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.

While the pundits and public debate the merits of keeping the detention centers at Guantanamo Bay open, no such debate is taking place in the Bush regime. Why?

You don't have to dig far to find out why. Last year, Halliburton received another construction contract for work on yet another prison facility there. This $30 million contract was not the first for a company that was Dick Cheney's former employer and where Cheney continues to have incredibly valuable stock options in the company. It is extremely unlikely that this will be the last Halliburton contract at Gitmo.

Throughout the War on Terror, protecting the country has been of little or no concern to the Bush regime, which is far more interested in justifying bilking the taxpayers than fighting terrorism. If Bush cronies could make money by handing bombs to bin Laden, the Bush regime would do everything possible to facilitate the transaction.

People for the American Way has started an online campaign calling for a Special Prosecutor to investigate the Bush Administration's domestic spying program.

http://action.pfaw.org/SpecialProsecutor

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' public statements have made clear that he is unwilling or unable to conduct the independent, objective, criminal investigation that is needed to resolve the legal issues involving warrantless NSA spying. Gonzales' efforts to spin the massive spying on Americans eliminate any credibility he would have to address the issue.

A special prosecutor is desperately needed to independently investigate the Bush Regime's domestic spying activities, bring criminal charges, and make sure that nobody is above the law.

When were the local police informed?

Was a police report filed?

If so, will that police report be made public?

Have the Secret Service agents present at the time been deposed?

Will those Secret Service agents be deposed later?

Was the shooting victim wearing the bright orange clothing hunters usually wear?

The latest news about Dick Cheney's alleged hunting accident raises some serious questions.

Why was there a one-day delay between the time of the shooting and the reports of it in the media?

Has Dick Cheney been tested to find out if he was under the influence of alcohol, prescription drugs, or illegal drugs at the time of the shooting?

Has there been a medical exam to determine if Cheney is suffering from Alzheimer's or some other kind of senile dementia, which might have contributed to or caused the shooting?

Were there any personal disagreements or hostilities that Cheney might have harbored towards the man he shot, hostilities which the man who was shot had no knowledge of?

Would an ordinary person have been arrested under the same circumstances?

Will Cheney be placed under arrest?

Will the corporate media ask any of these questions, or will they assume their typical role as propagandists for the GOP?