Bring 'Em Home, Joe

Forty years ago, it seemed the Vietnam War was the greatest malfeasance of government in America's history. Then Watergate happened. That was followed by Iran-Contra, which saw branches of government openly lying to pursue illegal policy objectives. Now comes what surely must be the heavyweight champion of government malfeasance: The war in Iraq.

Not surprisingly, a new poll shows a majority of Americans favor setting a deadline to bring troops home from Iraq, while an even larger majority oppose President Bush's plan to send more troops to the warzone. Meanwhile, another new survey of international relations scholars finds 89% in agreement that the war in Iraq will result in decreased national security for Americans. Polls taken during those previous debacles in American history showed similar sentiments. So why is public opinion so rarely heeded in decisions that affect not only the direction of the country and its relations with other nations, but the lives of America's sons and daughters, brothers and sisters? How representative is a government that doesn't represent the will of the people?

This time around, blame Joe Lieberman.

It's no secret that Lieberman is the lynchpin in the Democrats' control of the Senate and if Lieberman chooses to betray them, the Republicans regain control and hope of changing course in Iraq is lost. Therefore, the Democrats have one hand tied behind their back. They can't act on the popular support for bringing the troops home and ending U.S. involvement in the war, because they have to somehow appease Lieberman, who lost the Democratic nomination in his own state, due to his dedication to President Bush's alleged plan for Iraq.

In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal on Monday, Lieberman mentioned that General Petraeus, new commander of the forces in Iraq, expects to be able to assess whether the escalated force is achieving its goals by the end of the summer. Lieberman wants a "truce" between the parties on Iraq until then. What he really means is that he wants Democrats - in defiance of public opinion and popular support - to stop pressuring him and other Senate leaders to come up with an alternative before September. In a profile this month in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Goldberg writes that Lieberman feels he owes the Democrats nothing, and suggests that a big reason why cutting off funds for the war is not on the table is because that would push Lieberman over the edge and make him switch parties.

What if autumn comes and no progress has been made? The Bush administration will certainly spin the situation to tell the public that some goals have been achieved. Will they, and General Petraeus, ask for more time and more patience (which means, undoubtedly, more lives lost)? Or will Joe Lieberman have the courage to step up and say "We gave this a chance and it didn't work. Now let's listen to the people and bring them home"?

If it turns out to be the case that Congress must wait another six months to effectively even make an attempt to turn things around because Lieberman is holding control of the Senate hostage, then the lives of everyone lost in that time are on his hands. Lieberman's excess of pride and feelings of personal vengeance come at the cost of delaying the democratic process and the irreparable harm that will likely come to many families on all sides of this war.

More info: Inside the Ivory Tower

Majority in Poll Favor Deadline For Iraq Pullout

Lieberman Carves Increasingly Isolated Path

Don't Believe the Right-Wing Media

Barack Obama has the right idea. According to The Sleuth, a Washington Post.com column, Senator Obama is "freezing out" reporters from Fox News, the network which unapologeticly aired the right-wing smear against him in the last week. Since the incident - which right-wingers have attempted to blame on Hillary Clinton's campaign, in an effort to smear two Democratic candidates at once - Obama has given interviews to nearly every other major broadcast news channel, except Fox.

Obama's not the only one being attacked. Former Senator John Edwards is fielding questions on the campaign trail about his residence in Chapel Hill, N.C., and whether it is "too nice" for someone who is talking about poverty issues. The absurdity of such an attack shows how ruthless - or desperate - the right-wing is to take the public's attention off the actual issues.

Even what were once thought of as traditional news sources are being overcome by the right-wing propagandists. ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, recently hired right-wing talk-show personality Glenn Beck to be a regular commentor on Good Morning America. Several Muslim groups have complained to ABC that because Beck has demonstrated a bias against Arabs, he should not be included in their programming.

ABC's senior news correspondent Jake Tapper recently used quotes from the defender of the right-wing faith Rush Limbaugh to augment a story about the racial implications of Joe Biden's comments on his fellow Democratic presidential candidates. Limbaugh is someone who is known for making racially insensitive comments, so why would ABC choose to reference him? What could they have expected him to say?

Last week, Tapper questioned the authenticity of Democratic candidates, but not Republican candidates. The reporter has a history of favoring Republicans and questioning the integrity of Democrats in his reporting. It's sad to see the former home of a fine journalist like Peter Jennings become a forum for Republican propaganda.

On Fox News recently, smug right-wing poster boy Sean Hannity aired scenes that were cut from the ABC telefilm Path to 9/11 which were removed from the original broadcast because of complaints that they portrayed events that never happened. That didn't stop Hannity from telling viewers he was going to present "both sides." Presumably, he meant fact and fiction, along it remains to be seen how many actual facts were not obscured by Hannity.

Fox News was created by Roger Ailes, who was a paid political consultant for the Republicans in the 1970s, 1980s, and the early 1990s. Fox has had an unapologetic conservative emphasis from the beginning, despite its corporate slogan of being "fair and balanced." It was owner Rupert Murdoch's contention that the news media was "liberal" and he and Ailes intended Fox to offset that perceived imbalance. In fact, substantial research has investigated this, and concluded that there is no liberal bias in media. But conservatives persist in saying there is, which is a convenient way for right-wing extremists to get their opinions heard, and more dangerously, have their skew with the news.

Here is the definition of propaganda: "A type of message aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda is often deliberately misleading, using logical fallacies, which, while sometimes convincing, are not necessarily valid."

In an up-to-the-minute and egregious example of the right-wing's attempt to inject propaganda into the culture, the American Enterprise Institute - a right wing think tank funded by the likes of companies like Exxon Mobil - is offering scientists and economists $10,000 to dispute the United Nations' climate change report (referenced below). The Institute is looking for articles that cast doubt on the U.N. report's findings. You can be sure that if anyone takes the bait, the right-wing media will report on it, since groups like AEI and the Heritage Foundation often place people in the editorial staffs of news organizations. Nothing less than life continuing on the planet is at stake, and the right-wing wants to cast doubt on the report -- so that companies like Exxon will not have to change their ways and stop polluting the atmosphere. It's insanity.

We won't even get into the absurdity of Fox's smugness incarnate, Bill O'Reilly, who spins more stories and twists more truths than anyone can keep track of. He'll tell you he's an "independent thinker" but then recite Republican talking points and disparage Democratic personalities. The goal of propagandists like O'Reilly and the people behind Fox is to keep telling viewers they are getting impartial news, when that's the last thing they are getting. The Nazi propagandists used the same trick back in their time.

In an op-ed piece in today's New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman paid tribute to Molly Ivins, who passed away this week, citing her 1995 column about Rush Limbaugh, in which she wrote ''Satire has historically been the weapon of powerless people aimed at the powerful. When you use satire against powerless people it is like kicking a cripple.''

It's also a powerful political tool. Be smart; don't believe the right-wing media. They exist to serve corporate and neoconservative political interests, not to serve truth.

More info: Propaganda Techniques

News Hounds: We Watch Fox So You Don't Have To

Room For One More?

Just when it seems like everyone who has ever held any public office is running for president, along comes Al Gore, who has said he has no plans to run, but according to a new article in Rolling Stone, may be quietly laying the groundwork to make off with the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

Gore, who seems the favorite to win the Oscar for Best Documentary later this month for his film An Inconvenient Truth, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, has newfound cultural clout and respect for not only his environmental work but also his straight-talking attitude that came out before the Iraq war (and in the years since it began). In September 2002 - six months before the war even began - Gore gave a speech in which he said "The chaos in the aftermath of a military victory in Iraq could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam."

With the release of the United Nations' report on global warming on Feb. 2, Gore's profile is likely to rise even more, as the report is scheduled to support the scientific conclusions that he backed years ago. Anyone who disagrees with the scope of the global warming problem at this point is either an apologist for industry or a fool. These matters have been discussed for more than 30 years. Any leader who doesn't use their role to help correct the environmental disaster that is happening (not coming, but happening) will surely be judged as ineffectual.

The article makes a compelling case for why Gore should run, and how he could win. He'd be an alternative to the cautious middle-of-the-road campaign of Hillary Clinton, and right-wing pandering that will surely come from John McCain and Rudy Guiliani. Only Barack Obama and John Edwards - both strong candidates - could challenge Gore on his turf, but Gore has an advantage with his experience in the Senate and as vice president.

That said, fans of robust political debate should be glad that there are so many talented candidates running. With the likes of Edwards, Obama, Gore, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, and even Clinton running, one of them ought to be able to make it to the finish line and use their time in the Oval Office to make a dent in correcting the course the country has been on under the Bush administration and the extreme right-wing idealouges it represents.

At the very least, Al Gore should run because his presence alone would steer the national debate to environmental concerns that are essential to the nation's well-being.

More info: Climate Crisis.org

White House Twists Global Warming Science

The Ford Legacy

While the passing of any president is cause for a showing of respect, we must be careful that in praising the deceased we don't also rewrite history for political purposes. Unfortunately, that is what has been happening with the recent death of Gerald Ford.

The only U.S. president who was not elected by the people, Ford served as president for two years. Prior to that he was vice president for under a year, replacing the scandal-plagued Spiro Agnew. Prior to that, he was a Republican member of the House of Representatives from 1949 to 1973.

Since his death, Ford has been praised as a "healer" of the nation following the Watergate scandal. His pardoning of Richard Nixon has been the subject of debate for more than 32 years, but everyone from George W. Bush to conservative columnists to Jimmy Carter have credited Ford with "moving the country forward" from Watergate. Indeed, New York Times columnist David Brooks went so far as to say the pardon was "universally celebrated."

That's a discredit to history, and to reality. The principle objection to the Nixon pardon is that, in signing the order, Ford placed the president above the law. The nation strongly suspected that Nixon was guilty of crimes and with the stroke of his pen, Ford assured that the truth would never be known and that the president would not answer for whatever he did.

(Demostrating beyond any doubt that they are political animals first and foremost, the Republicans did not take Ford's lesson in "healing" to heart when they decided to impeach Bill Clinton. It's also worth noting for historical value that Clinton's misdeeds were of a personal nature, not a political or national nature, as Nixon's were.)

Ford's legacy also includes advancing the careers of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom served in his administration. Rumsfeld initially served as Ford's Chief of Staff, and later as his Secretary of Defense - a post he filled again from 2001-2006 for George W. Bush. Cheney succeeded Rumsfeld as Ford's Chief of Staff, and later ran his failed 1976 re-election campaign. Both Cheney and Rumsfeld are credited with instigating the current war in Iraq and shaping U.S. foreign policy to where it is today.

Ford was also a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Commission's findings have been widely discredited over the years, with a majority of people believing there was some sort of conspiracy in Kennedy's murder. Ford actually altered the first draft of the report to make Kennedy's fatal injuries sound more consistent with the single-bullet (and single shooter) theory the Commission was promoting. In altering the document, Ford elevated the location of Kennedy's wound from it's true location to support the single assassin theory. The Assassination Review Board released a document in 1997 that revealed Ford's actions.

During his eight years as Minority Leader in the House, Ford clashed with President Lyndon Johnson, particularly over his Great Soceity programs and the Vietnam War. In the 1964 presidential election, Ford supported Barry Goldwater, who advocated escalating the war in the face of widespread public opposition. Republicans are still battling the Great Society, with opposition to civl rights, health care and education still being waged.

Ford's biggest sin to history, however, remains his pardon of Nixon, for which he alone is responsible. In making the president above the law, Ford created an intangible - and unsubstantiated - doctrine of presidential power that presidents such as Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have invoked to keep secrets from the public when it suits their political purposes.

But when you're willing to alter the findings of an assassination report, keeping secrets follows naturally.

More info: National Archives - JFK Assassination Records

Watergate.Info: The Scandal That Destroyed Nixon

Book Censors Try, Yet Again, To Restrict Ideas

Once again, the Harry Potter books are under attack. This time, a mother of three elementary school children in the suburban Atlanta area has been petitioning the library to remove the books from the shelves. She says the books are "mainstreaming witchcraft in a subtle and deceptive manner." She also complains that children don't need to read about murder, greed and violence. In rejecting her petition, the Georgia Board of Education said the books encourage reading and help develop imagination and creativity. The board added that a ban on all books referring to witchcraft would end up including classics such as "Macbeth'' and ''Cinderella."

This is an old argument. Since 1999, the Potter books have been at the top of the American Library Association's list of most-protested books. The complaints come from religious groups - some of which have banned the books to their congregations - who find the subject of witchcraft in opposition to their reading of scripture. In fact, in 2001, a church in New Mexico held a bonfire in which Harry Potter books were burned, along with CDs by Eminem and copies of Walt Disney's Snow White film. "Behind that innocent face is the power of satanic darkness," said Jack Brock, the pastor of the Christ Community Church in Alamogordo, N.M. "Harry Potter is the devil and he is destroying people."

Another minister in Lewiston, Maine, wanted to burn the books, but couldn't get a permit from the city. Instead, he cut them up in public. Penecostal minister Douglas Taylor was quoted as saying "I wanted to burn the books because the Bible gives me the authority to burn magic books." This was in 2002.

Book burnings (and book desecrations) have always been around, going back at least to medieval times. In the 20th Century, the government of Nazi Germany famously burned books in massive bonfires, often accompanied by rallies of the Nazi party. In the 1960s, U.S. groups burned stacks of records by The Beatles, after John Lennon commented that rock and roll was more popular with kids than Jesus. (A statement which, even 40 years later, continues to be misunderstood.)

Religious groups are certainly entitled to believe what they will, but why do they need to see that the books are banned? What about people who don't follow their brand of fire-and-brimstone beliefs? By banning the books, they would deny an entire population access to them. So what if the books do encourage witchcraft? (We don't think they do.) Just because witchcraft may be in opposition to what some people believe doesn't mean it represents an illegal activity. People like the suburban Atlanta mother of three seem to have confused legal rights with religious doctrine. Has separation of church and state ever been taught to these folks? (Perhaps they burned the book that had that particular lesson.) As silly as much of this seems, those who would ban books, or music, or speech should be taken seriously. They could end up being successful.

The lack of a law prohibiting that which religious groups consider offensive doesn't preclude them from staying away from it, or telling their children to stay away from it. What they're really saying is that theirs is the only right and true belief system, and any opposition to it should carry the penalty of law. Their lack of understanding of the principles of American democracy is staggering.

Banning and censoring books, music, film or speech in general is a profoundly un-American activity. It's not an accident that the Constitution's prohibition on Congress making any law to restrict speech is the first amendment.

The failure to grasp this most basic principle of freedom is not surprising, given that these same groups failed to acknowledge a spoof that appeared in The Onion ("Harry Potter Books Spark Rise In Satanism Among Children," July 2000) as satire, and the article was e-mailed as proof that the Harry Potter books made children turn to Satanism. Even some would-be leaders don't get it. Just last month, former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich advocated new restrictions on speech as a tool in the "war on terror." Evidently, Gingrich believes that one can save democracy by suspending democracy.

Vigilance against ignorance is the price for an enlightened society.

More info: Harry Potter: Religious Opposition To Witchcraft Themes

A Brief History Of Banned Music In The United States

Pit Bull Politics Come Home To Bite

Dick Cheney has a problem. The pit bull of American conservative politics is seeing his supporters take nasty shots at his daughter Mary, who is both openly gay and pregnant. For most people, this would be a very happy time, and we are sure the Vice President is happy for his daughter and his family. But he can't be happy that his supporters - those voters he courted and nurtured into being the Bush-Cheney base - are being so venomous about his daughter and this happy time in her life.

Take, for example, Robert Knight, from the Culture & Media Institute at the Media Research Center, who said "I think it's tragic that a child has been conceived with the express purpose of denying it a father." Knight also said Cheney and her partner Heather Poe were "shortchanging" the child. The couple lives in Virginia, which won't recognize Poe's rights as a spouse or a partner.

Focus On The Family, perhaps the most venomous of all the so-called Christian rights' groups, issued a statement that criticized all same-sex couples who raise children. Republicans want a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and conservatives would oppose Cheney and Poe getting hitched. Forget marriage, they don't even want them to raise a child.

But why? There's no evidence that children brought up by same-sex couples fare any worse or any better than those in different-sex households (see: American Psychological Association study). The issue for these folks is cultural - they object to homosexuality and changes to the culture of child rearing they know and understand. Consistent with the Bush administration's practice (not pledge) of being dividers, not uniters, Cheney and the politicians with whom he aligns himself have repeatedly spoken in agreement with the issues that the Christian right promotes.

The Christian right should realize they're being suckered. The Bush administration doesn't care about them, and the Republican Party just wants their votes. In mid-October, a former official with Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives published a book, Tempting Faith, that disclosed that while national Christian leaders get public support from Bush and his Republican allies, they are called "nuts" behind the scenes and only used in efforts to mobilize voters. Anyone who examines the legislative objectives of Bush and the Republicans can see that their true concern is with giving aid to the objectives of corporations and the very rich. If they were truly religious people, wouldn't they have learned the lesson about the camel and the eye of the needle?

Still, Republicans are unlikely to admit the facade they've been using for so long and support gay rights, especially the right of gay marriage - not when fostering opposition to that worked so well in bringing out the votes of the intolerant in 2004. That's consistent with the history of conservatism. As various times in the life of the American politics, conservatives have opposed the right of women to vote, the right of black citizens to vote, Social Security and the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the creation of Medicare, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act, among others. None of these measures - which benefit the people and democracy - are consistent with the wishes of the business constituency or the religious voters that the Republican party currently needs to mobilize to get elected.

What's the problem with gay marriage? By what authority do conservative groups dictate who can love whom in society? They will claim by the authority of God, but religious text has been the subject of debate for thousands of years, and besides, with a separation of church and state, those who don't choose to follow a particular religion should be able to have the rights that are due them under the law. It is not the place of law to codify any religion, nor to measure what kind of love between two people is more worthy of recognition than another.

Ten years ago, in an interview with The Advocate, Bruce Springsteen said of the right to marry:

It does matter. It's very different than just living together. First of all, stepping up publicly- which is what you do: You get your license, you do all the social rituals- is a part of your place in society and in some way part of society's acceptance of you. [...] Coming out and saying whom you love, how you feel about them, in a public way was very, very important. Those are the threads of society; that's how we all live together in some fashion. There is no reason I can see why gays and lesbians shouldn't get married. It is important because those are the things that bring you in and make you feel a part of the social fabric.

Excluding people from the social fabric is exactly what this is all about to the conservatives. Republicans made a point of showcasing themselves as defenders of "family values." How does preventing gays from marrying or raising children value the family?

More info: Cheney's Grandchild Will Have Two Mommies

Freedom To Marry

Moving To The Moon

In the 1970s, television screens showed images of "Moon Base Alpha," a virtual colony on the surface of the moon, on the British-produced "Space: 1999." They might have gotten the date wrong.

Yesterday, in the latest example of making science fiction into science fact, it was reported that NASA plans to establish a permanent base on the moon by 2024, four years after the agency plans to resume manned trips there. For more than 50 years, a moon base has been the stuff of imagination in books and movies, and of scientific conjecture. NASA's plan is to equip the base with several lunar rovers to explore the surface of the moon.

The base would be set at either of the moon's poles, which have access to more sunshine than the rest of the surface, and which will better serve the base's solar-powered energy system.

Of course, the question is what to make of all this? On the one hand, is it really justifiable to spend the kind of money that space exploration requires when we have people without enough to eat or without healthcare? (Whether money can solve those problems is another matter, and it seems unlikely that money alone would be sufficient to break through the corrupt governments that block humanitarian aid in some parts of the world, or to solve the problem of corrupt corporations that gouge people for healthcare coverage and pharmaceuticals.)

Once President Kennedy set the goal for lunar exploration, Americans spent a good deal of the next decade and a half with a hopeful purpose. The space race had a positive influence on the culture, and saw people rooting for new achievements in science rather than rooting for their side in the latest global conflict. (How much more positive an influence that era would have seen but for the Vietnam War is something we'll never know.) Kennedy said of the plan to reach the moon, "new hopes for knowledge and peace are there." Sadly, those were never realized.

Significantly, however, the discoveries of the space age fueled many industries for the next several decades. Cell phones, iPods, personal computers and microwave ovens all owe a debt to the experimentation and achievements that came from that period. Even architecture was more bold and hopeful, as Googie design utilized lines and angles -- and imagination -- that soared. A return to the moon, and the realization of fifty years of thoughtful design in films, drawings, even toys, could be the catalyst for a new era of a hopeful, positive influence in the culture. All of that assumes that the intentions of international cooperation for the base are genuine. Using space for military purposes, as Donald Rumsfeld reportedly intended when he became Secretary of Defense, would be a profound negative, and a betrayal of hope.

In 1968, as violence at home and abroad reached a peak, and as the divide among Americans and among older and younger generations grew wider, astronauts from the Apollo 8 mission to the moon sent back a picture of earth, as illuminated by the sun and seen from the surface of the moon. The picture has been called one of the "most influential environmental photographs ever taken," and as an anonymous telegram to astronaut Frank Borman put it, "saved 1968" in its depiction of a finite planet, a small part of the vast universe.

That's the kind of thing the world could use right now.

More info: Wikipedia: Apollo 8

Manned Moon Base Within 20 Years