See John Kerry give tribute to Mary McGrory

At CSPAN you can see John Kerry giving a lovely tribute to Mary McGrory in his address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors at their annual meeting.
You can also see protestors march into the room chanting for Kerry to address AIDS funding as he gives his speech.
Making a plea for improvement in the tone of civil discourse in Washington, D.C., Kerry states: "The high road is harder, but it leads to a better place." Kerry goes on to lay out a new contract for America's middle class.
Related news article here.

From Kerry's speech:

"Two hundred twenty-nine years ago, the first patriots from Massachusetts put their lives on the line at Lexington Green. Nearby, Samuel Adams -- who was not only a patriot, but at times a newspaper editor -- heard the battle shots of freedom and declared, 'What a glorious morning for America is this!'"

"For once, an editor got it right." [Kerry said this of John Adams]. "Today, with all the grim news we read each day in your newspapers, it is important to remember what a glorious morning it has been for America -- and that glorious days lie ahead. I know that every four years people who are running for president tell you that this is the most important election. Well this one is different: It's the most important election in our lifetime."

Empty Days Blog:
On the role of high ideals in Realpolitik

This morning I'm showcasing Akim's blog.

Excerpt from above-titled entry:

The actual argument for the war sounds like this: we need to create a political and military base in Iraq and forcibly put a pro-american regime in place; if this can be done with american-style democracy, that's great, it would make for grand propaganda for our pretty suspect good intentions. If not, we'll be ok with any type of regime as long as we can easily manipulate it (unlike Iran - yet Iran is no worse a dictatorship than Saudi Arabia, in case you still think USA is really after dictators).

Bush and his eager cronies actually believe their own lies when they talk of "beacon of freedom" and "liberating" some selected "oppressed Arabs" - while talking of waging war on terror "abroad not at home". In the Middle East this peculiar mental confusion is called "American freedom" - as opposed to actual freedom.

Freedom implies the possibility of dissent and opposition - not only to your own home-grown dictator but also to the big dictator from abroad: who intends to dictate to you your thoughts and actions and hold you forever in bond for his supposedly selfless gifts. There is nothing moral or grand about dictatorially imposed "freedom". There is little selflessness or humanitarian concern in wanting to subjugate whole nations.

The book on the Wal Mart shelf
says the man o' sin is
coming soon

George Monbiot believes that U.S. Christian fundamentalists are driving President Bush's Middle East policy. He bases this theory on the Left-Behind-ers, a group of which he includes some of the most powerful men in America such as John Ashcroft and Tom DeLay. Monbiot thinks their beliefs are bonkers, but he understands they are at the heart of American power. He also believes they're actively seeking to provoke a new world war, seeing the invasion of Iraq as a mere warm-up act.

Follow the Leader
N.Y. Times op-ed by Joshua Micah Marshall

Reaching to the Choir

In this month's American Prospect, writer Ayelish McGarvey asks:
Think all evangelicals are right-wingers? Don't believe everything you read. Just as many are politically moderate. Can Democrats win their votes? God only knows, it's worth a try.

Excerpts:

..Will secular liberals ever be willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with "Jesus people" who aren't afraid to talk about their faith?

..Open, unembarrassed professions of religiosity haven't been part of the Democratic Party's culture for some time now..

..The party won't change overnight. But the extremist ideology of this [Bush] administration -- clearly antithetical to virtually everything Jesus Christ stood for -- has created an opening among religious voters..

..The Democrats can win some votes, redefine the role that religion plays in American public life, and neutralize one of the right wing's great wedge issues -- if they choose to pursue it.." [LINK]

Toomey strikes Um-Biblical Chord

Go here to see the floppy-eared Pat Toomey call the umbilical cord an um-biblical cord. (Go to time 23:00 and listen in). A political/Freudian slip or just goofy ignorance? He does it at least three times. It's nearly as hilarious as his opportunistic claim to being politically pro-life when he's been pro-choice on public record. Forgive me for saying it, but Toomey reminds me of "Preparation-H Raymond" (as played by Brian McCann) on the Conan O'Brien show.
I hope, with Pennsylvania's Republican voters, he loses soundly to the decent Republican Arlen Specter. If the Norquists of the extreme right-wing continue to harass and attempt to unseat Northeastern/Midwestern Republican incumbents, they may see the incumbents turning Independent as they jump off the extremist bandwagon. Fine. We could use a healthy and pragmatic third choice at the polls.

"Post 1994, Republicans don't raise taxes, and the ones who do "don't get promoted."
---Grover Norquist

If you've come looking for a John Kerry Waffle House Song....

It's not here. I notice many of you are searching for it. I haven't heard it yet. Must be funny?

Faith Waits for Opportunity


Make no mistake. The Shia insurgency in Iraq is based in strong faith as well as protective nationalism. The stretch of nomenclature from "nationalists" to "terrorists"...or from "occupation" to "democracy" will only take you as far as the borders of reality.

You just can't go any further (except crazy).

In 1965, an exile from Iran came to live in Najaf. Ironically, he was directed towards Najaf by the Shah of Iran, who was apprehensive about the warm treatment that this exile received in his first abode of refuge, Turkey. This cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, would one day lead a revolution. Khomeini stayed in Najaf till October 1978, when he was thrown out of Iraq and found a home — and international publicity — in Paris. In Iraq, the elder Shia Ayatollahs had treated Khomeini with reserve if not disapproval. As Saddam expanded his power base within the Baath regime, there was little appetite for a radical activist. But Khomeini found admirers in the younger generation, including within the families of Sadr and Hakim.

Between 21 January and 8 February 1970 Khomeini delivered a series of lectures in Najaf that laid down the ideological foundations of his revolution and searched for a solution to the ‘hopelessness and impotence of the Muslim world’. He argued that while the Shias must wait for their promised Imam, they could still turn to the Quran and the Prophet’s life for guidance. The clergy would lead this battle for revival: after all, the Prophet was a political person. On the specific question of the national divide between Iraqi and Irani Shias, he offered practical advice: they should preserve their borders but unite their thoughts. Mohammad Sadr was in the forefront of Iraqi Shia support for Khomeini. A chant rose in Najaf: "Ash al Khomeini wil Sadr weddin-e lazim yantaser!" ("Long live Khomeini and Sadr, and faith will prevail!"). This was accompanied by "Kulana lak fida Khomeini!" ("We are for you to sacrifice, Khomeini!").

.....democracy is incompatible with occupation, and a mere change in nomenclature will not change reality." [LINK]

It's time our government stopped calling Iraq part of a war on terror. It's never been about weapons of mass destruction or 9-11 and we'd have to be blind not to see that we were misled abour our reasons for being there. It's always been about a strong Bush-administration desire for regime change in Iraq (Iran to follow). If President Bush doesn't speak out about this obvious slap to our trusting American faces, he will never..I repeat never be re-elected. Congress gave him their trust (when they should have known better) and he betrayed them. George Tenet was integrally complicit in the rush to war by convincing the ignorant Bush that he had a 'slam-dunk' opportunity to fool the public. All this would create a fitting scenario for immediate impeachment, but with a bitterly partisan Congress and a polarized nation, we know it will not occur.

This government of ours is broken. It pains me to see the civil division. I believe it's as bad as it was in the days leading up to the Civil War. The Right has created a trap for our nation in gathering around them a gigantic gaggle of passionate social conservatives who will cling to and cluck about social issues and ignore all other issues at our nation's peril. The Right stokes the fires of social conservatism, thus appealing to the angels of our worst (wedge) nature. The Norquistian Right uses political strong-arm tactics to try to shame our Congressmen out of their true fiscal responsibilities to the People.

Meanwhile, the Right conducts a dreaded war of lies, misleadings, and empire (at a future nation-breaking expense to taxpayers without a current appeal for economic sacrifice....the most unrealistic and insane fact of all).
Right under our noses. (And does it ever smell).

Chosen...justified


Think on these things carefully. We're in a world gone mad.
The wild garden needs your tending. The plantings are of many origins....yet they stemmed from the dark-same timeless void. Their near-miraculous blooms come and go as seasons pass. Their beauty is hidden by a pestilence which may soon render the earth barren. The harmonious aura of each respective wild planting has been brought to the world by the source of dispassionate nature and, without tending, will never exist independently. The blooms of the wild garden cannot be left to stand alone...abandoned to the fates, fires and winds.



To all interested gardeners with the tools of love and truth in hand, I'm waiting for you to join me.
Born unimpassioned, the flowers have no knowlege or care of the source by which they were thrown together. They instinctively strive... only for innocent life itself. It's our responsibility to see they shine as they were meant to shine.

To assert that God is both violent and nonviolent is to declare that God is violent. It is analogous to the person who says, "I am nonviolent but..." The "but" is the place where violence is chosen and is justified....

......Once it is believed God endorses homicidal violence, then the only question left for violent monotheism is, "when" He endorses it. Theologies, sophisticated and simple-minded, complementary and contradictory, abound that designate the "when"..........

.......Does the omniscient and omnipotent God place anyone on this planet with the right to kill another person? Can the enemy of a state, tribe, religion, economic system or person objectively be the enemy of God?.........

.......In the world of violent monotheism, regardless of the institutional or theological architecture it assumes, it is inevitable that one person's collateral damage will be another person's beloved daughter or son or spouse or parent or friend, that one person's freedom fighter will be another person's terrorist, that one person's military hero will be another person's mass murderer, that one person's God will be another person's fiend......

.....since Christians and Christian leaders think Jesus' teachings on the rejection of homicidal violence are unrealistic, fatuous, fanciful, utopian, idealist, silly, and impractical, this effectively guarantees that Christian leaders and their followers will never attempt to implement them....."

-- Rev. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

Bandar outranks those sissies at Foggy Bottom

Regarding Bob Woodward's book about the inner sanctum of the Bush war council, Marie Cocco states:

I want more pages, but not from Woodward. Twenty-eight of them, to be exact......

....after 9/11, we learned of another part of the unspoken pact: We are supposed to avert our eyes from the Saudi nurturing of radical Islamists and the royal family's slush funds for terror. Congressional investigators wanted a hard look and wrote a chapter with their initial findings. The president says we can't see it.

Since when does the President have the uncheckable right to tell the people that they can't see or know anything about these 28 pages? Even the Saudi government long ago asked Bush to declassify the 28 pages and Bush continues to refuse. He obviously has something he needs to keep in the shadows...he can't be proud of whatever lies in those pages. Perhaps the information runs against the interests of the American people. Perhaps it shows allegiance to Saudi Arabia over the United States. After all, we now know that Bush gave his country's trusted secrets to Prince Bandar before his own cabinet members. If this is looked at too closely, I think the President will know he will be (appropriately) impeached. The 28 pages are all about CYA. America is not securely in the hands of the American citizenry where it has always been meant to belong. The President tells us he's on a God-inspired mission to spread democracy to foreign lands while democracy is made irrelevant here at home in America.

Pentagon not happy about released military coffin photos

A website published dozens of photographs of war dead arriving at the largest U.S. military mortuary, prompting the Pentagon to order an information clampdown today.

Dover Gallery here

Read here about how Tami Silicio came to lose her job.

The Condensed Bob Woodward
Slate reads Plan of Attack so you don't have to.
By Bryan Curtis

Click photo to read brief/important excerpts

Middle East: William Buckley on Dying Diplomacy


Tick-tock.. tick-tock. Mr. Buckley bets that diplomacy will die before a Palestinian community can be regenerated. You know what happens when diplomacy dies.........don't you? We may not see the exact result now, but if there's one thing we could say with certainty, it would be that it isn't going to be pretty.

Tuesday morning we learned that the king of Jordan snubbed the president of the United States....

....If you think Jordan's King Abdullah was acting precipitately, you have lost count of diplomatic currents and crosscurrents in the recent season. Jordan's rebuff came after one week of excoriations by Egypt's Hosni Mubarak....

Turning Point
George Bush's global holy war threatens our Presidency—and perhaps the future of our nation
Village Voice/Sydney H. Schanberg

Many presidents have invoked God in speeches and policy decisions, especially during times of war when soldiers were dying for country. And most presidents have told lies of various kinds during their tenures. But I know of no president, certainly no modern president, who said he was acting in God's name while telling lies in order to prod the country into a war against an adversary that, though a vile dictatorship, was no real threat to our security—and had no significant link to the bin Laden forces that attacked us in 2001......
.......Americans take his faith seriously. Many of them, however, may not trust his presidential judgments.

Norman Solomon's plea:
Journalists should scrutinize U.S. government spin, not contribute to it.

The scene:
It's April 7 on the NewsHour (PBS). Battles are raging in close to a dozen Iraqi cities; a retired U.S. Air Force colonel refers to the American authorities' closure of a newspaper that had served as a megaphone for the anti-occupation Shiite leader Moktada al-Sadr:

Col. Sam Gardiner: "The immediate problem we have to remember is we started this ... with the aggressive policies towards Sadr that came from us, shutting down his press."

Jim Lehrer: "The reason we shut down his press is because it was calling for violence and anti-American ..."

Col. Gardiner: "Sure."

Lehrer: "I just want to get that on the record."

Norman Solomon has many questions. He investigates further. He's disappointed in what he sees as a lack of journalistic integrity in this case. The statements made on April 7th simply didn't jibe with the facts. We wonder how the public is so misled?

George Bush, Self-deluded Messiah
By David Corn, The Nation/Alternet, April 19, 2004

[President] Bush told [Bob] Woodward that he remained certain the war had been the right move because he has a "duty to free people." That is not how he had depicted his obligations before the war. Then he claimed his duty was to defend the United States. This remark – coupled with Bush's comment that "there is a higher father that I appeal to" – does make it seem that Bush believes he is on a mission from God. That might scare some, but it would not be so problematic if Bush also believed that God expects him to engage in self-examination and critical and honest discourse before mounting an action that claims thousands of lives, and if Bush took into this heart the fact that God (assuming God exists) created intellectuals, experts, skeptics and critics as well as cowboys, oil rig workers, and truck drivers (not that any of these folks cannot be fancy-pants eggheads as well). [LINK]

Christianity and Islam: Collision or convergence?

How Christians and Muslims navigate the road ahead will have profound consequences for both communities--and for the world.

--- Charles Kimball

An address given by Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, at the Gregorian University, March 25, 2004 is HERE.

Four questions are carefully considered:

-- What are the reasons for Islam’s association with terrorism and death?
-- What challenges does Islam itself face?

-- What is Islam’s challenge to the West in general and Christianity in particular?

-- How may we move from collision to convergence in mutual understanding and respect?

If you're short on time, an article at Sojourners.com gives you an abbrerviated version with main points emphasized.

Election 2004- Listen to the warnings

The U.S. is heading for another election fiasco as election reforms fail---the Civil Rights Commission makes a plea----and Republicans publically demonstrate they don't want to hear about it?!? American citizens, if your blood is not boiling over this deliberate Republican disconnect from the concern over your right to vote, you are not paying atttention. The vitality of America’s democracy depends on the fairness and accuracy of America’s elections!

When the Commission on Civil Rights convened an expert panel in Washington this month to discuss its report, the Republican Party delegation walked out before the proceedings began, one panel participant, Rebecca Mercuri, a Harvard University voting machinery expert, said.

Bootleg-able Jesus Entertainment: Popular or Influential?

We are asked to believe that "The Passion" is an out-and-out spiritual revolution. At least, that's what People magazine says. Then again, People magazine's definition of a spiritual revolution is moving to a more original, self-expressive wardrobe.. and cutting veal out of your regular diet.

At Rawstory.com, Larry Womack writes an entertaining editorial called "Bootlegging Jesus". Like Larry, I'd initially said I wouldn't see Mel Gibson's movie "The Passion". You can see my pre-movie thoughts here. As it turned out, I went to see it. Like Larry, I'd read the Bible. I'd also studied Christianity (among other religions). I considered Gibson's movie as entertainment...if you can call it that. (The nachos suddenly didn't taste so good whilst watching the meaty/bloody scouging scene.) I wanted to see--I HAD to see.. what the fuss was all about. Jesus Christ Superstar was entertainment, too...and after seeing both, for me, Superstar was far more inspiring. (I'm not the action-movie blood-n-guts type). My point is that neither of these entertainments were part of the well from which I'd drawn my faith. The problem with "Jesus entertainment" is that people may well incorrectly base their knowledge of Jesus' life on the films, not on the Bible. Pop-religion. That's a pretty scary thought. The Bible's already confusing enough with all the contradictions found amongst the Gospels.

Today...

A car-driven suicide-bomb blast has leveled a Saudi Arabian security building.

If it's up to Sen. Chuck Hagel, Uncle Sam will be calling on your boys and girls (or you) to report to duty soon.

At least 68 people (I assume they're Iraqis) are believed to have died and many more been injured in co-ordinated suicide attacks on four police buildings in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

Benjamin Duncan discusses Bush, Kerry, and the politics of religion.
Luis Lugo of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life says:

He [Kerry] cannot sound so religious that he turns off the section of the Democratic Party that is secular."

Bush does not have to worry about appearing too religious to his conservative base.

"Bush does not have that challenge, because on his side there is not a large swath of seculars."

Surprise! Puppet misleader-extraordinaire Ahmad ("we are heroes in error") Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress has announced his own nephew, Salim Chalabi, as his choice for the general director of the tribunal to try Saddam Hussein. Right. I'm sure that will win more hearts and minds.

Bernard Weiner/Crisis Papers: Shallow Throat to Dems:
"Time to Go for the Jugular!"

WOW! Who woulda thunk it, already?: A top Pentagon official told lawmakers Wednesday the Iraqi military operation ''is going to cost us more money'' than anticipated. The conservative tune is a cool $700 million.

The imminently dangerous Saddam 'still thinks he's president'. Bush will probably 'still think he's president' on November 3rd as the little yellow bus bound for Crawford warms up for the long trip from Washington D.C.

Daniel Ellsberg: Iraq a new Vietnam-The veteran of the Pentagon Papers-era Defense Department says the U.S. should withdraw its troops.