"Our beliefs are the very opposite of the fanatics - we believe in reason, democracy and tolerance... These beliefs are the foundation of our civilised world."
"They are enduring, they have served us well and as history has shown we have been prepared to fight, when necessary to defend them. But the fanatics should know: we hold these beliefs every bit as strongly as they hold theirs. Now is the time to show it."
"We have respect for human life. They do not. We hold essentially liberal values. They do not. As we look into these issues it is important that we never lose sight of our basic values." Tony Blair, address to Parliament, Sep 15, 20001
If candidate A is someone you can't stand....and candidate B is one you agree with on some issues, but not all.....and candidate C is a third-party dark horse who has no chance of winning, you should vote for candidate B.
Failure to accept this logic may result in an unwanted Presidency
Subcommander Zero
So Bush Did Steal the White House By Robert Parry November 22, 2001 George W. Bush now appears to have claimed the most powerful office in the world by blocking a court-ordered recount of votes in Florida that likely would have elected Al Gore to be president of the United States. A document, revealed by Newsweek magazine, indicates that the Florida recount that was stopped last year by five Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court would have taken into account so-called “overvotes” that heavily favored Gore.Consortium
In an effort to get a special prosecutor appointed, Democrats.com has launched a new Web site at Enrongate
Al Gore went out on a precarious limb in 1992 with his bold call to action Earth in the Balance. He has been ridiculed and lampooned by right wing opinion makers for nearly 10 years for his bold and courageous environmental views. Now how about giving Al Gore a little credit for being a visionary in calling for the elimination of combustion engines. Bold, visionary environmental ideas, that will be Al Gore's legacy, and in an era of prepackaged, blow-dried Presidential candidates, such a legacy is not a bad one to have. .democraticunderground.com
The system is cybernetic. The feedback loops were put there well before the computer was invented. In fact, the system invented the computer. Franklin and Jefferson and others put the checks and balances into the system. Franklin was behind the first copyright and patent laws. Franklin discovered electricity. The congress funded the first succesfull telegraph line. Edison's first inventions were based on the telegraph. The system acts as an amplifier. After Fort Sumpter was fired on, there was a slow period of reorganization, then Sherman burned a path 100 miles wide from Atlanta to the sea. Work on the Merrimack retrofit was proceeding for several months before the Union started to design the Monitor. It was designed, parts ordered, and built in 90 days. No system that flexible had ever existed before. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, the system reorganized, and after a while, the bomb was dropped. When Germany started bombing London, there was an eventuall response that amplified the effect. Thousands of planes and ships were used. After Sputnick was launched, the Saturn V was built in response. Meanwhile, after Wilson tried to start the League of Nations, Republicans defeated the plan. [see notes] __________________________Liberal causes, things they fought for: ( by Houston Wade ) - An end to slavery - An end to child labor - human rights - A woman's right to vote - Free public Schools - For US membership into the League of nations to prevent a second Great War - Social Security - A minimum wage - Union formation - Medicare/Medicaid - The 8 hour work day - Indigent legal services - Unemployment compensation - Integration (Brown vs. The Board of EEducation) - The Peace-Corps - Ameri-Corps - Equal rights for all people - Voting Rights Act - Civil Rights Act - School lunch programs - Public radio and television - Head Start - Funding for the Arts - After School Programs - Science to be taught in schools, not religious indoctrination - The National Parks System - And Environmental regulations to namee a few... Conservative and right-wing causes, things they fought for: - To keep slavery - Segregation (Plessy vs. Ferguson) - To keep Child labor at all costs - Against union formation and for forceed labor - To keep women as property without thee right to vote - They never wanted public schools insttead they were all for religious indoctrination at private schools - Against the minimum wage - Against Social Security from the starrt (It was a program they never wanted to begin with. Now they claim that they are the ones qualified to "save" it. Go figure.) - Have always been against human rightss - They were against the creation of Meddicare and Medicaid (two more programs they are now suddenly qualified to "save") - They never liked the creation of Natiional Parks and want to sell off to thee highest bidder (good idea guys) - Prayer in Schools - Against the Voting Rights Act - Against the Civil Rights Act - Anti-science and pro religious indocttrination in schools - Against the Peace-Corps - Against Ameri-Corps - Against Head Start (Now they claim thhat this program is a big success) - Anti-envirionment http://www.bartcop.com/124wade.htm
from Bill Berry's webpage:
"And could the whole 2000 election campaign have been a more disgusting spectacle from the point-of-view of progressives? If I had thought he had the chance of a snowball in hell I would have voted for Ralph Nader (though the man has all the charisma of my old workboots). But didn't we know that Nader's only potentially serious impact on the election would be to throw it to that smirky, dim-bulb frat-boy, G.W. Bush? To see just this scenario play out in slow motion in Florida was like a bad dream. Never mind that the Republicans won the election fraudulently by illegally expunging the names of thousands of legitimate (mostly black and mostly Democratic) voters from the rolls; Gore would still have won had it not been for Nader (who, thanks to this fiasco will be virtually persona non grata among serious progressives for some time). There were, after all, some differences between the two major candidates, the principal one being their political parties and the constituencies within those parties. (At least progressives could hope to have some influence within their own party. And let's stop pretending that that party could be, at least for the foreseeable future, any other than the Democratic Party. One day, with instant runoff voting and proportional representation, there might be an alternative, but that day is now even farther away thanks to Nader and his supporters.) " View From the Rock.The legendary Bill Berry's web page!
| Last Years Issues Page || The Betrayal of America|
| Colin Powell Lies to the Iran Contra Investigation |
The National Will
"The patronage of public office should no longer be confided to one who uses it for active opposition to the national will." --Thomas Jefferson, 1804
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." --Abraham Lincoln.
"And they swiftly decided to aggressively present to the nation and, not incidentally, to federal and state judges who were watching the counts on television, an image of Florida in chaos. They did that not only by alerting reporters to genuine episodes of discord, but also by organizing their own demonstrations, then complaining about the chaos that resulted."--NY Times on Republican strategy.
Laughing at Himself, or Laughing at Us? July 26, 2001 by The Plaid Adder [regard Shrub's speech at Yale] I cannot understand why the media keeps talking about Dubya's "ability to laugh at himself" as if it is some kind of positive trait. Has no one considered the possibility that Dubya's amazing ability to laugh at himself may have something to do with the amount of practice he's had? More to the point, doesn't anyone realize that when Dubya laughs at himself, he's not laughing with us, but at us? After all, the subtext of that "C student" crack is clear enough: "Any of you who ever did anything better than C work, you're suckers. I'm real glad I never bothered to put any effort into any of my classes, cause it would just have been a waste of time. Cause look at me! I'm lazy, stupid, and ignorant--and I'm President! What have you got lined up for next year, Mr. Valedictorian? Some graduate school gig with a $9,000 stipend? To hell with all of you pencil-necked geeks! I'm king of the world!!!!" A little while ago a friend of mine forwarded me a document that purported to be a speech given by Larry Ellison of Oracle to the Yale graduating class of 2000, in which Ellison was supposed to have said much the same thing. However, that "speech" was actually a parody written for an online magazine, and was intended as a joke. Dubya, as is so often his wont, has taken something that most people wouldn't buy even as a joke and turned it into lived reality. Parody will soon be dead in this country because there will be no way to top the painful farce that is the Dubya presidency. After all, could you invent anything more bizarre than the spectacle of one of America's most prestigious institutions of higher learning giving an honorary degree to a spoiled, anti-intellectual slacker who rewards them by publicly gloating over the fact that he got to be President without ever having to work or think? Or the fact that this unrepentant slacker wants to be "the education president"? Well, I'm glad Dubya can "laugh at himself." I've stopped laughing. He's not funny any more. He may not take education seriously, but I do. And I'm sick of seeing the "education president" get up in public and be, as one senior quoted in the YAM article put it, "proud of his bad grades. " I'm sick of the fact that our president is the standard-bearer for ignorant privilege, complacent laziness, and self-satisfied mediocrity. I'm sick of the fact that through Dubya, the Republican regime is actively cultivating our national fear and distrust of anything that resembles intelligence. I happen to think that morality is linked to the ability to think critically; that compassion and empathy are dependent on the cultivation of curiosity; that both individual happiness and national prosperity are related to our willingness and ability to learn. I believe - call me crazy - that an education is more than a series of hoops through which you have to slouch in order to get the B.A. that will qualify you as a member of the middle class. I believe that what we try to teach students makes a difference to them in their future lives. I try - in the face of all evidence to the contrary - to believe that my students give a shit. And that is why, when it comes to Dubya, I am no longer amused.
Subject: Carter blasts Bush
Former US President Jimmy Carter has launched an outspoken attack on President George W Bush.
"I have been disappointed in almost everything he has done," said Mr Carter.
Trifecta of Ignominy
From The Chicago Tribune
"Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires," Scalia wrote. "The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to [Texas Gov. George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election."
Allow me to paraphrase: "...So we must stop it this instant, lest the unruly, unsophisticated masses ever get the idea that Vice President Al Gore actually won the election because he got more votes than Bush in Florida--as well as the rest of the country. It would perturb them to see Bush inaugurated, and this might make it difficult for Bush to be an effective and respected president."
I've come up empty scouring the Constitution for my right not to be perturbed. In vain, I went back over Article II, which deals with the presidency, looking for a "sunshine clause" saying, "No clouds shall be cast upon the claim of legitimacy of a president."
Nanny Scalia and four fellow baby-sitters of the right freelanced a temporary suspension of our common-law right to know. If their reasoning holds, Republicans will be allowed to impound the ballots in Florida for at least four years so that Freedom of Information Act busybodies can't conduct their planned unofficial recounts of machine-rejected ballots several weeks or months from now.
After that, perhaps the paternalistic caregivers on the high court will take another look at the whole freedom-of- information idea. The truth? They can't handle the truth!
The five conservatives justices hit the trifecta of ignominy with their stay order:
1. They cast a cloud upon the court's moral authority with a partisan 5-4 ruling. If they're just a fractious clutch of ideologues like so many guests on "Hardball," why should we pay deference to their rulings?
2. They all but killed Gore's chances to prevail in a recount or swing public sentiment his way by helping Republicans run out the clock on the Dec. 12 deadline for appointing electors.
3. They all but killed Bush's chance to have the legitimacy of his election recognized by most Democrats
Chicago TribuneFrom the API reports:
"Some Democrats raised alarms Monday because two sons of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia work for law firms connected to the case. John Scalia accepted a position with the Miami-based firm Greenberg Traurig on November 7. The next day, Barry Richard, a partner in the firm, said he was called about representing Bush in Florida. A second son, Eugene Scalia, is a partner in the Washington office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher -- the firm representing Bush in the Supreme Court arguments. He is not involved in the case. "
Judge Merritt urges Justice Thomas to remove himself
..a federal judge in Nashville said Justice Thomas faced a serious conflict of interest as a result of his wife's work for the Heritage Foundation. The foundation has close ties to the Republican Party and would probably have a say in the hiring of key government officials if Gov. George W. Bush assumed the presidency. In e-mail distributed on Capitol Hill earlier this month, Mrs. Thomas solicited résumés "for transition purposes" from the government oversight committees of Congress. "The spouse has obviously got a substantial interest that could be affected by the outcome," [federal appellate judge, Gilbert S. Merritt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit] said in an interview from his home in Nashville. "You should disqualify yourself. I think he'd be subject to some kind of investigation in the Senate." ...He urged Justice Thomas to remove himself from the case in order to prevent any violation of a federal law - he cited Section 455 of Title 28 of the United States Code, "Disqualification of Justices, Judges or Magistrates" - that requires court officers to excuse themselves if a spouse has "an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding."--New York Times, 12/12/00
Quotes from Richard landes, at The Center for Millennial Studies at the Department of History, Boston University "The resurgence of religious fundamentalism, so utterly unanticipated by the sociology of the 1950s and 1960s, has turned the global village into a wide array of local battlegrounds." Apocalyptic Time and Modernity: Reaction and Accommodation "Much has, in fact, been written about the phenomenon of fundamentalism; it is perhaps the single most important religious phenomenon of our age. And yet little of the research in this field has paid more than limited attention to the links between the two, to the impact of apocalyptic time on the tenor and development of fundamentalist attitudes.(5) And yet the fundamentalist approach shares with apocalyptic fervor a common and paradoxical relationship to modernity: they characterize both poles of response. On the one hand, apocalyptic time offers an opportunity for communities of believers to protest the invasive effects of modernity in the most violent fashions." ... httP://www.mille.org Landes points out that the Millitia movements represent a conflict between two (or more) attitudes about society. The "dominating paradigm" portrays societal relationships in black-and-white, good or evil, models. The "civil society" paradigm including democracy, freedom of speech, and religious tolerance, are portrayed as the "enemy" by the millitias (both Islamic and Christian). Landes has a good web site, but it was rather busy today. I was able to get to "cached material" on Google. My habit has been to use the term "narrow-minded-bigot-faschist- maggot-brain." Landes has a more scholarly description of the same viewpoint. He calls it "the dominating paradigm", referring to the belief that every group either dominates some other groups, or is dominated by them. The enemy of the "dominating paradigm" is modernity, or civil society, with democracy and the free enterprise, etc. The conspiracy theories of the NRA millitias, and the Islamic Jihad, and the UFO fanatics share certain traits. The most disturbing are dislike of the government and complaints about modernity. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
fringefolk \'frinjfolk\ n
people who rise up to protest when the constitution is unraveled: Fringefolk
Franchise "Most Americans will be shocked, appalled and outraged to learn that their Constitution does not grant them the right to vote. The 15th, 19th and 26th Amendments prohibit 'discrimination' in voting on the basis of race, sex and age -- but does not extend to (Americans) the right to vote," Jackson said, recalling Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's admonition to Al Gore's lawyers during last year's Florida dispute that no such protection exists. "Even though the right to vote is the supreme right in a democracy, the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore told Americans there is no explicit fundamental right to suffrage in the Constitution." http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/Betty Bowers has a well designed site: Betty Bowers is a better Christian than you!
This game takes only minutes to play, and is very rewarding: New Supreme Court Game!
Political and movement news sites:
Bartcop Political news and humor
Buzzflash News
Bush Brother's Banana Republic
Allied Forces Million Voter march
Political and movement news sites:
Jane's handy linksBartcop Political news and humor
Buzzflash News
Bush Brother's Banana Republic
Allied Forces Million Voter march
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