As you probably know by now, the US Senate voted 69-28 to pass a FISA bill which gives immunity to Telecoms who illegally spied on Americans at the request of the Bush regime and which gives an attempted legal license to the unconstitutional spying of political opponents and dissidents.

Three votes are of particular interest to followers of Presidential politics. Obama voted in favor of this attack on the Constitution and on basic political freedoms; John "Keating Five" McCain didn't bother to vote; and Hillary Clinton actually voted against it, despite her earlier vote against a filibuster of the reprehensible legislation.

Much has been written on Obama's betrayal on this issue, despite previous promises to filibuster any bill with Telecom immunity. It raises serious questions not only about his commitment to constitutional rights, but also to his credibility and trustworthiness.

The lack of a vote by John McCain is interesting. Did age and frailty make it too difficult for "Keating Five" McCain to carry on his Senate duties while campaigning for the White House? Was he afraid that voting for the bill would alienate anti-government conservatives who might vote for Bob Barr?

Hillary Clinton's No vote was a rare break from the rightist wingnuttery which has typified her time in the Senate and her presidential campaign. Was she trying to take both sides of an issue to triangulate? Was she trying to move to the left to stay politically viable in New York? Her vote suggests that those of us in New York should see if this represents an opportunity to try to pull her away from her generally Republican behavior, admittedly an enormous task.

What about the rest of our not so esteemed Senate? There wasn't even one Republican honest enough to vote against the legislation, demonstrating how completely corrupt and unAmerican that party has become. The votes of 20 "Democrats" for the bill shows that corruption has made enormous inroads in that party. Webb's vote for the bill, along with his pro-war record (as opposed to anti-war rhetoric) shows the folly of trusting a former Reagan administration official.

Here is the vote tally from the US Senate Website:

Yes ---69 Alexander (R-TN) Allard (R-CO) Barrasso (R-WY) Baucus (D-MT) Bayh (D-IN) Bennett (R-UT) Bond (R-MO) Brownback (R-KS) Bunning (R-KY) Burr (R-NC) Carper (D-DE) Casey (D-PA) Chambliss (R-GA) Coburn (R-OK) Cochran (R-MS) Coleman (R-MN) Collins (R-ME) Conrad (D-ND) Corker (R-TN) Cornyn (R-TX) Craig (R-ID) Crapo (R-ID) DeMint (R-SC) Dole (R-NC) Domenici (R-NM) Ensign (R-NV) Enzi (R-WY) Feinstein (D-CA) Graham (R-SC) Grassley (R-IA) Gregg (R-NH) Hagel (R-NE) Hatch (R-UT) Hutchison (R-TX) Inhofe (R-OK)	Inouye (D-HI) Isakson (R-GA) Johnson (D-SD) Kohl (D-WI) Kyl (R-AZ) Landrieu (D-LA) Lieberman (ID-CT) Lincoln (D-AR) Lugar (R-IN) Martinez (R-FL) McCaskill (D-MO) McConnell (R-KY) Mikulski (D-MD) Murkowski (R-AK) Nelson (D-FL) Nelson (D-NE) Obama (D-IL) Pryor (D-AR) Roberts (R-KS) Rockefeller (D-WV) Salazar (D-CO) Shelby (R-AL) Smith (R-OR) Snowe (R-ME) Specter (R-PA) Stevens (R-AK) Sununu (R-NH) Thune (R-SD) Vitter (R-LA) Voinovich (R-OH) Warner (R-VA) Webb (D-VA) Whitehouse (D-RI) Wicker (R-MS)
No ---28 Akaka (D-HI) Biden (D-DE) Bingaman (D-NM) Boxer (D-CA) Brown (D-OH) Byrd (D-WV) Cantwell (D-WA) Cardin (D-MD) Clinton (D-NY) Dodd (D-CT) Dorgan (D-ND) Durbin (D-IL) Feingold (D-WI)	Harkin (D-IA) Kerry (D-MA) Klobuchar (D-MN) Lautenberg (D-NJ) Leahy (D-VT) Levin (D-MI) Menendez (D-NJ) Murray (D-WA) Reed (D-RI) Reid (D-NV) Sanders (I-VT) Schumer (D-NY) Stabenow (D-MI) Tester (D-MT) Wyden (D-OR)
Not Voting - 3 Kennedy (D-MA) McCain (R-AZ) Sessions (R-AL)

 

Here's a report from the Real News Network from back in May. You probably didn't hear or read this in the corporate media.

Air strikes against Iraqi civilians have been going up during the "surge," an important story that is being censored by corporate news outlets.



Anyone who says that the violence is going down in Iraq is either ill informed or isn't counting the escalating violence by US troops acting under orders of the Bush regime.

Here is another Real News Network story (June 23, 2008) that covers the minimal network news coverage of Iraq, about 2 minutes per week. The lack of information on Iraqi casualties also is discussed. The lack of bad news we are getting from Iraq is primarily due to the lack of total news we are getting from Iraq.



 

Reuters 7/5/08:

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said on Saturday his plan to end the Iraq war was unchanged and he was puzzled by the sharp reaction to his statement this week that he might "refine" his timetable for withdrawing U.S. combat troops.

Of course, if you have followed past Democratic betrayals, you know that "refine" almost always means "capitulate" when it is uttered by most centrist and conservative Democrats. Obama's quote may or may not be reassuring.

"For me to say that I'm going to refine my policies I don't think in any way is inconsistent with prior statements and doesn't change my strategic view that this war has to end and that I'm going to end it as president," Obama told reporters on his campaign plane.

One key question is:

When?

Obama's prior 16 month timetable is absurdly long. It only took weeks for the Bush regime to get our troops into Iraq, the notion that it could possibly take more than 6 months for a full withdrawal insults the intelligence of anyone with an IQ over 50.

The possibility that such an outlandishly long timeline might be extended is sickening. One deadline does present itself to congressional Democrats. If we are still in Iraq in November 2010, the Democrats will face enormous losses in the midterm elections.

Maybe Obama's prior comments were a trial balloon. If so, we need to fight like heck to pop it.

Will he try to filibuster the war to the end of his first term? To the end of a second term? After Obama betrayed people concerned with the Constitution and civil liberties on FISA and hate-based initiatives, we need to push as hard as we can for a full and immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Democrats tend to follow social movements rather than lead them.

We better be one of those social movements.

 

The claims by the fascist government in Columbia, the Bush regime, the "Keating Five" McCain campaign, and the corporate media that the FARC hostages were released through trickery and this all just happened to take place in time for McCain's visit to that country were fishy from the start. Any decent bullshit detector should have been going off the charts.

It turns out the whole story was a bunch of bullshit.

FARC was paid millions of dollars to release the hostages. (The Australian 7/4/08)

LEADERS of the Colombian FARC rebel movement were paid millions of dollars to free Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other hostages, Swiss radio has said, quoting "a reliable source".
The 15 hostages released Wednesday by the Colombian army "were in reality ransomed for a high price, and the whole operation afterwards was a set-up," the radio's French-language channel said.

Saying the US, which had three of its citizens among those freed, was behind the deal, it put the price of the ransom at some 20 million dollars.

The radio said its source was "close to the events, reliable and tested many times in recent years.'

The Bush regime and its corrupt cronies in Columbia staged the whole thing to help McCain's campaign, and it sounds like they used our taxdollars to pay off FARC.

 

Yes, I know I'm harping on this, but most people in the corporate media are downplaying the main reason why gas prices are so high while stirring up anger over high gas prices. The independent media, including you and me, need to counter this propaganda.

Many people in the peace movement have neglected to connect the dots between the Iraq War, its resulting reduction in Iraqi oil production, its destabilization of the Middle East, and rising prices at the pump. That critique doesn't apply to all peace groups, though. The West Virginia Citizens Action Group is calling for a "separation of oil and state."

"I think really people are smarter than the politicians let on. I think people really know that the unrest in the mideast is really causing a large part of the gas problem in this country," Gary Zuckett of Citizen Action Group said.

Leaders of Citizen Action Group point to a recent study that tracks how gas prices have risen dramatically since the start of the war.

Be sure to watch the video included with the WSAZ news story where the grassroots activist makes some excellent points.

The problems caused by the war on Iraq are hardly limited to present and potential petroleum supply disruptions. Sen. Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) brought up another way that the Iraq War is increasing gas prices: devaluing the dollar. (The Hill's Blog Briefing Room 7/1/08)

"We cannot economically afford to keep borrowing two to three billion dollars a week from China," McCaskill said on MSNBC. "That's why gas prices are so high. People are speculating in commodities because nobody wants to go near our dollar. We cannot–it is unsustainable to continue to prop up, in the middle of a civil war, an Iraqi government that will not step up and do what they need to do."

Let's face it. Jesse Helms was an incredibly evil man. He was an uncompromisingly racist, sexist, and heterosexist bigot who did everything in his power to promote the spread of HIV in the queer community. Helms had absolutely no personal or public integrity whatsoever, being as much of a liar as he was a bigot. He also was a bought politician, doing whatever he could to please the tobacco companies and other corporate interests.

Now, Jesse Helms is dead.

If you want sympathy or false praise for that piece of garbage, you will have to go elsewhere. Helms deserved to die a lot younger than 86.

If you want to get an idea of how evil and bigoted the so-called "Heritage Foundation" is, read the quote from the article from their president on Helms.

Ed Feulner, president of conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, hailed Helms as "one of the most consequential figures of the 20th century."

"Along with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, he helped establish the conservative movement and became a powerful voice for free markets and free people," Feulner wrote.

Free people, my ass.

 

The YouTube page has a description that makes an important point.

The Bush Administration's mindless threats to use nuclear bunker busters against Iranian nuclear research facilities could, if implemented, wipe out 2.6 million people in Iran, Pakistan, and India, and expose another 10.5 million to nuclear fallout.

If you think there are too many terrorists now, think of how many terrorists such an attack would recruit.

Why is it that there are so few politicians in either the GOP or the Democratic Party that actually show any common sense or common decency? Kucinich should not be the rare exception to the dismal rule of politicians. The rest of Congress should be following his lead, not trying to marginalize him because corporate and wealthy donors don't like what he has to say.

 

From their Action Alert:

No Compromise on Liberty

As we’re celebrating independence and freedom this Independence Day, many senators are getting ready to come back to Washington and sell out some of our most fundamental freedoms.

This July 8, senators will make a crucial decision: whether or not to eviscerate our treasured right to privacy in our own homes and let lawbreaking telecom companies off the hook for handing over private information without a warrant.

Email your senators today. Demand they protect your privacy and the rule of law.

The default text for the email also makes an important point:

Please also reject any bill that lets the president keep spying on the personal phone calls and emails of Americans without getting a warrant. Checks and balances are critical in our democracy.

You have to ask what the point is in electing Democrats if they are going to act like Republicans on issues like stopping FISA expansion which are vital to our freedoms as Americans.

 

Here's a description of the Green Party presidential candidate questionnaire from the McKinney campaign website.

Many state Parties formulate their state ballots from a list of Presidential candidates recognized by the Presidential Campaigns Support Committee of the Green Party of the United States. Besides access to the Green Party's nominating process, the list is also used to govern access to Party resources and support.

Part of the process involved responding to a questionnaire which included many questions on issues of public policy.

Ms. McKinney has a lot to say in her answers to the questions from the Green Party. Cynthia McKinney's description of her campaign's goals shows a tremendous grasp of long-term thinking that is treated as heresy by most pundits and politicians these days.

I am entering this process because I believe a successful Green Party campaign can do the following:

--Institutionalize the Green Party as a meaningful, effective, and permanent part of the United States' political landscape;

--Popularize and grow the Green Party as an electoral/social vehicle to unite people across socio-economic lines that are often used to divide;

--Recognize and publicize the internationalization of problems facing average households across our nation;

--Inject radical common sense solutions into our national political debate;

and

--Positively affect public policy to improve our quality of life with justice for all.

Building a real alternative party to the Republicans and Democrats is a critically important political project. Ralph Nader's candidacy represents a protest against the status quo, but a Green candidacy builds for the future while speaking out against how terribly fucked up things are in the present.

McKinney's answers to the public policy questions represent what liberal values and politics are all about. Even if you don't plan on voting for her, it still is worthwhile to familiarize yourself with what she has to say. I'll end with a really great quote from her.

My service in the Congress gave me a clear understanding of how our system works -- or doesn't work -- for average, ordinary Americans whose values our policies purport to represent.

Read Ms. McKinney's Answers to the Green Party Questionnaire.

 

Some Notes on Living is a wonderful blog. Proudprogressive is my favorite writer there, though the others have quite a lot to say too. I just read a posting on Trans Pride in SF with a couple of sentences which say something of critical importance.

Remember if Gender ID and Expression is not protected - seriously no lesbians or gays are truly protected either. No matter how well you are assimilated. To society at large - we are all gay , all queer. The Ts are the canaries in our coal mine - don’t kid yourselves.

The same is true of the leather community, the sexually liberated (sometimes referred to as "promiscuous"), and the polyamorous. Until someone accepts as an equal every butch dyke, leatherperson, drag queen, and every other person whose very being makes it impossible to forget they are queer, they don't accept the most assimilated lgbt person either.

 

I never thought I would be devoting so much text to a rapid right-wing shift by Barack Obama. He already was a centrist, so the media is being deceptive when they say he is shifting towards, rather than away from the center. He keeps acting more and more like Hillary Clinton and John "Keating Five" McCain.

However, one encouraging point is that Obama's rightward shift did not seem to help him in the latest CNN poll.

The latest disturbing Obama position was his pronouncement that he would expand Bush's hate-based initiative to shift public funding from inclusive charities to religious ones. This is doubly discriminatory against atheists. It forces atheist taxpayers to pay for religious indoctrination, and it puts atheists in hostile environments when they want to participate equally in government funded services.

Also, the very premise of these hate-based initiatives is bigoted against atheists. The shifting of funds provides no tangible benefits for the poor. (The corruption in so many churches means that they almost certainly are resulting in less federal money actually reaching the poor.) The claim behind this garbage is that religious faith somehow makes someone more responsible and morally superior. The lack of even questioning, much less challenging, of such absolute nonsense shows how prejudice against freethinkers permeates our society and the corporate media that help to shape it. (Note: I refer to these initiatives as "hate-based" rather than "faith-based" because the former more accurately reflects the programs' true intent.)

The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) has a great 7/1/08 press release that focuses on the state/church separation aspect of the issue. The text follows:

FFRF Protests Pious One-Upmanship by Political Candidates

Faith-Based Initiative Should Be Abolished, Not Renamed

July 1, 2008

The Freedom From Religion Foundation, the nation's largest association of freethinkers (atheists and agnostics), today condemned Barack Obama's "gratuitous" pandering and his pledge to expand and rename George Bush's faith-based initiative. The Foundation is a nonpartisan educational organization working to keep church and state separate, which has taken the lead in legal challenges against the faith-based initiative.

Statement by Foundation co-presidents Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor:

Just as seven years ago the Foundation condemned Pres. George W. Bush's creation of his misguided "faith-based initiative," today the Foundation protests the shortsightedness of candidate Barack Obama in endorsing its continuation.

This is the wrong direction for our country. The next president should have the integrity and courage to back off from Bush's fiasco and abolish the so-called faith-based initiative. It has been a waste of taxpayers' money, has injected religion into politics, deprived needy clients of the best help, and has punched a huge hole in America's vaunted "wall of separation between church and state."

It's lovely to say, as Obama does, that "I believe deeply in the separation of church and state." But actions speak louder than words. There is negligible difference between Obama's and Bush's stated provisos on the faith-based initiative. Like Obama, Bush claimed the faith-based initiative would not allow religious groups to use public grants to proselytize or discriminate against clients, and that public money going to places of worship was only to be used for secular programs. But there is no accountability and no monitoring provisions, as the GAO audit of 2006 documented.

It's also fine for Obama to say the government and its recipients are going to follow the law. But every day at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, we field complaints about violations of the separation between church and state even over established law, such as school prayer. Obama offers no plan for monitoring the constitutional pitfall of a "partnership" between religion and government.

The Foundation has taken and won many court challenges against the faith-based initiative. For instance, a federal judge in our Faith Works case in Milwaukee ruled in 2002 that $800,000 in direct federal subsidy to a ministry that existed to "bring homeless addicts directly to Christ" was unconstitutional. The funds were spent (and wasted) by the time we won the case. In 2005, we halted the final federal grant to MentorKids USA, in which volunteer mentors had to sign a statement that they believed literally in the creation story before they could go on to openly proselytize children of prisoners. We stopped a "parish nursing program" in Montana in 2003, and in 2007 a "chaplaincy" in Indiana set up to minister to state employees. Important and pioneering as our legal cases have been, they are a mere drop in the bucket in terms of the public financing of proselytization under the faith-based scheme.

Obama praises Take Youth Education for Tomorrow, a program run by churches and church schools to teach reading after school and during the summer, largely in church settings. Churches and the offices of religious organizations are innately coercive environments. What about parents who don't want their children to have to go to church in order to get reading help? When taxpayers are footing the bill, such programs should be held in a neutral setting--there is, after all, no shortage of public schools, already tax-supported!

It is not only the 16% of the population who is nonreligious who is offended. Many Muslims are forbidden to enter Christian churches. Jewish children may not feel comfortable entering a Christian church. Even many Christian sects are uneasy about adherents entering churches run by competing denominations. The idea is fraught with practical and constitutional peril.

Weirdly, Obama criticizes Bush for failing to reach out to faith-based groups about how to apply for federal dollars. Yet this was a cornerstone of Bush's faith-based initiative. At countless regional and federal faith-based conferences, hands-on technical support at public expense (including "free lunches") is exactly what the Bush Administration has offered churches and religious agencies for seven expensive years!

Obama says "we all have to work together--Christian and Jew, Hindu and Muslim; believer and nonbeliever alike--to meet the challenges of the 21st century." True, even laudable. But that does not mean "we" should all be taxed to support churches or religious agencies. Many Americans proudly are descended from immigrants who came here to escape mandatory tithes and taxation in support of churches against their consent.

Obama's tone is more balanced than Bush's. But he spoils the effect by criticizing those "who bristle at the notion that faith has a place in the public square." Secularists have never said faith can't be displayed in public. We do insist that faith should not be part of government, subsidized by government or promoted by government. The genius of the founders of our secular republic was to recognize that keeping religion and government separate is the way to prevent religious corruption and coercion.

Obama's reference to needing "people of faith on Capitol Hill"--as if Capitol Hill weren't at the moment dominated by "people of faith"--is both a naive platitude and exclusionary. How would religionists feel if Obama had said: "We need people without faith on Capitol Hill"?

Let's abolish the faith-based initiative and go back to the days before John Ashcroft first proposed so-called "charitable choice." Religious social services have always been free to bid for social service grants, but they were expected to create a secular arm, keep separate books and take their crosses down. A return to the status quo is the simple answer to the mess created by Bush's faith-based initiative.

Obama's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is merely a renaming of Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Ironically, nearly everything Obama criticizes Bush's initiative for ("it was used to promote partisan interests," "it has to be a real partnership--not a photo-op") can be said of Obama's plan and his "photo-op" speech today. Same taxi, different driver. Where's that vaunted "change" that Obama's campaign has been promising?

On a related topic, we are appalled at the arrogant, presumptuous hubris of politicians who claim to know "God's will." Obama joins an unfortunately long line of political candidates and public officials (which includes more than its fair share of despots), who talk about "fulfilling God's will" and "doing the Lord's work." Why are these politicians so special that they possess a direct pipeline to a divinity? The presidential candidates have crossed the line between acknowledging sincere personal faith to wearing faith on their sleeves and unapologetic political pandering. Both John McCain and Obama have been burned by their past close associations with pastors. Why can't they see that religion mixed with politics is always a combustible mixture?

Our country desperately needs a second political party.