Category: Politics

Maybe there’s still hope. If William Safire says he’s worried about the Bushies’ assault on the Constitution, we may yet see a bipartisan movement in its defense—and the beginning of the end of this dark night of the Republic?

To fabricate an alibi for his nonfeasance, and to cover up his department’s embarrassing cut of the counterterrorism budget last year, Attorney General John Ashcroft — working with his hand-picked aide, F.B.I. Director “J. Edgar” Mueller III — has gutted guidelines put in place a generation ago to prevent the abuse of police power by the federal government.
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Some sunshine libertarians are willing to suffer this loss of personal freedom in the hope that the Ashcroft-Mueller rules of intrusion may prevent a terror attack. They won’t because they’re a fraud.

Out of “concern for the world’s Jews, for the supporters of Jews, and for peace in general,” Israel is asked to remove its semimilitary colonies from the West Bank, Gaza and Golan.

As far as I’m concerned, the flawed idealism of Zionism has run up against a wall. Even if I accepted the biblical premise that Jews are entitled to that piece of Levantine real estate – and I don’t – the political reality is that you cannot find peace by pursuing your current objectives. And you threaten more than yourselves and your immediate neighbors; you are threatening those of us who contributed so heavily to your existence.
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In fact, if Israel insists on maintaining the occupation, I will take action. I will demand my trees back. You owe me.

Bloggy has a fresh take on arguments about the distinction between “certain knowledge” (conspiracy treason?) and “reasonable suspicion” (cowardice treason?) as they relate to the Bushies and September 11.

If administration officials felt that the warnings they had were enough to warrant changes in travel plans for the President and members of the cabinet, and failed to warn the American people, I think it’s fair to say their behavior was treasonous.

[I think.]
Buchanan makes more sense than anything we see in the mainstream media!
The darling of the discontented Right says we are being attacked because of our imperial foreign policy, and not because “we are democratic and free and good.”
[One caution: While he gets it, as far as he goes in this piece, I would wager that his ultimate conclusions would be unlikely to please the progressive Left.]

Before, not after, the next terror attack on this country, America’s leaders should start telling the truth: Evil though they may be, Islamic killers are over here because we are over there. They are not trying to kill us because they dislike our domestic politics, but because they detest our foreign policy.
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Is the empire worth it? French, Brits, even Soviets said no. They went home. And nothing over there – not oil, not bases in Saudi Arabia, not global hegemony – is worth risking nuclear terror over here. I may be the only right-winger in America who loves D.C., but then I grew up here. Washington is my hometown. It comes first, and empire isn’t even a close second.

Climate changes, Bushes don’t.
The Bushies admitted last week, in a quiet report intended not to make the headlines, that we are indeed destroying our climate and our environment with the production of poisonous gases, but they say there will be no policy change.
Rather, we are told, we must adapt to the “inevitability” of our national policy of not reducing these emissions. Huh?

But while the report says the United States will be substantially changed in the next few decades — “very likely” seeing the disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes, for example — it does not propose any major shift in the administration’s policy on greenhouse gases.

Iceland is on the way to full energy independence, and it does not involve fossil fuels. If we could only widely duplicate some of that country’s natural advantages and ecological enthusiasms, we could eliminate much of the planet’s pollution and make our current fuel-driven domestic and foreign policy totally obsolete.

Iceland, with its steaming geothermal power stations, already knows plenty about alternative energy.
Now this island of lava on the edge of the Arctic plans to become the world’s first society to ditch fossil fuels entirely, relying instead on hydrogen made using the power of its roaring rivers and volcanoes.
Enthusiasts even talk about it one day becoming the “Kuwait of the North” as an exporter of the new, green fuel to markets in Europe.

America’s agenda, while it clearly does not include any real consideration for the welfare of the world outside, excludes most Americans as well, with the notable exception of only the very very rich, who remain the beneficiaries of our tender care.
The World Health Organization proposed last year that poor countries be provided with such basic items as antibiotics and insecticide-treated mosquito nets. If we had backed the proposed program, estimated to save eight million lives each year, our share would have been about $10 billion annually (about a dime a day for each American). The U.S. dismissed the suggestion with little grace.
In contrast and at about the same time, our legislators in Washington enthusiastically joined together in support of the administration’s proposal to make permanent the recent repeal of the estate tax, a bounty which will affect only some 3300 families yet cost the country $20 billion in revenue.

So here are our priorities. Faced with a proposal that would save the lives of eight million people every year, many of them children, we balk at the cost. But when asked to give up revenue equal to twice that cost, in order to allow each of 3,300 lucky families to collect its full $16 million inheritance rather than a mere $10 million, we don’t hesitate. Leave no heir behind!

[By the way, the foreign aid figures Krugman uses in the column linked above are respectively 11 one hundredths and 13 one hundredths of one percent, and not 11 and 13 percent of our GDP. These are figures which usually shock Americans, who like to think we give away scads of dough to foreigners.]

Back to the sixties—or worse! It’s not the good parts this administration wants revived, but the infiltration and monitoring of political, religious and activist groups suspected of being critical of the government.
The NYTimes has it right in a sober editorial today.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has a gift for making the most draconian policy changes sound seductively innocuous. He was at it again yesterday, describing new domestic spying powers for the Federal Bureau of Investigation as nothing more than the authority to surf the Internet or attend a public gathering. That is profoundly misleading. In reality Mr. Ashcroft, in the name of fighting terrorism, was giving F.B.I. agents nearly unbridled power to poke into the affairs of anyone in the United States, even when there is no evidence of illegal activity.
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At a press conference Mr. Ashcroft promised that the new rules would be put in place with “scrupulous respect for civil rights and personal freedom.” The sentiment is welcome, but unconvincing. Mr. Ashcroft and his colleagues have missed no opportunity since Sept. 11 to expand the investigative powers of the federal government and to stampede Congress into supporting the changes by suggesting that opposition is disloyal.

Adding a modest obsevation: They couldn’t even handle all the data they had gathered when they had “restrictions!” It does not seem to have been lack of information that kept us from preventing September 11.

The Green Party nominees for New York state offices carry background credentials a progressive voter normally only dreams of. Compare them to the candidates of the two “major” parties for office anywhere at any time.
What do we betray or throw away when we support the things we believe in? What do we betray or throw away when we do not?

Dr. Aronowitz said that key issues in his program would include energy policy, especially the need to close the Indian Point nuclear power plan; the effects of the growing permanent war machine on our ability to meet social needs in the state; and, tax giveaways to the wealthy and corporate welfare. Like many of the speakers at the Green convention, Aronowitz spoke of the need to oppose the efforts by the national Democratic and Republican Parties to use September 11th as an excuse to curtail civil liberties and increase corporate welfare.
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The Greens are committed to ecology, democracy, nonviolence and justice.

The Onion’s roving reporter “Opinion” box this week quotes one imaginary member of the public, in reply to a question about suicide bombers in our midst, as follows:

“The U.S. is safe, so long as the terrorists don’t see us being critical of President Bush.”

I just checked again. No need to worry yet.