Bush Latin

One of Resident Bush's dumbest comments, or scariest depending on how you look at it, was when, attempting to sound authoritative, he told us that he was "the decider." It is flagrantly obvious that the Rethuglicans and their Pandercrat allies are either horribly ignorant of the basis of our country's governmental system or just don't give a crap. The latter is the most likely option. However, Bush and his nitwits need to take a lesson in Latin from their constituents. They should know that constituent is from the Latin constituere which means to decide. Hence, constituents are the deciders, Mr. Bush.

It's time we the people sent a clear message to the administration, the Pandercrats and the neo-fascist bastards in the Repug party. (Yes, I said fascist. Anyone who says we are not on the road to fascism is pathetically delusional.) We must stand up and say:

"We are the people. We are the government. We make the choices. You implement them. You work for us. We will not be bullied. We will not have our country destroyed for your wallets. We will not allow you to risk our lives any longer for political expediency and global hegemony. We will not let you steal our votes. We will not allow you to sell our country out to corporations. We will no longer tolerate your treatment of minorities and the poor. We will not allow you to spy on us or create illegal laws to circumvent the Constitution. You are traitors and we are onto you. You are not in charge. We are. We are the deciders."

The Texas Progressives

Most people don't associate progressivism with the so-called uber-red state of Texas, but even the Lone Star state is feeling the urge to get away from the Bush brigade that it spawned. Of course, you might not have heard about the Dem ticket for 2006 in Texas and that's exactly how the mainstream news media wants it....buried and gone. But progressives have ascended to a prominent position in the party and are fighting as hard as they can to wrest power from the Neo-cons, "con"-servatives and Repugs in Dems' clothing that have plagued the state for decades. That being said, there is still a large contingent of "conservative" Democrats standing in their way and it's up to the grass roots to get the job done.

There seems to have been a renewal of both populism and anger that have merged into a grass roots attempt at ousting the Repugs from Austin. One would most likely locate the breaking point sometime during the 2000 presidential election. Dems all over were angry and frustrated having found that the national party, once again, saw Texas as a lost cause and only harassed supporters for money that would not be used in the state. The state convention swelled with new activists looking to change the balance of power. New blood from El Paso to Lubbock to Beaumont came together in Houston. More recently, the Fort Worth convention saw an all-out battle between the traditional and liberal factions for party chair. The libs lost (you know how deal-making turns out), but the message to the establishment was clear. "We're here and you will deal with us."

While there are Dems fighting all over the state in even the most scarlet of counties, here's a taste of some of the most progressive, populist, state-wide barn-burners leading the way.

David van Os is a populist progressive firestorm labor lawyer running for the position of Texas Attorney General against the law-breaking, partisan hackery of Bush-crony Greg Abbott. David has publically challenged the malfeasance of the oil giants shouting his war slogan, "I'm coming for you!" He is publically opposing the Trans-Texas Corridor and abuses of eminent domain. As David says, "There is no legislation that can't be repealed, and no politician that can't be fired at election time..." A staunch supporter of the 14th Amendment and veterans, David has received many awards for his lifetime of work fighting for the Constitution, including Civil Libetarian of the Year from the ACLU and Good Guy recognition from the Texas Womens' Political Caucus. David is also a founding member of the Texas Progressive Populist Caucus. David van Os is a true champion of the people. Those who see him speak live are always impressed and ready to go out and kick elephant behind. Join him at http://www.vanosfortexasag.com/.

Hank Gilbert wants to be Texas's next Ag Commissioner and is supported in that cause by many, including the Texas Fraternal Order of Police. Hank is a former teacher and all around good guy who also opposes the Trans-Texas Corridor. But he grew up a farmer and has farming in his blood. Hank understands the Republican agenda that is hurting so many people across Texas and we're not just talking about farmers. If you want to know how all Texans can benefit from a Democrat as Ag Commissioner, just ask Hank. As he says, "If you eat, you're automatically involved in Agriculture." Help Hank out at www.http://www.hankgilbert.com/

Maria Luisa Alvarado is A San Antonian looking to be the new Texas Lt. Governor. Most people don't realize that the Lt. Governor in the Lone Star state is more powerful than the Governor with lots of pull in the legislative process. Maria seeks to stop the abuses of Austin in matters of equality and, as a veteran herself, wishes to see all Texas vets gets a fair shake. Maria is one of those do-gooders-turned-politician you really have to hear. Maria's campaign can be found at http://www.onetexasforall.com/about.html.

Eliot Shapleigh is a state senator who most people in Texas can't vote for, but unlike higher profile races such as Lampson's bid for DeLay's seat, this race is not getting the attention it needs. El Paso is one of the last bastions of Democrats in Texas, but Eliot is facing a Bush-crony candidate backed by Karl Rove's firm. Shap, like many candidates, is taking a beating in the local media which has conclusively decided to back his challenger, insurance baron Dee Margo. Margo has blasted Shapleigh as being uneffective and a failed leader because El Paso has become the fourth poorest county in the nation while Eliot has been in office. What Margo omits is that it is the leadership in Austin that has failed El Pasoans....the Repug leadership. Tom Craddick has publically stated his opposition to helping El Paso. Margo represents corporate interests and sides with anathemas such as ASARCO, a copper smelter that plans to reopen right smack in the heart of El Paso's Westside, after decades of poisoning people in three states and two countries. Margo is well-funded and backed by developers. Shap could use the help. Go to http://shapleigh.org/ .

There are so many great candidates running for office this time around and they would all appreciate your support. Texas wins when these people win and it is up to the voters to get out there and put them in office where they belong. For too long now, the Repugs have run roughshod over Texas and have engaged in the most despicable acts of partisan politics. It's time to stop allowing them to enrich themselves at our expense and, to paraphrase Sean Penn playing Huey Long in the upcoming movie All the King's Men, "Let them lie in the filth they made."

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We Don't Need No Stinkin' Rules

The administration has put its law-breaking capacity into overdrive in recent weeks. If it's not one thing with these people its another. I shouldn't rag too much on the administration though. It's apparently the majority of the Repug party that's gone A.W.O.L. from American-style democracy. Check it out:

Contractors: We have all heard about the Bushies' penchant for awarding contracts to their buddies in industry. (We don't have any Eisenhoweresque letters to captains of industry giving them the governnment if he dies yet, but we can be pretty sure they either already exist or are on there way.) We know about Halliburton and KBR fleecings in Iraq. But now comes something we probably, if we asked our past selves, knew was coming. It turns out that a Bushie named O'Beirne is in charge of okaying contracts for the Middle East and he has a unique system. In order to work in Iraq one must swear loyalty to the Bush administration and state opposition to Roe v. Wade. Remember, this is the federal government. Rules schmules.

School Strippers?: Congress recently debated a bill, that was tabled, titled HR 5295 that would, of all things allow schools to spy on their student body (as if they don't already). The bill gives them the ability to engage in 4th Amendment violations up to and including STRIP SEARCHES. Now if we consider how many pedophiles are employed in our schools combined with out-of-control authoritarians, think about how many young men and women will be violated by their trusted authority figures. We might as well pass the same law for the church. So much for the "moral majority."

DLC Wolves: It has been much discussed that a possible presidential contender for the 2008 race is New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. The number one qualification for the Dem elite, however, seems to be that Richardson is Hispanic. What no one seems to be looking at is his record. Richardson is straight-up, NAFTA-wed DLC. In a recent ad, he touts his role in cutting taxes, especially the capital gains tax. Here's a good rule of thumb: If a Dem wants to cut the capital gains tax, he or she is a DLC Repug-lite. In addition, according to Greg Palast's Armed Madhouse, Richardson knew full well that Mexican-American and Native-American votes in NM had been thrown out by GOP operatives in both 2000 and 2004 and he knew his head election official was not correctly investigating the voter purge (She later went on a cruise sponsored by touch-screen voting machine companies). He did nothing. With candidates like Hillary and Bill Richardson, it's amazing the Democratic party still exists.

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Geneva for Dummies

The administration is now bent on "defining", or as they like to say, removing the vaguery from Geneva Article III. The only problem is....the article was meant to be vague. The question for those who drafted the Geneva Accords was how to keep future regimes from engaging in activity that, for most reasonable people, is tantamount to government-sponsored torture. The answer was time-tested. Make the language as vague as possible.

Bush keeps asking the question, "How do we know what defines an affront to human diginity? The language is too vague." Or at least he keeps asking a question that somewhat resembles this in English. But how does one go about making sure no one transgresses the idea of human dignity? Think about it. If one is not sure whether one is actually violating an international treaty that prohibits things like...um....torture, then the logical conclusion a reasonable person should come to is that, well.....one is. Or at least one should conclude that it's better not to risk it. But, oh no, not the Bushies.

Here's their logic:

"We know we are in violation of the treaty that, according to the Constitution, is U.S. law, making us technical war criminals. So what should we do? Stop?!! No, that would mean we cannot continue to violate the treaty and U.S. law. But we don't want to get busted. So we should "define" the treaty under our concocted law, using our lackey Congress, in order to make whatever we do legal."

In other words, the Bushies are, for all extensive purposes, attempting to opt out of the Geneva Accords, just as they "opted" out of the Non-proliferation Treaty and the Kyoto Accords. But they can't tell us that. That would be.................fascist. So instead, they claim they want to more clearly define the law. But there's another problem.

Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution prohibits the Congress from passing ex post facto laws. The Latin phrase means that they may not pass laws "after the fact." The administration knows it has transgressed Geneva and their answer is the same as always, i.e. change the law. See, in order to make themselves immune from prosecution for engaging in torture, they want the U.S. Congress to, as they did, break the law. Unfortunately, there are far too many members, Republicans I should say, that are ready and willing to subvert the justice process and let these criminals walk at the expense of our law, our reputation, our tradition and the safety of our troops. Although a few old-school Republicans are blocking the administration's attempts at bullying a co-equal branch of government, we must conclude that our democracy is headed for disaster as long as the Repugs control government.

If an attempt to legalize a globally accepted crime on Nature is not enough to wake the American public out of its stupor, what is?

Greg Gets AmBushed

Greg Palast is a muckraking journalist and an American who had to flee to Britain long ago. He now has his work actually published by The Guardian. In the U.S., he is largely censored. It was Palast that broke the election theft of 2000 by Jeb Bush and ChoicePoint months before anyone over here on the other side of the pond would touch it. He recently uncovered the theft of Mexico's election, again involving ChoicePoint, which the Bush-friendly media have ignored with few exceptions. Greg has been a great source of real news for Americans. But now the administration has caught on.

In an sardonic twist of fate, Palast has been forced to report on his own problems that, not-so-coincidentally, involve the Bush administration, because the corpo-media won't touch it. It seems Palast has been charged with a crime for videotaping actual conditions in the Big Easy for Democracy Now! See, the bushies don't like poor black people, especially when they are in the way of nice, white developments....uh, developers who donate money to campaigns. So they took all the displaced African-Americans and stuck them in trailer parks surrounded by barbed-wire. Yup. Barbed-wire! Greg and his producer, Matt Pascarella, have been charged, not for trespassing, not for protesting, not for spitting on the sidewalk, but for filming a "critical national security structure." Yep, black people who did nothing but escape death by drowning are put in a pseudo-concentration camp and when a reporter, notorious for telling the truth, tries to film it, they charge him with endangering national security.

The Land of the Free?

The Old War

It has not been lost on most people who pay some sort of attention to national politics that the "War on Terror" (aka the War on Terra), is nothing more than a verbal transition from Cold War rhetoric, i.e. it's the new sell. Commies and atheists have been replaced with Arabs and Muslims. The old Soviet bloc is now the Middle East. However, although this may be crystal clear to many Americans, the rhetoric has a purpose and that purpose is, once again, to hide the REAL WAR.

The Real Cold war is the old war of class war. The new vehicle for waging it is the trans/multi-national corporation. In the U.S, our founders attempted to provide us with as much liberty as democracy would allow....while, yes, maintaining as much power for themselves as possible (although they created social mobility). However, those who believe they are smarter than the founders (Yes, believe it or not Neo-cons, such as Cheney, think they know more than people such as Jefferson.), the overly ambitious, see only the overthrow of the American way of life. A little power is not enough for them. They want it all. For what?...Who knows? Working through the corporate sector, they have appropriated your rights effectively for themselves (e.g. Corporate personhood).

Let's take the example of Iraq. The U.S., according to numerous scholars and discussed heavily in Palast's Armed Madhouse, did not go into Iraq to TAKE the oil. They went into Iraq to secure OPEC's oil stranglehold by ensuring that the Iraqis would not "over pump." First rule of economics: Scarcity drives profit. They have also created the first fully "free trade" economy. There are NO tariffs protecting Iraqi businesses. There is NO job security for Iraqis or even jobs . There is only rampant greed. Bush promised them democracy and gave them corporate socialism. Mussolini would be proud.

This could be your future too, America....if the fear is right. How much power are you prepared to give to the Bushistas? When will you see what corp-aberrations are doing to this country and say, once and for all, "I will no longer shop at Wal-mart!" I will boycott Disney for "The Path to 9/11." The New Deal, with the exception of Social Security,for now, is gone. Not enough for you? Look at these quotes:


"We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is!" -- David Boylan, station manager for Fox Tampa Bay

“We have found we...cannot trust some people who are non-conformists.
We will make conformists out of them in a hurry..." “The organisation cannot trust the individual—the individual must trust the organisation.” - Ray Kroc, McDonald's

"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier." - G. W. Bush

"If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator..."- Bush

"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it... "- Bush

Still think they're kidding? Still think your job is safe? Still think you have rights?

To the current powers that be, of both parties, you are no different from an Iraqi, Indian or Mexican peasant. They will continue to use corporate power to violate your rights, rip you off and, eventually, make you superfluous. Will you let them? Communism, as employed by Stalin, to these people was not the abomination they claimed it was. It's more the case that they were jealous.

Flat-Earth Education: Part 2

The growing power of Neo-Conservatism on campuses is beginning to have serious effects on the quality of education. For Neo-Cons, the goal is not, as they make out, an equal opportunity to express their views without fearing retaliation. How many Republicans have been failed, removed or censured? We can assume none, because we know they would immediately be in court over it. Their true aim is to dominate classroom discussion to the exclusion of anything even remotely resembling liberalism. This should not sound odd. After all, domination is the basis of Neo-Conservatism. The problem is that they are achieving their goal.

A recent article in The Nation, relates the story of Juan Cole, a prominent Middle East scholar/historian and his inability to claim a professorship at prestigious Yale. Cole is a liberal scholar who holds an objective view of the region and that objectivity has led him to have a critical view of Israeli politics. Unfortunately for Cole and freedom of discourse, his seat was blocked by Neo-Cons who sit on the school board and who saw an opportunity to use the bigotry card to discredit Cole. They actively opposed Cole's liberalism and began a smear campaign against him be calling prominent Jewish donors and spreading the alarm that Cole is an anti-Semite. Many donors, in turn, pressured the school to deny his appointment. Many other professors have faced and do face intimidation from Neo-Cons and other pseudo-patriots who wish to see freedom of discourse meet a cold, calculated end.

David Koepsell, executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism (not a favorite with either the Bible-screwing NASCAR crowd or, for that fact, most mainstream Americans) and professor at the University of Buffalo, makes the case that the explosion of religiosity on campuses has led to professors becoming overly sensitive when dealing with religion-related matters. That being the case, he argues that free academic discourse is suffering.

Academia is being assaulted through religion, business and in its own hallowed halls by the pseudo-intellectual Right. Pepsi and Coke battle to control whole campuses. Religious fanatics demand Creationism, aka Intelligent Design, be taught in science classrooms. Teenagers are subjected to incessant advertising on and in their schools, in their textbooks, and on the mandatory, Bush-connected Channel One. John Yoo teaches at Berkeley. The Right-wing is in full-swing attack mode with organizations seeking to infiltrate and inculcate Right-wing fundamentalism into college life and basic education. Groups such as Accuracy in Academia, Collegiate Network, The Eagle Forum and its Eagle Forum Collegians, Intercollegiate Studies Initiative, Students for Academic Freedom, The Bradley Foundation and The Young America's Foundation are working feverishly to destroy academic freedom.