Category: Politics

I’d rather see it fought on grounds even more essentially moral, but this one will definitely do.

As the Bush administration draws up plans to simplify the tax system, it is also refining arguments for why it may be necessary to shift more of the tax load onto lower-income workers.
Economists at the Treasury Department are drafting new ways to calculate the distribution of tax burdens among different income classes, which are expected to highlight what administration officials see as a rising tax burden on the rich and a declining burden on the poor.

Anyone out there think it’s not time to honor Jefferson’s maxim, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”*? Ok, maybe we can avoid the blood, but only one side has been engaged in a class war up to now.
___________________
* Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Stephen Smith, November 13, 1787, in Albert Fried, Ed., The Essential Jefferson (Collier Books, 1963), p. 264.

So reads the excellent headline on Stanley Crouch’s excellent column in today’s Daily News.
My favorite sentences, here pulled out separately from the whole:

What stands before the Republican Party, however, is something much deeper than the Day-Glo red in Brother Lott’s neck.
We have to remember that white Southerners were Democrats because the party of Lincoln had won the Civil War (which Lott has referred to as “the war of Northern aggression”).
After Johnson’s burst of civil rights legislation, the old-time religion of racism lost its power in Democratic Party circles, and reluctant ex-segregationists began to join up with the Republicans, who made them feel at home.
If the Republicans are not what white racists think they are, they need to raise their elephant bottoms up off the dime and get to work.
Long before his name was even mentioned as a presidential candidate, Bush told me in Texas that if the Republican Party did not expand itself beyond its white base, it would die. Though I doubt it, let us hope he was right.

Die. Yeah, die would be better for all of us.

this spunky little site makes a fine statement.
Maybe it looks a little chauvinistic, but if it helps to direct a boastful nation to its ideals, I can take the bunting and the suggestion of former virtue.

Following the unsuccesful American-backed military coup in Venezuela last April, when asked whether the Bush administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as the nation’s legitimate president, one White House official replied, “He was democratically elected,” then added, “Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however.”
Yes, here in the U.S. we understand exactly what he meant, and this week Washington is saying it again. The Bush gang wants a change in the regime in Caracas as soon as possible, and is saying so publicly.
But are they out of their minds? Considering the motives and mindset in question, I shouldn’t bother asking. But what about everybody else: Venezuelans, South Americans, Americans not part of the U.S. ruling oligarchy, the rest of the world? Nicholas Kristof, writing from Caracas, thinks they’re all “playing with fire.”

The international community is playing a very dangerous game here in Venezuela, along with self-described democrats who are calling for military intervention. To consider what could go wrong, just look next door at Colombia, torn apart by civil war for half a century.
….
A Venezuelan journalist I met, Francisco Toro, is strongly against Mr. Chávez but also worries about the consequences of his removal. “In Colombia in 1948, the oligarchs assassinated [the populist leader Jorge] Gaitán,” Mr. Toro said, “because he represented a particular problem that they wanted to solve. They never dreamed that 54 years later, Colombia would still be in civil war. You know how something like this starts, but you don’t know how it ends.”

Those who know me have seen the blue button I have been wearing for the past two months, and some already know what it means.
If you are still curious, or if anyone else reading this might be curious, please go to the Blue Button Project site, for the source, in art and conscience, of this emblem of resistance.
I always have extra buttons for those who will wear them.

Lott stays, for now, sorta hanging out there in the breeze for all to enjoy, neck in a noose; Kissinger drops out, deciding he can’t take the heat just yet, will wait for the fires of hell; and Cardinal Outlaw is down for the count after fleeing to his earthly holy father.
It’s been a great day, but there’s mountains of work left out there. The real Mr. Bigs are still standing, everywhere.

Because of an experience of my own, Pinter’s introductory analogy reads as particularly genuine, but the main text of this address should read as genuine to all.

By Earlier this year, I had a major operation for cancer. The operation and its after effects were something of a nightmare. I felt I was a man unable to swim bobbing about under water in a deep dark endless ocean. But I did not drown and I am very glad to be alive.
However, I found that to emerge from a personal nightmare was to enter an infinitely more pervasive public nightmare – the nightmare of American hysteria, ignorance, arrogance, stupidity and belligerence; the most powerful nation the world has ever known effectively waging war against the rest of the world.

Can we all agree on one thing? If there realy were a god, he wouldn’t be working with a Cardinal Law.
Law’s outrageous assaults upon those who trusted him, and those who never would, did not begin or end with the messy issue of sexual abuse currently in headlines around the world.
He represented, with an energy and enthusiasm uncommon even among his colleagues, the Roman Catholic Church’s disastrous, authoritarian and evangelical global policies on AIDS, abortion, same-sex marriages, women’s health care, public education and public health policy.
Preaching from Church pulpits soon afer his appointment in Boston, he told Catholics to vote against the Democratic White House candidates in 1984, Walter Mondale-Geraldine Ferraro, because of Mrs Ferraro’s support for abortion, and he never relented in his political partisanship, if it could mean advancing the narrow obsesssive agenda and the economic, social and political power of the Catholic fanaticism he and his office embodied so well.
Good riddance, but Law’s lone departure is not likely to change a thing, for while the people of the Boston area are being delivered of one miserable wretch, the damage remains, and the mischief continues there and throughout this nation and across the planet, nasty stuff worthy neither of gods nor men.

Awwww. That’s so sweet. It’s nice to know that Christian tourists may not be too discomfited by the repeated brutal Israeli invasions of Palestinian Bethlehem during this joyful Christmas season. Resident Palestinian muslims however, including especially the elected Palestinian leader, need not apply.

VATICAN CITY – Israel’s president promised the pope during a meeting yesterday that the army will redeploy outside the pilgrim city of Bethlehem during Christmas if there are no warnings of terrorist attacks, the Israeli Embassy said.

I say, Please, please, please don’t get rid of Trent Lott!
After Bush himself, Lott is the most spectacular evidence we have for the stupidity, disconnectedness and pure malevolence that has descended upon Washington.
For those who might worry about his continued presence as the second-highest ranking of the elected and almost-elected officials in the land, I can’t imagine how Lott can create any more mischief than his Republican colleagues would eagerly without his coaching, so keeping him visible could actually do less harm than good.