Along with the dysfunction, however, occasionally comes insight. You acquire it at the cost of leaving home and settling in a strange land for a time and then returning to live. That is the plot of the modern southern novel, and it is nothing more than a retelling of a journey that repeats itself in real life over and over. The south is a mother one must leave in order to grow up.
Joe Bageant has made that journey. Here is a recent interview of his on Australian TV:
Click here for video of Joe Bageant interview on Australian TV.
P.S. Posting will be infrequent for another week while I finish what I hope will be my last legal brief and become more proficient on the Dvorak keyboard.
The Logic of the Health Care Debate
Bush, Barbour, Cochran, and Lott can count the votes. That's all that matters to them.
Update 10/18/2007 20:02: The House of Representatives failed to override Bush's veto of the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act.
Rep. Bennie Thompson did the right thing and voted to override the veto.
Robo-republicans Wicker and Pickering predictably voted to sustain the veto, but amazingly Gene Taylor, a Democrat, also voted to sustain. How representatives from the poorest state in the U.S. can square their consciences voting for gigantic tax cuts for the rich and an illegal and costly war but not for the health of Mississippi's children is a mystery.
But children can't vote. That's all that matters to them. They apparently have no consciences to square.
Television, radio and newspapers are very profitable. Profits require scarcity. A television or cable franchise is valuable precisely because both air and cable channels are limited, and until the growth of the Internet, there were no electronic alternatives. Now that there is an alternative, the issue of net neutrality has become one of the most important issues of our times, since the outcome of the battle will determine whether the owners of the physical network will either be common carriers, like the phone companies, or gatekeepers, like the media networks.
The mainstream media and the political elite have been implacably hostile to the independent web-based news organizations that have arisen since the advent of the Internet and the Worldwide Web, and have used every stratagem in their arsenal to limit and even destroy their power and independence. One of the best-known of these web-based news organizations, the Indymedia Network, has been the target of police raids, government harassment, and criminal prosecutions as a result of its broadcasting news, audio and video that governments and multinational corporations want to suppress.
Once the Internet can handle full-screen video, channel scarcity will cease to exist, and an independent media, provided with news contributed by both volunteer and professional reporters, will reach into the vast majority of the nation's homes. This will not only diminish the profitability of the networks, which will be faced with serious competition, but the Corporatocracy that secretly controls our nation and much of the world—deriving much of its power by virtue of the public's ignorance of what is really going on—will find itself directly threatened, much as the medieval church found itself threatened by the invention of the printing press and the rapid spread of literacy spawned by the availability of inexpensive books written in the vernacular.
These corporate media folks take the matter of net neutrality very, very seriously, and have consequently spent many millions, both in campaign contributions and media advertising, to wrest control of the Internet away from the public and concentrate it into the same hands that now control the mass media. In an nation already being seduced and frightened into authoritarianism and all the evils that invariably accompany an authoritarian regime, a neutral Internet, protected by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution, may be one of our last opportunities to arrest what is increasingly looking like a slow-motion coup by the extreme right-wing.
So it's time to put away the clown suits, the puppets and the street theatre. In the early Sixties, protesters wore suits and dresses. They looked serious and respectable. They made an impact. They changed the nation.
The media couldn't make them into hoodlums, communists or wild-eyed radicals because they looked and dressed like the viewers, or, even more significantly, their children. Respectable clothes may or may not be the answer today, but the current approach isn't working most of the time. Now that the Bush administration appears to be set on a course to attack Iran, the stakes have become too high not to rethink our approach. If Bush paid no attention to the millions of demonstrators around the world who opposed the invasion of Iraq there is no reason to believe that ten times as many demonstrators will make the slightest difference in his plans to invade Iran.
Here is an IndyMedia NewsPaper. No wonder the powers-that-be oppose them.
Update: Clowns can have a powerful impact, under the right circumstances:
Any other ideas for constitutional amendments? Put them in the comments.1. The executive branch shall, upon the request of any senator or congressman, promptly produce all documents and information requested within its possession or control to the requesting member, irrespective of classification, sensitivity, or any other danger to national security that might result from the disclosure of such documents or information to the member or to third parties. Such requests may be directed to any employee or officer of the executive branch, irrespective of position, rank or contractual provisions that may require non-disclosure. The duty of the executive branch to respond fully and completely to such requests shall extend to testimony by officers, employees and contractors of the executive branch before either house of the legislature and their committees
2. The agency receiving such request may, within 7 days, object to the production of the documents or information or any portion thereof by serving its objection upon the requesting member, setting out in detail the reasons for its objections, and unless 55% of the members of the house of Congress to which the requestor belongs votes to sustain the objection, the agency must comply with the request. The vote to sustain shall be privileged and each member is limited to 30 minutes of debate.
3. Each house of Congress may, by a two-thirds majority adopt rules limiting the access of all members to certain categories of documents and information, but may by a two-thirds majority exempt individual members from any or all such limitations. Any rules adopted under this section must be drafted with specificity as to the documents and information protected and any ambiguities shall be interpreted in favor of disclosure.
4. Executive privilege is hereby abolished. No member of the executive branch, including the president or vice president, may refuse to provide any information or documents required to be produced under this amendment.
Update: Upon further consideration, it occurred to me that it is usually the minority party that is refused information by the executive branch. Requiring a super-majority to sustain the objection of the executive branch creates a presumption that the information should be produced.
One of the most effective means of stealing the 2004 election was voter caging—sending letters to newly-registered voters in Democratic areas with instructions not to forward. The Republicans then challenged the voters whose letters came back, including soldiers serving in Iraq and students who had been sent letters while on summer break.
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/330/video.html
The mainstream media in the U.S. have avoided this topic as they would a contagious disease.
There was, however, far more skullduggery going on in 2004 than just vote caging. Palast's book (see sidebar), which sets out detailed, virtually conclusive evidence that the election was stolen, is a shocker.
http://www.jacksonprogressive.com/issues/misspolitics/electedGovernor050907.html
Since it appears that the campaign for the U.S. Presidency is already in full swing, I am asking you, dear reader, a similar question: "If you were elected president, what would be your first official act?"
In other words, what do you think is the single most important thing our next president should do immediately?
Bork is demanding actual and punitive damages. He must believe that he is exempt from following his own principles.
It reminds me of a fundamentalist preacher's hellfire and brimstone sermons that terrified his congregation with predictions of the end of the world until they discovered that he was planting trees around his house.
The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy has a short article on Bork's previous opposition to large personal injury judgments.
See also Blomberg.com, and Bork's paper on Congress's power to enact tort reform.
Bork is another "intellectual" darling of the right-wing whose writings and influence over the past 50 years helped make this nation, weaker, poorer, nastier and more divided than before. I once thought of exposing this conceited windbag with a book of the same title as this article, a parody of the title of Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, but decided that it wasn't worth the time. Others have done an excellent job.
It's a bad day for Congress. And America.
Not the people of Mississippi who elected him.
The issue before Congress was whether Americans should be able to purchase prescriptions medicines sold by American manufacturers abroad at a fraction of the price charged for the identical medicines here in America. It is a fact that pharmaceutical companies charge Americans far more than they charge the citizens of other nations. Naturally, the industry is resisting any change that would cut back on this profitable racket, and it backs up that opposition with an army of lobbyists and a fortune in campaign contributions.
Cochran introduced a poison-pill amendment that for all practical purposes crippled a bill that would have made it possible for Americans to purchase medicines from other nations. It is amazing that the people of this poorest state in the union continue to elect to the Senate a person with so little regard for their health and welfare.
Yahoo: Senate Blocks Bid to Allow Drug Imports
For those folks who think the Reagan administration brought economic salvation by lifting the nation out of the high interest rates and high unemployment blamed on Jimmy Carter, the following article should show them their error:
The Reagan Years: A Statistical Overview of the 1980s
Reagan left the country meaner, more unequal, less stable, and less free than it was when he became president.
One state, Maryland, has already enacted into law the National Popular Vote Bill, that, if enacted by enough states whose combined electoral votes equal or exceed 270, automatically gives their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the national popular vote. No constitutional amendment is required.
A National Popular Vote Bill was introduced in the Mississippi Senate this year, but failed to gain traction. New ideas take a long time to penetrate our state's legislative skull.
The mechanics of the bill are simple. Until a sufficient number of states to create a majority in the electoral college have enacted the bill, nothing happens. But when the magic 270 electoral votes are reached, every participating state, including Mississippi if it enacts the bill, automatically chooses electors pledged to vote for the winner of the popular vote. It doesn't matter which states choose to participate; once an electoral majority is reached, the winner of the popular vote will be automatically elected president.
The Jackson Progressive thinks this is a good idea. Congratulate its sponsors, and if your senators or representatives didn't sponsor it, tell them you think it is a good thing.
Read the National Popular Vote web site for a more comprehensive explanation and for the latest news on the national campaign.
Addendum: Here are the sponsoring Mississippi state senators: Gloria Chisholm Williamson, Robert L. Jackson, Deborah Dawkins, David Lee Jordan, Johnnie E. Walls, Jr., Willie Lee Simmons, and Joseph C. Thomas. Let them know that you appreciate what they have done.
<snark>
How appropriate! After twelve years of demonstrating their commitment to collegiality and bipartisanship, the Republicans have much wisdom to impart to the incoming Democrats on how to go about being bipartisan:
The Washington common wisdom is correct; the Democrats have much to learn from their Republican colleagues.Tom DeLay could instruct on mid-decade redistricting;
Newt Gingrich on impeaching presidents of the opposite party;
Dick Cheney on courtesy towards senators of the opposite party;
Mark Foley on youth outreach;
Dennis Hastert on transparency and openness in government;
Duke Cunningham on honesty and integrity in government;
Trent Lott on coiffure;
Chip Pickering on net neutrality;
Virgil Goode on religious tolerance;
John McCain on how to fool people into thinking you are moderate and bipartisan;
</snark>
Wallace is a highly intelligent lawyer, eminently qualified intellectually for the position. Unfortunately, he is a right-wing extremist who clearly lacks judicial temperament and who could not be expected to impartially rule on cases involving civil rights and similar fields of law about which he has never attempted to conceal his opinions and beliefs. Wallace was appointed by Reagan to head the Legal Services agency of the federal government with the intention that he would do his best to destroy the agency entrusted to him, a pattern Reagan and his Republican successors have followed many times since. He nearly succeeded. There is no reason to believe that he would behave any less ideologically as a federal appellate judge. The American Bar Association obviously felt the same way.
Extreme right-wing lawyers, wrong-headed as they may be, do not possess the ability to damage persons, institutions, and the law itself in the way a judge can. The American people have repudiated what Wallace stands for and we are all better off that he remains a very successful practicing lawyer.
Which is to say that while Senator Cochran may not have done anything illegal, it seems awful sleazy.
Email: Abramoff Associate Urged Funds for GOP Sen. Who "Never Said No"
Electronic voting is like an iceberg; the real threats are below the waterline where you can't see them. Paperless electronic voting machines bypass that security process, allowing a small group of people -- or even a single hacker -- to affect an election. The problem is software -- programs that are hidden from view and cannot be verified by a team of Republican and Democrat election judges, programs that can drastically change the final tallies. And because all that's left at the end of the day are those electronic tallies, there's no way to verify the results or to perform a recount. Recounts are important.
This isn't theoretical. In the U.S., there have been hundreds of documented cases of electronic voting machines distorting the vote to the detriment of candidates from both political parties: machines losing votes, machines swapping the votes for candidates, machines registering more votes for a candidate than there were voters, machines not registering votes at all. I would like to believe these are all mistakes and not deliberate fraud, but the truth is that we can't tell the difference. And these are just the problems we've caught; it's almost certain that many more problems have escaped detection because no one was paying attention.
This is both new and terrifying. For the most part, and throughout most of history, election fraud on a massive scale has been hard; it requires very public actions or a highly corrupt government -- or both. But electronic voting is different: a lone hacker can affect an election. He can do his work secretly before the machines are shipped to the polling stations. He can affect an entire area's voting machines. And he can cover his tracks completely, writing code that deletes itself after the election.
I voted this fall on a touchscreen voting machine, but it's doubtful my precinct votecount was hijacked, and if it were, it was probably due to incompetence, since the results of the major federal elections in Mississippi were foreordained. There's no point in committing fraud and risking being caught when the election isn't close. When an election is close, however, all it takes is a few changed votes in a number of "safe" precincts, and the result can be changed without anyone being the wiser.
So read Schnier's article; even better, subscribe to his newsletter, the Crypto-Gram, in which he discusses security of all kinds almost always in non-technical language.
Update 11/15/2006: Lott is minority whip and the Democrats are singing Hallelujah.
I think many Americans still don't know what the Democratic Party stands for. The party leaders in Congress have spent almost their entire careers either under Republican presidents or under Republican majorities in Congress. When Reagan won office in 1980, it appears that many Democrats decided that their political future lay in making themselves indistinguishable from Republicans, a strategy that ultimately cost many of them their jobs and ultimately cost the Democrats control of Congress.
The Republicans won control of all three branches of our government by making themselves over into an aggressive, take-no-hostages, party, preaching an agenda to the American people that sounded good, and did whatever it took to win control and to hold it. To give credit where credit is due, the Democrats assisted them by their own scandals and arrogance. Now the circle has finally come around and the Republicans have been clearly repudiated by the voters for their arrogance and corruption.
The soul of a political party is determined by how it obtains power. In this day of mass media, money has been the key to power, and the Republican Party gets it money from wealthy individuals and large corporations, whose interests it represents to the detriment of almost everyone else. Until recently, the Democrats were getting most of their money from the same or similar contributors, and a huge army of consultants grew fat as intermediaries between Democratic politicians and their powerful donors.
That political model is now under heavy attack from two directions. Most importantly, Howard Dean's 50-State project, designed to build viable state parties in every state, will, if successful, almost certainly make Democratic senators and representatives beholden to their local parties, rather than the beltway consultants that provide access to the big money. The D.C. establishment recognizes Dean as a threat to its gravy train and is fighting him viciously. Just today, Clintonite James Carville advocated replacing Dean with Harold Ford of Tennessee.
And it is not just the consultants and power brokers that are opposed to Dean. Think for a second: If you were a congressperson, with whom would you rather deal: rich donors in luxurious surroundings or your state Democratic executive committee, meeting in the basement of a church or the private dining room of a local fish house? It is naive to think that members who are to shortly to become part of the majority party are not being courted by the rich and powerful, even as this column is being written. The way to control the average politician is to control the means by which he is nominated and elected. When a politician is dependent on the state party to be elected, that is where his allegiance will lie.
Dean's project is therefore of critical importance, both to democracy and the long-term health of the party. If he goes, the Democratic Party will almost inevitably resume the very practices that caused it to lose in 1994. Given another two years as chairperson of the DNC, however, Dean will have shifted the party's center of gravity from Washington, D.C. to the state and local parties, where it belongs, and away from dependence on the rich and powerful.
The second attack upon the present arrangement is the Internet, and in particular, what the liberal political blogs have been calling the "netroots." Through the support of the blogs for specific candidates, people are donating to candidates and the DNC in numbers and amounts inconceivable just two years ago. That money comes from the grassroots and every dollar raised this way is a dollar that doesn't have to be solicited from a wealthy and powerful donor who will expect special favors. That's the reason that net neutrality is so important; the Internet is the sole mass medium that is not almost completely controlled by large corporations and the freedom of speech that is possible on the Internet is undoubtedly a thorn in the flesh of every politician and CEO whose misdeeds are likely to be discovered and broadcast to the world.
So Howard Dean needs our help. This plain-spoken doctor turned politician, rather conservative in his political beliefs, is radically changing our party for the better. It would be a disaster to lose him now.
Secondly, we can only insure net neutrality by pressuring our representatives in Congress to put it into law.
Air America Blackout - ABC Memo
The reward for investigating the rich and powerful is to be blacklisted. Is there any doubt as to why the mainstream media has betrayed democracy over and over again?
Via MyDD, here is a list of candidates for federal office that have pledged to support publicly-funded elections.
The Voters First Pledge asks candidates to commit to support legislation to make elections fair through Clean Elections-style public financing, enhance accountability through stricter lobbying and ethics guidelines, and the protect voters' right-to-know with better disclosure.
Being acquainted with a number of candidates, mostly former candidates, I have listened to nearly all of them lamenting the time they had to spend on the phone asking potential donors for money. The universal feeling was that the money chase was demeaning and poisoned the whole process, and this feeling was shared by both Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives.
Unfortunately , none of our Mississippi candidates have taken the pledge, so it's time to start asking why they haven't. Elections should not be decided on the basis of who has the most money.
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
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
Some time ago, I wrote a proposal for an electronic voting system that could be kept honest. It consisted of a card with a barcode and a number drawn from a fishbowl and swiped through the voting machine. The voter gets a printed ballot to keep containing the serial number of the card he swiped through the voting machine. He then goes home and checks his vote over the Internet using the number on his ballot which only he knows. The entire election database would be downloadable, thus allowing totals and subtotals to be independently verified.
Even though there are drawbacks to allowing a voter to have a copy of his ballot, it seems to me that it is the only way the system can be kept honest.
Tags: Diebold, touchscreen
Before Al Qaida it was the Serbs, who turned out in the end to be a pitiful target, and the "victimized" Kosivars a gang of racist, drug-dealing bandits.
Before the Serbs it was Saddam (a former client strongman) and the first Gulf War, followed by murderous sanctions that were responsible for the deaths of over half a million children. Madeline Allbright, our secretary of state at the time, felt that their deaths were "worth it."
Before Saddam it was Noriega, another former ally who became inconvenient.
Before 1992 it was the evil empire. Included along with the Soviet Union was Nicaragua, ruled by the Sandinistas, and the vicious and dangerous island dictatorship of Grenada, ready to pounce upon an unprotected and helpless U.S.
There is also the war against drugs, begun during the Reagan presidency, a continuing assault upon the treasury and our civil liberties with virtually no prospect of victory before the 22nd century.
Fear and greed are the tools used to manipulate the chumps.
What chumps?
Us chumps.
And manipulation it is. The Jackson Progressive web site is getting hit daily with dozens of messages coming from fake grassroots organizations predicting the imminent demise of the country if something isn't done to stop the influx of illegal aliens. A month ago I would receive 1 or 2 such messages a week. An examination of the message headers reveal that they originate from relatively few IP addresses.
Many years ago, I was required to read William Golding's Lord of the Flies as an assignment before starting my freshman year of college. It's the story of how a group of perfectly normal, middle-class boys stranded on a tropical island were turned into murderous savages by fear of an imaginary beast invented almost out of whole cloth by a couple of the boys. I'm beginning to appreciate William Golding more and more.
The country has gone through waves of xenophobia with past migration waves and the republic was never in danger of being overwhelmed by foreigners. In fact every new wave of immigrants brought us priceless gifts, every one of them: the Scots, Irish, Poles, Italians, Czechs, Romanians, Bohemians, Dutch, Germans, Cubans, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Russians, Indians, Thai, Indonesians, and last but not least, black Africans. (There are many others that do not come to mind immediatly. My apologies.) For most of the life of this nation, there were virtually no restrictions on immigration. We have done pretty well as a nation, I think, not in spite of immigrants but because of them.
My female barber, born in Korea and and adopted as a baby by an American couple, speaks with a pronounced Mississippi drawl, creating a most amusing cognitive dissonance. The Mississippi Delta is full of Italians and Chinese who have been there for generations. Today, the state is home to illegal aliens who work in the big chicken plants and other agricultural industries. For the most part they work hard, take care of their families and don't make trouble. The police and immigration authorities leave them alone as long as they don't commit crimes. Their children will grow up speaking English and live their lives as ordinary American citizens.
Our Mississippi social and economic model has not stood the test of time very well. All the talk of our "southern heritage" pales in the light of the reality. We're the poorest, unhealthiest and most ignorant state in the union. In the unlikely event that Hispanics become so numerous that they control the state it would probably be an improvement.
Historically, Republicans advocated loose immigration laws in order to keep down wages. Now that a substantial percentage of the Republican fundamentalist base is in the lower income brackets, the Republican Party has a big problem, which is why Bush's speech the other night was almost unintelligible. It was unintelligible because it was meant to be unintelligible. He is attempting to sail between Scylla and Charybdis.
Would anyone want to give odds on whether immigration will be an issue after the November election?
Or whether Halliburton will get the contract to build the Rio Grande Wall?