The favored candidate, usually a Republican, is on
the left. The issues are apparently chosen on the
basis of polling data in each state and phrased in a
way that skillfully frames the issue to make the
conservative candidate appear to be the anointed
choice of all true Christians. There is no room for
subtlety here. Some questions contain the answer,
such as "Appointing judges that will adhere to a
strict interpretation of the Constitution," an
intellectual position that has no basis in law or
history and is code for appointing right-wing judges.
Others have no simple answers.
Here's a senatorial voter guide for California:
Note the different list of issues. The table
contains a footnote that the position of candidates
are ascertained from their votes and public
statements. Again, many of the questions cry out for
reasoned analysis, such as the first issue, whether
to raise taxes. The Federal deficit and the negative
balance of international payments are issue of
immense concern and simple answers like "no new
taxes" are not answers at all but mindless political
slogans. Sometimes taxes must be raised and while
reasonable persons may differ on the amount and the
timing, an automatic opposition to any increase in
the tax rate is either idiotic or extremely cynical.
The issue of voluntary prayer is not about voluntary
prayer at all; it is impossible to keep kids in
school from praying. I recall that in my high school
there was often fervent prayer just before final
exams. Likewise, there is no way to prevent people
from praying in public facilities. What the Christian
Coalition actually wants is voluntary prayer for
the fundamentalist Christians with the rest of the
class being involuntarily forced to participate.
There there is the Gordian sentence, "Holding
criminals liable for harm they cause to unborn
children." It appears to penalize only criminals who
harm unborn children. A person convicted of burglary,
for instance, would be liable for selling liquor to a
pregnant woman but a non-criminal bartender gets a
free pass. What about doctors that perform abortions?
And what kind of liability? Civil damages? Criminal
liability?
The ineptitude of the drafters, however, is not why
the issue is phrased so sloppily from a logical
viewpoint. It is enough from their standpoint that
"criminal," "harm," and "unborn children" occur
together in the same sentence to trigger the message
that abortionists are criminals, or ought to be.
"Further restrictions on the right to keep and bear
arms" conflicts with the bilge about strict
interpretation of the Constitution. If judges
strictly interpreted the Constitution, the people
could only bear muskets and flintlock pistols, since
that is all the drafters knew.
Deconstructing the remaining issues is a similar
process. All of them are reductions of difficult and
complicated question into memes for the simple-minded
or the willfully stupid.
Tags: Christian Coalition, rightwing, abortion, judges, conservative, taxes
--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl
--AZ-01: Rick Renzi
--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth
--CA-04: John Doolittle
--CA-11: Richard Pombo
--CA-50: Brian Bilbray
--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave
--CO-05: Doug Lamborn
--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell
--CT-04: Christopher Shays
--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan
--FL-16: Joe Negron
--FL-22: Clay Shaw
--ID-01: Bill Sali
--IL-06: Peter Roskam
--IL-10: Mark Kirk
--IL-14: Dennis Hastert
--IN-02: Chris Chocola
--IN-08: John Hostettler
--IA-01: Mike Whalen
--KS-02: Jim Ryun
--KY-03: Anne Northup
--KY-04: Geoff Davis
--MD-Sen: Michael Steele
--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht
--MN-06: Michele Bachmann
--MO-Sen: Jim Talent
--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns
--NV-03: Jon Porter
--NH-02: Charlie Bass
--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson
--NM-01: Heather Wilson
--NY-03: Peter King
--NY-20: John Sweeney
--NY-26: Tom Reynolds
--NY-29: Randy Kuhl
--NC-08: Robin Hayes
--NC-11: Charles Taylor
--OH-01: Steve Chabot
--OH-02: Jean Schmidt
--OH-15: Deborah Pryce
--OH-18: Joy Padgett
--PA-04: Melissa Hart
--PA-07: Curt Weldon
--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick
--PA-10: Don Sherwood
--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee
--TN-Sen: Bob Corker
--VA-Sen: George Allen
--VA-10: Frank Wolf
--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick
--WA-08: Dave Reichert
.
Tags: torture, habeas corpus, Lott, Cochran, Wicker, Taylor, Thompson, Pickering, Civil Liberties
The tax fairness winner for Mississippi over this period is representative Gene Taylor, who scored 100%. As a Democrat who voted for the odious Bankruptcy "Reform" Act and this year's torture-authorizing legislation, I had just about lost faith in him.
Bennie Thompson, who usually votes in favor of the lower and middles classes, scored only 83%, due to an "F" he earned for his vote in 2004 for the “The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004,” H.R. 4520, appropriately titled The 2004 Corporate Tax Giveaway Bill. Here's a description:
This bill began as an attempt to resolve a trade dispute between the United States and Europe over a $5 billion a year U.S. tax subsidy for American exporters that had been (repeatedly) ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization.It expanded into a huge array of corporate tax giveaways, totaling $214 billion over 10 years.
The true cost of the bill was masked by gimmicks and false assumptions, including: $49 billion in revenue “saved” from complying with our trade treaties; $82 billion in added revenues from what Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt.), co-sponsor of the Senate bill, accurately called “measures which in themselves should be good public policy and we should pass anyway”; and $79 billion in probably phony “sunsets” on many of the new tax breaks in the bill. So, despite the fact that these supposed offsets fall into the categories of things that Congress had to do, ought to do anyway or probably won’t do, the bill was officially “scored” as cost-free.
The vote on the bill was taken just prior to the 2004 elections. There is little doubt that many members of Congress voted for the bill in an attempt to show a friendly face to business, and thereby gain campaign contributions. As a result, the vote is the most lopsided of any of the votes we surveyed. In the House, the vote was 251–178, and in the Senate, 69–17. Members of Congress who opposed this bill received an “A” grade, while those who voted for it received an “F.”
So kudos to Taylor, qualified kudos to Thompson, and a pox on the rest of them. They have done Mississippi no favor.
Tags: taxes, tax fairness, Lott, Cochran, Wicker, Taylor,Thompson, Pickering
In a few nights, children will walk from door to door wearing ghoulish masks and costumes and calling "trick or treat"--we must give candy or catch mischief. Children love Halloween. Most adults love it. But some well-meaning Christians regard it as demonic and evil. I think they are mistaken.
Halloween clearly has pagan origins. In Medieval Europe, it was commonly believed that the dark, mischievous spirits of the night celebrated the change of season that would lengthen the nights and shorten the days. During those supposed nocturnal demonic celebrations, young men ventured about pulling pranks in imitation of the spirits, a throwback to the animism that permeated primitive societies prior to the coming of Christianity.
Halloween, of course, is short for the Eve of All Hallows, the latter known as All Saints Day, a celebration of the communion of saints. The early church originally established the Feast of All Saints to honor saints without a specific day. Although it was first set in the spring, the feast was later moved post-harvest to October 1, when adequate provisions could be made for the many pilgrims that flocked to Rome. It was only over a long period of time that the celebration of the nocturnal spirits became the eve of All Saints.
I suspect that most Americans living today acquired their understanding of Halloween from Walt Disney's Fantasia, which included an animation of the Russian composer Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. In Fantasia, the spirits of the dead emerge from their graves and flock to the top of a great mountain, where the devil himself holds court. He sports with the dancing evil spirits, torturing them by throwing them into fire and molten lava, but when the church bell strikes, signalling the advent of morning and All Saints Day, he retreats into his mountain and the dead return to their graves. The scene ends quietly.
The movie is, of course, preposterous. It has no basis in Christian theology and only slightly in the pagan myths that underlie Halloween. It is no more than imaginative storytelling—entertaining, even terrifying—but hardly the stuff of belief. It is unfortunate that some persons have taken this version of Halloween seriously, not literally, but as a celebration of evil. Halloween is in fact a much deeper phenomenon than Disney's two-dimensional portrayal.
Festivals and celebrations do not survive for centuries out of mere nostalgia or sentimentality. On the contrary, they survive because they express in dramaturgic form the soul's condition and movement. To understand them we are compelled to enter the realm of myth. It has been said that a myth is a collective dream and that a dream is a personal myth. To understand the message of Halloween, we must study it with a mythical eye, rather than literally. Halloween and All Saints come together. Is this merely a chronological accident? Perhaps, but probably not.
Masks and costumes are archetypal. They change a person from an individual into a symbol. In Greek tragedy, staged during the festival of the god Dionysos, each actor wore a mask, a "persona," and it is clear that in wearing the masks, the actors represented something other than themselves, something bigger, something quite universal. Darth Vader, for instance, is clearly archetypal, with an imposing black mask through which his voice is painfully distorted. At the end of the movie and the end of his life, Vader's face, unmasked, is seen to be fatherly and kind—the hidden face behind the monster's mask.
Likewise, the children knocking at our door wear the symbols of death: ghosts, goblins, skeletons, witches and monsters (astronaut, ballerina and hobo costumes don't count). But we know that these grotesque wrappings hide beautiful, innocent, faces. Is it possible that the strange attraction of Halloween lies in its evocation of the profound, submerged knowledge that underneath the gruesome and frightening masks of death lurks a reality both innocent and beautiful? Could it be that the deepest fears of our lives, our psychic "skeletons,"once we summon the courage to face them, become harmless, and even beneficent?
Alan Watts once wrote that God plays peek-a-boo with us, much in the manner that adults play peek-a-boo with children. The psalms are abounding with prayers begging God not to hide his face from the psalmist and lamenting the fact that the Lord had hid his face. "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" (Ps. 13:1) "My soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning." (Ps. 130:6) "Do not hide your face from your servant, for I am in distress—make haste to answer me." (Ps. 69:17) In counterpoint to the mood of the lamentations is the delight of the psalmist in the revealing of God's face. "For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him." (Ps. 22:24) "So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory." (Ps. 63:2)
The Bible could even be defined as the record of the progressive revelation of God, first, as a stern, avenging, oriental-style monarch who reacts at humanity's sinfulness by flooding the earth, then, as a rule-making celestial executive who adopts a Semitic tribe and gives them a code of laws, and, finally, as a loving father who reveals himself in a fully human incarnation. It is as though God had been slowly withdrawing a stern, frightening mask from His face, but only as quickly as humankind was able to accept the revelation.
The proposition that good lurks underneath the appearance of evil is not exclusive to Christianity. In Plato's Symposium the drunken Alcibiades compared the homely Socrates to a Silenus, a small statue of the father of the god Dionysus, ugly on the outside but when opened, being found to hold images of the gods. And one must not omit The Eumenides of Aeschylus, in which the furies, ruthless creatures tormenting Orestes for the crime of matricide, were propitiated by the goddess Athena, who made them protectors of the City of Athens.
The Tibetan pantheon contains frightening and grotesque deities that are not really gods, as Westerners understand the term, but aspects of our own existence, who, when acknowledged and honored, become friendly and loving. In one story, two monks sat in a mountain cave, meditating in an attempt to evoke a particularly fearsome deity. After much time and effort, the deity appeared, terrifying beyond all imagining. One of the monks took leave of his senses and ran down the mountain, totally mad. The other monk, although frightened, remained, and began to study the visage standing before him. Immediately, he perceived that the monstrous deity was actually Amitabha, the "Buddha of Boundless Light," and that the fearsome appearance was merely an illusion caused by his initial failure to perceive the true nature of reality.
The complementarity of Halloween and All Saints Day reminds us that the saints, before they march in the heavenly procession, must face squarely, acknowledge and even "treat" the goblins and monsters in their own souls, who, when courageously confronted, reveal themselves to be helpers, not hindrances, but which, when denied and concealed from consciousness in the underworld of the soul, do not disappear, but return in vicious and harmful forms to cause dysfunction and suffering.
The child in monster costume proclaims "trick or treat." The child is an actor in a cosmic drama. Either we open our door and honor these masked children, or else they will return to do mischief, just as we must open ourselves to our own "monsters"—our deepest fears, angers, attachments and aversions—so that they do not do us mischief.
Halloween, therefore, is a ritual enactment of the dark night of the soul, a reminder of our need to enter and explore some of the darkest corners of our being, and that the reward for such a journey is not despair or hopelessness, but joy, love and peace.
Copyright Thomas Lowe, 1999. All rights reserved. Published in The Jackson Progressive, http://www.jacksonprogressive.com. Noncommercial reproduction of this article in its entirety is authorized, provided that this notice accompanies any reproduction.
Tags: Halloween, Plato, Euripides, mask, Mussorgsky, Silenus
Part I - Winning the Intelligence War
Part II - The Ground War
Part III - The Political War
Tags: hezbollah, Israel, Lebanon
My thesis: After Reagan became president, the Democrats, who had forgotten that they could lose their control of Congress, gradually gave away their natural electoral advantage by weaving the very rope that hanged them in 1994, and that if they wish to regain and retain such control, they will have to unravel that rope that they and the Republicans wove. It will not be easy, and without either a Democratic president or a veto-proof majority, they won't be able to do it. The project will therefore take several years to accomplish, at the least.
To win, the Democrats will have to make the system reasonably transparent and honest. Here's how:
1. Re-establish the fairness doctrine by statute. The fairness doctrine that required licensed radio and television stations to give equal time to opposing viewpoints was abolished in 1987 by a Republican-dominated FCC and has resulted in the ascendency of such luminaries as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage, who were free to advocate extreme right-wing political positions over the public airwaves without contradiction.
2. Re-establish the personal attack rule and political editorial rules which were abolished in 2000. According to the Wikipedia,
The personal attack rule was pertinent whenever a person or small group was subject to a character attack during a broadcast. Stations had to notify such persons or groups within a week of the attack, send them transcripts of what was said, and offer the opportunity to respond on the air. The political editorial rule applied when a station broadcasts editorials endorsing or opposing candidates for public office, and stipulated that the candidates not endorsed be notified and allowed a reasonable opportunity to respond.
The right-wing punditry that currently dominates the airwaves cannot survive real debate. Considering the dominance of a few corporate entities in the cable network business, a good argument could be made for the constitutionality of extending these rules to cable TV, where some of the most vicious right-wing commentary dominates.
3. Amend 18 U.S.C. §201(c)(1)(A) to eliminate the quid pro quo element of the crime of bribery. A Democratic Congress changed the illegal gratuities statute in 1984 to eliminate the receiving of gifts by federal officials as a crime unless it was for something specific, a quid pro quo. If somebody gives an official money or gifts in the general expectation of favorable treatment, neither the giver nor recipient has violated the law. After the Supreme Court interpreted the statute as requiring that the gift to an official must be for a specific official favor, the flood gates opened to all manner of corruption, for as long as a person or corporation gives a congressman a gift merely to gain favorable treatment in general, there is no violation of the law.
4. Repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1986 that sold the public radio spectrum to the highest bidder and permitted extreme concentration of media ownership. Neither the public nor the Democratic Party is served when one single corporation owns thousands of radio stations throughout the nation, especially when only right-wing propaganda is allowed to be broadcast. In addition, defense contractors should not be allowed to own television networks in the way that GE and Westinghouse now own two of the three major networks. In fact, no corporation that does extensive business with the U.S. government should be gatekeepers of public information. Allow only one media outlet per owner in each coverage area, meaning that a corporation may own a newspaper or a TV station in a city, but not both. There is no justification for the situation we have today.
5. Adequately fund PBS and CPB to do the job they are supposed to do and make them independent.
6. Require paper ballots in all federal elections. That means that all electronic voting machines will be required to print a paper ballot which the voter can approve and drop in a ballot box. Make it a felony to unlawfully exclude voters by any means whatever, including reducing the number of voting machines in opposition districts in order to cause long lines, or compiling a grossly inaccurate felony list and using it as a tool to challenge registered voters at the polls. Make it a felony to intimidate election workers, as happened in Miami in 2000. Establish uniform recount and ballot preservation procedures for all federal elections. Establish fair procedures for handling spoiled and incomplete ballots. Had those provisions been law in 2000 and 2004, Bush would have lost both times.
7. Establish federal financing of all federal elections. Appropriate sufficient funds so that candidates will choose to accept government financing rather than forego it for private gifts.
8. Enact an Internet neutrality bill guaranteeing equal treatment of all information providers. The huge advantage of the Republicans in raising corporate cash and dominating the mainstream news organizations has been mitigated by the Internet, which is open to both left and right. The Democratic party thrives on open discussion and debate; the Republicans are at a great disadvantage if they cannot control the flow of information to the public.
It's up to the Democrats to make any successes in November stick. If they don't make changes to open up the system, all their gains will be short-lived, and the nation will be poorly served.
Tags: democrats, communications, congress, bribery, elections, fairness
Tags: Hizballah, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Israel, Nasrallah
It is simply incomprehensible that some right-wing, supposedly "Christian" organizations publicly approve of torture, as long as the persons tortured are "them," and not "us." It all goes to prove the proposition that churches (or any other religious bodies) should never be permitted to have political power; they cannot resist the third temptation of Christ. Mat. 4: 8-10:The appearance of legal torture as part of the American landscape is a profound change, and certainly signals the approach of the totalitarian state, though it may not herald its actual arrival. And considering that a right-wing regime is involved, discussing the specter of fascism is not only appropriate but necessary.
Even if it does not signal the actual arrival of fascism, it's the clearest warning sign of its approach yet. Torture is a quintessentially fascist act; codifying it means that the massive brick in the wall that it represents has been plunked into place. And it's the kind of brick that can be the cornerstone of a massive national pathology of apocalyptic proportions.
After all, they have always had ways of making us talk. Now they have the legal power to do so too.
I am ashamed to say that I have not heard a word about the torture bill from the pulpit of my own mainstream church.Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor; 9 and he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away with you, Satan! for it is written,
‘Worship the Lord your God,
and serve only him.’ ” (NRSV)
Tags: torture, legislation, fascism, Geneva, Christian
None of the substitutes evokes the same feelings as "terrorism" and "terrorist," although the substitutes might describe them more accurately. It is because the terms insurgent, guerilla, jihadist and partisan are far more concrete and specific. The administration has refused to tell us just what a terrorist is, for two very good reasons:
First, it gives the president the unprecedented and unchecked discretion to label a person a terrorist and deprive him of the protections of the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions. That degree of power we usually associate with a dictatorship, not a republic.
Second, and more importantly, terrorism only has power when we give it power—by projecting our own shadow onto an enemy about which we know very little. Terrorism makes us fearful because it resists definition, and that is no accident. It is difficult, if not impossible, to project such evils onto ordinary men and women or even insurgents or jihadists. The target of projection cannot be too familiar, because projection becomes impossible in such a situation. Demonized persons are too likely to turn into real people when we come to know them.
Strictly speaking, a terrorist is one who strikes with the primary purpose of making us fearful. For him, the deaths of the innocent are a secondary consideration. If he fills us with terror, he succeeds, because fearful people are people whose judgment is impaired. Fearful people are easily manipulated by crafty politicians against their own interests.
When we refuse to be afraid of the terrorist, he is utterly defeated. We don't have to lift a finger.
There is no rational reason to be fearful of a terrorist attack. The danger to the average American citizen of a terrorist attack is miniscule. There are too many other things that deserve our attention. Yes, there is a small possibility that one might be killed by a terrorist, but one is far more likely to die in an automobile accident or even from influenza.
So ask yourself, has Bush or his minions even once told the American people not to fear? To be of good courage? To keep a stiff upper lip?
No. At every opportunity he has stoked that fear. He has no interest in defeating the terrorists or wiping out terrorism. It took serious creative work on the part of countless politicians, military officers, right-wing think tanks, television networks, and neocons to create an enemy evil and mysterious enough to replace communism and the Soviet Union, which may be one of the reasons that Bush chose not to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. Why kill a perfectly serviceable enemy that can be recycled over and over to scare the American public, whose short and selective memory makes it so susceptible to this kind of repeated demagoguery?
H.L. Mencken said it best:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
William Golding's novel, Lord of the Flies, also comes to mind.
Tags: terrorism, terrorist, Osama Bin Laden, courage, projection