Time constraints have kept me from responding to this as quickly as I would like, but I think it is still important to comment on a bigoted ad from the Lieberman Senate Campaign. Queerty.com has extensive coverage of the issue, including screen shots and video.

The technique used in the ad was to make Lieberman's opponent, Ned Lamont, look subservient and dependent on former Connecticut Governor Lowell Weicker by putting a pink shirt on his cartoon caricature and giving the Lamont cartoon a high pitched voice. Attacking men by associating female and queer traits with them is reprehensible. It is a personal insult to all queers and to all women.

There is an element of irony. Women like Cindy Sheehan and queers like Harvey Milk have shown more courage and independence than Lieberman is capable of doing.

Lieberman's defenders might point out the Champaign Fund's 100% rating for the incumbent on lgbt issues. However, two terribly important votes on lgbt issues show that such a rating is either outdated or inaccurate. Lieberman cast a viciously homophobic, sexist, and racist vote in favor of confirming John Roberts to the Supreme Court. Joe-mentum cast an equally homophobic, sexist, and racist vote on Alito filibuster, the only Alito vote that affected the outcome of his nomination.

It is no secret that Alito and Roberts have devoted their adult lives to attacking all civil rights and to subverting and undermining the U.S. Constitution. Lieberman didn't just betray the queer community with those votes, he violated his oath of office to uphold and defend the Constitution.

Hopefully, the HRC will put aside the pressure of rich, right-wing donors who love Ann Coulter's endorsee, Joseph Lieberman, and endorse Ned Lamont who is better on queer issues.

The following is an email I sent out to express my frustration about The Al Franken Show's lack of proper coverage of liberal views on trade and Bush's war in Iraq.

On two major issues, liberal perspectives are being ignored.

Your panel discussion on trade was interesting, but why not have a liberal on it? The liberal position on trade is to repeal NAFTA, withdraw from the World Trade Organization, and put limits on corporate policies that pit workers against each other worldwide.

Even more strange was that you and all your guests acted as if "free trade" agreements relieve poverty in the developing world. That view has been rejected in the experiences and election results throughout most of Latin America, where democracy is most prevalent in the developing countries. In fact, the Zapatista revolt was deliberately started on the day NAFTA went into effect because everyone in Mexico knew that NAFTA would devastate everyone except the wealthy elites.

As for the war, liberal views are largely ignored. In State Department polls (which have a strong pro-occupation bias), over 80% of the Iraqis want an immediate withdrawal of US troops, not the phased withdrawal you said that they want. In independent polling, the percentage of Iraqis wanting an immediate withdrawal is around 98%.

Even though most Democrats want an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, you are ignoring or belittling our point of view, often using the GOP buzz-phrase "cut and run."

The irony is that the true cowards are people without the guts to oppose the Bush regime and its corrupt cronies like Halliburton, the Religious Right, Big Oil, Bechtel, etc.

You try to have it both ways by criticizing the Bush regime while actively promoting its Iraq agenda. Saying Bush is bad is not enough, you need to support the responsible alternative to dragging on this illegal and unAmerican war: immediate withdrawal.

Lest you try to spit out GOP talking points, I will point out the following facts.

- The Civil War in Iraq has been going on ever since the invasion.

- The Bush regime's occupation of Iraq is aiding and abetting Al Queda's recruitment efforts, as the CIA and Army have admitted. (When will you report the fact that Zarqawi refused to join Al Queda in 2000, wanting to focus on his opposition to Arab regimes. He only joined Al Queda after the invasion and colonization of Iraq?)

- The Bush Regime already has lost the war in Iraq.

- US troops stuck in Iraq are powerless to go after bin Laden and senior Al Queda leadership figures in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

- The war in Iraq makes bin Laden much more popular in the Muslim world.

- Iraq already is in a state of complete chaos.

Considerable protest has targetted New School President Bob Kerry and his decision to invite John "Keating Five" McCain to speak at the university's commencement address.

The criticism has been focused on issues such as McCain's support of the illegal and unAmerican war in Iraq. McCain also has been criticized for his misogyny, homophobia, and contempt towards the legitimacy of the political views of young adults.

However, there is another important aspect of the issue that has largely been overlooked. The decision by Kerry to invite McCain to speak at commencement shows a lack of concern about ethical education in the University.

McCain is a corrupt politician. His actions and those of the rest of the Keating Five cost people their retirement savings and who helped his corporate cronies carry forward schemes that cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in the Savings and Loan Bailout. Universities should invite commencement speakers of the highest ethical standards, not sleaze like John "Keating Five" McCain.

A university is not just supposed to provide rote memorization and a degree that helps with future career and income. Part of a university's responsibility is to teach ethical behavior. One of the most influential ways of educating people is by example. What a terrible example Bob Kerry has provided in John “Keating Five” McCain.

Wikipedia has a lengthy article on the movement to impeach Bush. This provides an excellent background and provides evidence to the extent of the movement's support. The crimes of the Bush regime are starting to catch up with them.

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors passed an impeachment resolution a couple of months ago. A resolution has been proposed for the California Legislature. Similar proposals are on the table for Illinois and Vermont.

Several Vermont towns have passed Impeachment Resolutions. The most interesting part of this is that they were passed in town meetings, showing that considered, direct democracy often works better than representative democracy.

The Green Party of the US has taken a particularly thoughtful approach, calling for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney. Cheney is at least as guilty of Bush, and having him follow Bush in the White House would solve nothing.

Veterans for Peace's early support for impeachment played a vital role, and they have some excellent arguments for impeachment. (PDF)

There now are pro-impeachment House and Senate Candidates. Here are some examples:

Jean Hay Bright - Maine Senate

Jeeni Criscenzo - CA-49

Chris Owens - NY-11

Tony Trupiano - MI-11

The impeachment movement has an enormous online component.

ImpeachPac.org is the most comprehensive. It is worth going through the site for all the resources.

AfterDowningStreet.org is hosting Public Service Announcements for impeachment and have instructions people can use to try to get them on the radio. Some of the people making the announcements include Cindy Sheehan, Ed Asner, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky.

www.impeachbush.org was one of the first impeachment sites. As often is the case, the left takes the lead on issues that the rest of the country is not ready to acknowledge yet.

Another impeachment Web Site

There's an impeachment blog.

Michael Moore is hosting impeachment resolution language on his web site for states, city councils, and political party committees.

There also are online impeachment petitions.

Veterans for Peace

The Petition Site

Petition Online

It is so frustrating that 4 out of 7 Democrats voted to confirm Michael Hayden, an Air Force General, to run the CIA. It was sadly typical of a party sadly lacking in integrity and backbone.

There were serious concerns about putting a general in charge of the CIA, a civilian intelligence agency. However, far more important was that fact that Hayden has been in charge of the NSA while it has illegally spied on Americans, illegal spying that Hayden has not only defended, but bragged about.

All of the Republicans on the committee voted to confirm Hayden. They should be ashamed of themselves. But, four Democrats, Levin (MI), Feinstein (CA), Mikulski (MD), and Rockefeller (WV), joined in betraying our nation's freedoms and the rule of law.

The three Democrats on the panel who voted against the nomination were Evan Bayh (IN), Russell Feingold (WI) and Ron Wyden (OR). They certainly deserve credit for doing so, but why only three? Democrats should be leading a fillibuster against Hayden, not sucking up to him.

Some people say we really need a second political party. At times like these, it isn't difficult to identify with that point of view.

The following advertisers placed half-page or larger ads in Saturday's (5/20/06) New York Post, Rupert Murdoch's fascist propaganda rag.

p.14: Sprint (full page)
p.29: Warner Brothers Pictures (half page)
p.45: Star Toyota (half page)
p.47: Used Car Mega Center (half page)
p.49: Able Ford (half page)
p.49: Victory Toyota (half page)
p.51: Hempstead Mitsubishi (full page)

My original intent of posting this was to shame advertisers, which still is perfectly valid. However, I cannot help but notice how few large ads were sold. This lends credibility to claims by the New York Daily News that the Post loses a lot of money.

OK, "Net Neutrality" has to be the most boring catch phrase since the dawn of political slogans. The geeks who invented this term think in terms of Network Administration.

Until now, the Internet has worked so that you get to go to any web site, and your ISP will accept the data you download the same way, regardless of who the data comes from. This is called "Net Neutrality," meaning that your ISP is neutral in terms of where on the Internet the data comes from.

Unfortunately, the phone and cable companies have been doing a good job lobbying Congress and the FCC to get rid of this, while pro-Internet lobbyists are trying to get it put back into effect. The broadband providers have two goals with this.

1) They want to charge premium prices to data providers, even though all the costs already are covered in your monthly service charge.

2) Some cable providers are owned by Time Warner, a leading media conglomerate. Other broadband providers would like to make deals with other media conglomerates. In both cases, the idea is to push people away from content that they don't control.

If you want to go to WBAI's web site, you eventually will get slower access or none at all. (Substitute your favorite non-profit web site for WBAI.) Listener funded radio can't afford to pay for faster access, even if the cable and phone companies would be willing to allow access to a media outlet that often criticizes them and other corporate interests.

In this faux Internet world, most broadband customers would have access to a limited number of viewpoints in a manner similar to that of cable TV. That mean, it would be harder to keep up with news and views from:

- Queers
- Atheists and Humanists
- Liberals

Some of the activists trying to defend the Internet experience for Americans are referring to it as "Save the Internet." In a sense, this slogan is not overblown. Also, it's a lot more interesting than "Net Neutrality."

Pundits have bemoaned the increased divisions in our nation's political discourse during recent years, though usually neglecting to mention that the GOP and the Bush regime have been the driving factors behind it. Yet, there is another way that the Bush regime has damaged the nature of American political debate: the increasing religiosity.

Religion should be a private matter. Religious considerations have no legitimate role to play in politics, and injecting religion into politics discriminates against atheists. Until recently, such behavior had been abandoned by the left, staying primarily in the fundamentalist right and with obnoxious Dixiecrats like Bill Clinton.

Yet, with the ascension of George W. Bush, religiosity has started to permeate political debate throughout the political spectrum. Although I admire Cindy Sheehan very much, I was dismayed to find out that she was dragging a cross around at Camp Casey II.

The Bush regime has done everything it can to use the power of the state to promote religion. In its “faith-based initiatives,” which would be more accurately referred to as hate-based initiatives, Bush and his band of religious extremists have transferred federal grants to charities that discriminate on the basis of religion. Bush has been on political jihads against the right to choose on abortion and against the civil rights of the queer community. Bush looks for every excuse to unconstitutionally declare Days of Prayer.

Even more damaging has been Bush's efforts to inject his non-existent deity into political debate. His brutal and murderous war in Iraq has been justified in Christian religious terms. This has created a backlash among liberal Christians, who think that the war is “unChristian.” This latter claim is bizarre given the murderous history of Christianity.

Too much of the debate on Iraq is couched in a Christians vs. Muslims context or in a “who would Jesus bomb?” context. Life-and-death national issues are being lowered to the level of a “my god can beat up your god” type of debate.

Air America even has a show devoted to injecting religion into politics and thereby advocating discrimination against atheists, State of Belief.

People of all political persuasions need to recognize the lunacy of believing that a supernatural being is taking their side in political debates. We need only to look at Afghanistan under the Taliban to see the risks involved in mixing religion and politics.

Every nation that has expanded its economy since the industrial revolution has done so using protectionism. This is especially true of the US and Japan in the past and equally applies to China's present situation, which is booming due to protectionist practices.

Corporate interests despise protectionism because it interferes with their efforts to pit workers in different countries against each other, lowering wages and benefits for all workers in the process.

Here in the US, thoughtful observers realize that living standards for the overwhelming majority of Americans continued to improve as long as our country practiced protectionism.

Ever since our government started to abandon protectionism in the 60s and 70s, living standards for all but the wealthy few have gone down. This is hardly surprising because replacing protectionism had its intended effect, making it easier for corporations to export jobs, lower wages, cut benefits, attack unions, ravage the environment, and reduce worker and consumer safety.

The term "free trade" is a misnomer. A more accurate term would be "corporate-controlled trade." Corporate-controlled trade limits the freedom of workers, environmentalists, and consumers to participate in a democratic society and to have any say over their lives.

Support for corporate-controlled trade might be rational for extremely wealthy people who think they can shield themselves from the instability caused by the poverty, debt, war, and desperation that corporate-controlled trade generates. For everyone else, support of corporate-controlled trade is absolutely foolish. Trade barriers protect the vast majority of people on both sides of borders. Unfortunately, those people do not own media outlets and cannot afford major donations to economics departments at universities.

David Broder's column on the Dubai ports deal includes a common mistake in the media, attributing some of the opposition to the deal to “nativism.”

However, nativism is based on resentment against immigrants and a notion that people who arrived in this country first are somehow better than the people who got here later.

This really has nothing to do with the opposition to the ports deal. One might be able to claim that some of the opposition to the deal is based on religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice, but nativism is unrelated to the very nature of the controversy, which has nothing to do with immigration.

However, there also are plenty of legitimate reasons to be opposed to the ports deal which have nothing to do with prejudice.

The United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, has been very friendly to terrorists, despite the claims to the contrary by the Bush regime.

• The UAE was one of only three countries to recognize the Taliban's government, which included most of Afghanistan. The others, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, have been quite friendly to terrorist causes as well.



• Two of the 911 hijackers were from the UAE.



• Terrorist financiers, among other financial criminals, commonly operate out of Dubai and the rest of the UAE.



• The UAE's royal family vacationed with Osama bin Laden and maintained friendly ties to Al Queda, at least until the 911 attacks. When President Clinton asked them to leave the vacation area so that the US could bomb bin Laden, the UAE royal family refused. The UAE claims that the ties have been cut, but we are expected to rely on their word in the matter.

Then, there also is the problem of the growing fanaticism among Muslims. The literally insane reaction by many Muslims to a few cartoons in a Danish newspaper raises a perfectly legitimate question:

How do we keep a bunch of those nutcases from becoming employees of the company that would be running US ports?

It is true that many Muslims reject the lunacy, but ports are so vital to our national security that we cannot have significant numbers of people working in our ports with the same mentality as the terrorists who have made bomb threats, staged and participated in riots, launched military operations against embassies, and shot a man working in Russia merely for being from Denmark.

It would be highly irrational and irresponsible for anyone to suggest that we should compromise the security of our ports under these circumstances. But, that is hardly the only problem with the ports deal. It is in our economic interest to ban foreign ownership of our ports and to restrict foreign ownership of other resources and enterprises. With foreign ownership, the profits of these enterprises are exported abroad, hurting our economy. Level-headed analysis of our economic well-being should overshadow right-wing economic ideology just as level-headed analysis of our security interests should overshadow the ideology of corporate-controlled trade.

One current talking point in the corporate media's coverage of the situation in Iraq talks about Iraq supposedly being near civil war.

Report finds Iraq teetering toward civil war (U.S. News and World Report)

Civil War Looms With 66 Killed in Baghdad (ABC)

More attacks take Iraq to brink of Sunni, Shiite holy civil war (The Tennessean)

Similar headlines and statements have claimed that Iraq is on the verge of chaos. Of course, in the real world, rather than GOP/corporate Spinland, a civil war has been going on in Iraq ever since the Bush regime's invasion. The Bush regime's bungling has forced our troops to fight on the side of Iranian-aligned Shi'ite religious extremists, who are doing more than their share of killing as well.

The situation has been one of worsening chaos since the occupation began, bringing a firestorm of undeterred looting. Even before the Shi'ite mosque was blown up, Iraq was so dangerous that most reporters remaining in Iraq are under orders from their employers to stay in or near their hotels. Electricity is a fleeting thing. In addition to the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians being killed by the Bush regime, countless others are being slaughtered by other Iraqis.

Finding humor in the absurd, even surreal, headlines may be gallows humor, but one cannot help but laugh at how hard the corporate media tries to manipulate the gullible.