just fine with me.

very cool image lifted from La Galaxia de los Cómics

tossed into the pond from Liberal Street Fighter

Stupid at Altercation points out that we’re our own worse enemy today:

Hey Eric, it’s Stupid to get serious about the war against terrorism.  I’m sorry to keep picking on Thomas Friedman, because I really do respect him, but I can’t help it.  After 9/11 he repeatedly urged Dubya to use the tragedy to galvanize the nation around energy conservation.  I expected Friedman and others to do the same after the London attacks, but I haven’t seen a word.  It mocks the noble stoicism of the Brits to ignore the most empowering course of action we can still take in this war.  One ounce of Saudi Arabian crackdown on the terrorists is worth a pound of video surveillance cameras trying to spot the next subway bomber, but what leverage do we have with the Saudis when we’re begging them to keep their oil production at maximum levels?  Not to mention whatever oil money reaches the terrorists and Wahhabi institutions that create them.  How can anyone call this a war when we’re financing our enemy?  Zeesh, even before we entered World War II, we tried to undermine the economy of the Axis powers.

He links to a piece by Robert F Kennedy Jr who points out once again that much of our current mess could have been avoided, especially if Reagan hadn’t ended President Carter’s CAFE standards:

In the late 1970’s, President Jimmy Carter implemented CAFE standards to combat an oil shortage driven by policies of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The standards raised fuel efficiency in American cars by 7.6 miles a gallon over six years, causing oil imports from the Persian Gulf to fall by 87 percent. Our economy grew by 27 percent during that period. Detroit, predictably, figured out how to build more fuel-efficient cars largely without reductions in size, comfort or power.

The CAFE standards worked so well that they produced an oil glut by 1986. That’s when the Reagan administration intervened to rescue America’s domestic oil industry from gasoline price collapse. Ronald Reagan’s rollback of CAFE standards caused America, in that year, to double oil imports from the Persian Gulf nations and to burn more oil than is in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Would they have made that big of a difference if they’d continued? Kennedy continues:

According to a recent report by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, if the United States had continued to conserve oil at the rate it did in the period from 1976 to 1985, it would no longer have needed Persian Gulf oil after 1985. Had we continued this wise course, we might not have had to fight the Persian Gulf war, and we would have insulated ourselves from price shocks in the international oil market. Fuel efficiency is a sound national energy policy, economic policy and foreign policy all wrapped into one. Every increase of one mile per gallon in auto fuel efficiency yields more oil than is in two Arctic National Wildlife Refuges. An improvement right now of 2.7 miles per gallon would eliminate our need for all Persian Gulf oil!

Yet the Republican Congress in 1995 made it illegal for the Environmental Protection Agency even to study higher CAFE standards. The result is that America now has the worst energy efficiency in 20 years.

What do we call a party that places the selfish interests of its corporate patrons before the wealth, health and security of their country? Profiteers? Pirates? TRAITORS? And what of the bought-and-sold Quislings who help them from the “opposing” party, the party that did everything it could to undermine Carter’s Presidency, especially during the 1980 primary campaign?

Once again, it’s necessary to face all of the ways in which the Vichy Dems in Congress and the entrenched consultancy complex continue to fail to oppose the criminals in charge, fail to take advantage of ready-made issues that Americans would rally around, if only given the opportunity. Yes, Americans love their cars, but the long waiting lists of people looking for hybrid and high-mileage cars reveals that a sizable number of our fellow citizens would be willing to do what it would take to make this country a better global citizen.

All the party has to do is rise to the challenge.

Sad, that years of neglect have come to this, but Ken Mehlman was making his pitch today in Milwaukee for African Americans to give the GOP another chance:

“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Mr. Mehlman told his audience. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”

Alluding to the rise of the Republican Party in the South since the civil right movement nearly a half-century ago, Mr. Mehlman said that “if my party benefited from racial polarization in the past, it is the Democratic Party that benefits from it today.”

Make no mistake, this is just another round of hardball Republican tactics, after years of voter suppression, most recently in Ohio. The unspoken message — we took your rights away, and you have to come to us to get them back.  Where else are you going to go, you can almost hear Mehlman saying … that other party has made it clear that they won’t stand with black lawmakers, let alone black voters.

from Liberal Street Fighter

One almost couldn’t blame black Americans if they thought … “hmmmmmm, he’s a lying sack of shit, but what the hell, being LOYAL hasn’t worked out so well, time for some hardball.”

Howard Dean offered a counterpoint today to Mehlman’s plea for “forgiveness”:

I’m here to tell you that the Democratic Party is going to stand up for the things we believe in. We’re going to stand for social justice. We’ll never take a single African American vote for granted. We’re going to show up now, not eight weeks before an election. And we’re going to put organizers in all 50 states.

For more than 95 years, you have been the conscience of our nation, and the message of your work is a powerful one – when we come together around shared goals and common principles, great things are possible. Historic things are possible. People of all races, nationalities and faiths have united in the NAACP on a fundamental premise – that all men and women are created equal.

The Democratic Party shares this mission, and we share common goals in the fight for fairness and equality for every one. We believe that everyone is equal in the eyes of God…

That all sounds great. Many of us on the left are big fans of Howard Dean, but we couldn’t blame them if the delegates at the NAACP convention took all of that with a grain of salt. After all, the other guys have done a pretty damned good job of gaining power by stealing access to the polls, maybe it’s time to go to their fence and buy back what was stolen.

After years of neglect, Dean has got a long fight ahead of him to win back some trust, and I wouldn’t blame the NAACP to play coy to protect their community.

How very sad that the party of the Southern Strategy has played the Democrats so well. Perhaps the only way to save the Democratic Party from the corporate handmaidens now running it is to appeal to the other side. Perhaps it’s time for various communities of the Democratic Party base to start making the party WORK for their votes.

So, how should we define terrorism?

Well, the CIA says:

How do you define terrorism?

The Intelligence Community is guided by the definition of terrorism contained in Title 22 of the US Code, Section 2656f(d):

—The term “terrorism” means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.

Given that, I think this story from the San Francisco Chronicle qualifies (story link found thanks to the Austin Klein’s Agnosticism/Atheism Blog):

Jerusalem — Violence marred the annual gay pride parade for the first time Thursday when an ultra-Orthodox man broke through heavy security and stabbed three of the participants, leaving them with light to moderate wounds.

Other protesters, most of them religious Jews, lined the mile-long route of the “Love Without Borders” march through central Jerusalem. Some held placards that read “You are corrupting our children” while others shouted insults. One placard read “Jerusalem is not San Francisco.”

Thirteen protesters were arrested, including one man who threw a soiled diaper at the marchers then attacked a photographer trying to record the scene.

proffered for flowers or flames from Liberal Street Fighter
Let’s see, premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups — CHECK.

Wait, you might say, this was just a religious nut. How can you say it was political? Well:

Outside the Great Synagogue, where about 100 protesters shouted anti-gay slogans behind a thick police cordon, two members of the Knesset (parliament) tried to stop the march by sitting in the middle of King George V Street, the city’s main thoroughfare. They were eventually dragged away by police.

The violence — in stark contrast to the peaceful events of previous years — came after attempts by the ultra-Orthodox mayor of Jerusalem, Uri Lupolianski, to ban the march.

The Washington Blade describes the incident in more detail:

Opponents tried to stop the march by throwing a stink bomb at the starting point, but several thousand marchers paraded through the center of Jerusalem anyway, braving shouts and insults from protesters, mostly young ultra-Orthodox Jews. “Homo sex is immoral,” read a sign carried by one protester. The march proceeded despite the violence. “It took many years for Jerusalem to have the Gay Pride parade,” said one participant, 39-year-old Moshik Toledano, “but once it happens, it makes no difference if the ultra-Orthodox come here and try to stop it.” Organizers called off an international gay festival set for late summer because of Israel’s planned pullout from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank around the same time. But they decided to go ahead with the annual local march, despite opposition from Orthodox Jews, who have a strong presence in the city. (photo above courtesy of the same article)

The way words like “terrorism” are used by politicians and the media are utterly corrupted by the political spin placed on them by dominant groups. Brian Whitaker of the Guardian detailed the problem a few years ago after the US State Department released one of its meaningless Terror Reports, in May, 2001:

Denying that states can commit terrorism is generally useful, because it gets the US and its allies off the hook in a variety of situations. The disadvantage is that it might also get hostile states off the hook – which is why there has to be a list of states that are said to “sponsor” terrorism while not actually committing it themselves.

Interestingly, the American definition of terrorism is a reversal of the word’s original meaning, given in the Oxford English Dictionary as “government by intimidation”. Today it usually refers to intimidation of governments.

The first recorded use of “terrorism” and “terrorist” was in 1795, relating to the Reign of Terror instituted by the French government. Of course, the Jacobins, who led the government at the time, were also revolutionaries and gradually “terrorism” came to be applied to violent revolutionary activity in general. But the use of “terrorist” in an anti-government sense is not recorded until 1866 (referring to Ireland) and 1883 (referring to Russia).

Plainly, the word has become all-but meaningless due to its corruption over the years. How DO we define terrorism? Why is a truck bomb targeting off-duty American Soldiers terrorism, but carpet-bombing civilian areas not? Why is the murder of Theo van Gogh considered terrorism by many, but the attack on the gay marchers above, a violent attack plainly intended to intimidate a targeted group of civilians for political effect, not?

What do YOU think?