i fully expect google to pull this down asap, but until that time, it's going to be sticky at the top through tuesday. this is too important not to share with as many people as possible...

Journalism Isn't Dead Yet
Sarah Swatosh

“Why pursue a dying career?” they said. “Everyday after birth is a day closer to death,” she responded, “doesn’t mean we need to go out without a fight.” And not just a fight with bloodied knuckles, I am talking fight to the death with barbed whips and unbridled tigers. Is journalism dying? Is it over? Have we succumbed to final defeat while refusing to prohibit the rout of those before us who once so valiantly defended free knowledge?

While we turn away and thumb our noses at the Seymour Hersh’s and Ethel Payne’s who so fearlessly risked their lives as intermediaries between society and knowledge, Rupert Murdoch has kicked another shoe full of manure on to the gravestone of Elijah Lovejoy, and hundreds of thousands of people have died in Iraq (and Fox viewers still think there was a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda in 2003). Suddenly, journalists report news to consumers and not citizens, while General Electric walks away with $157 billion in yearly revenue.

You can’t help but feel slightly conquered as the daily papers slowly discard their scrupulous reporters and Google reports a 92% profit increase. You can’t help but feel a bit more soulless as we strip the media of its nobility, poise and tenacity. The 1996 Telecommunications Act so thoughtfully sealed its fate as the privatization of the media took hold. Corporations like General Electric, Time-Warner, Disney, Viveldi International, News Corp., Bertlesmann, CBS and Viacom now monopolize the once free press here in the United States, and where once the focus fell on truth and dignity, it now rests on the bottom line.

Unleashing the Christ Within: Last Hope for the Moribund Soul of a Nation?
by Jason Miller

“What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?”---Jesus Christ

Humanity’s “beacon of hope” is unraveling at its moral seams faster than George Bush can say nucular. 230 years ago, disciples of the Enlightenment shattered the shackles of colonial oppression and inaugurated their conception of a haven for humanity. While tainted by patriarchy and racism, the founding of the United States was arguably the pinnacle of social and political evolution. Tragically, the descendents of those who ascended to that zenith are racing to the bottom at a dizzying velocity.

In a collective sense, the soul of the United States is writhing in the agony of spiritual asphyxiation. Trapped in an overflowing cesspool of its own making, the nation’s élan vital desperately needs freedom and an infusion of spiritual oxygen. Sans significant change, its odds for survival equal those of an under-sized fish carelessly tossed ashore by a heartless angler.

Yet it is not too late for the “cradle of democratic civilization” to fulfill the dream of a nation governed by We the People. Our ancestors overcame seemingly insurmountable odds by defying a tyrant. What is preventing us from following their lead? Humanity and the Earth desperately need for us to end the Corporatocracy’s destructive rampage and direct our unparalleled resources, wealth, and technology toward the betterment of the world.

We the People need to recapture the Zeitgeist of 1776 and initiate a revolt. To overcome a ruling class that maintains its power through the manipulation and enslavement of our psyches, we need a spiritual revolution. Since reactionary forces have assassinated the influential spiritual leaders whom have arisen in recent history, it appears we will need to resurrect one in the abstract.

While there have been a number of viable potential candidates throughout history, Jesus Christ appears to be the obvious choice. While people continue to debate whether he was man, myth or God, few would deny the wisdom and virtue of the teachings attributed to him. His popular appeal and impact on civilization are unprecedented. And one need not subscribe to organized religion or ecclesiastical zealotry to manifest the soul-nurturing principles of Christ.

We need to take back our country
Diane Bass

"We need a revolution in this country. We've got to take back our country!"

A man said that to me a few years ago. He said it with such passion that for a moment I was taken aback. Later, I began realizing just how much we'd been Bushwhacked and I knew he was right. Mr. Mac would probably say, "America you've been played!"

That's right, sent up the creek with barely a paddle by the Republican Party. Sold a bill of goods, all for the love of the Almighty Dollar. Bushwhacked and led astray by a plan so devious that most of the people who are Republicans got Bushwhacked, too. Some of them are just figuring it out. Some are still in denial. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

The Bushwhacker had to scare most of the folks over 70 to death with rhetoric about terrorists just outside their bedroom windows and promised mainstream Christian America that he would do battle against the in-your-face fight for gay and lesbian rights

Finally, after promising everyone else practically anything he could think of, he got close enough to the crown to steal it.

The Bushwhacker stood on the deck of one of our most powerful battleships gave us the impression that as commander in chief he knew what he was doing. Then, we realized he had promptly started a military conflict in two different countries at once. I've never been good at puzzles and I'm amazed sometimes at others' ability to strategize, but I can tell you, even I know that any military man worth his salt, given the choice, would never start a conflict in two different countries at the same time.

The Pombo Ugly Last Campaign of Laura Bush
John Nichols

The Nation -- PLEASANTON, CA. -- Pity Laura Lane Welch Bush. A solid Democrat who placed her ideological values in a blind trust when she married into the Republican royal family, she now has been forced by the collapse of her husband's political fortunes into the most sordid of circumstances. The bookish Bush, who has devoted her tenure as First Lady to the gentle pursuits of promoting literacy and trying to smooth the jagged edges of her beau's administration, has now been put to the task of retaining Republican control of the House of Representatives. As the sole person closely associated with the Bush presidency who is still approved by a majority of Americans, she alone can be dispatched to states like California by the most political White House in American history. She alone can try to execute the most serious electoral repair job a presidential administration has had to engage in since newly-minted President Gerald Ford ventured onto the campaign trail in the Watergate year of 1974.

These cannot be happy days for the First Lady, who spent the day before her 60th birthday on Saturday in the political purgatory that had to make her wonder about the compromises she has made in her life.

What have the Republicans Accomplished?
Weird is Relative

A common question asked by politicians running for office is "Are you better off today than you were before the incumbent took office?"

Let's see what our Republican Majority and the Bush Administration have been up to.....

• Attacked Afghanistan. Job Incomplete, allowing for a resurgence of the Taliban
• No Justice for Victims of 9/11: Osama Bin Laden Still At Large
• No Justice for Victims of 9/11: Pulled troops from Afghanistan
• Opposing the formation of the 9/11 Commission
• Lies, multiple delays and failure to cooperate with the 9/11 Commission
• Launched a war in Iraq based on lies told to the American public
• Guantanamo Bay Camps: Waived Geneva Convention protection for prisoners, jeapordizing American soldiers overseas
• Guantanamo Bay Camps: Authorized torture in prisoner interrogations
• Waged the Iraq War with inadequate resources
• Waged the Iraq War with a level of political interference unmatched by any other American administration, including Vietnam.
• Ignored or Dismissed torture and abuse allegations at Abu Ghraib
• Inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina
• Failure of and opposition to assigning responsibility regarding Abu Ghraib tortures
• Abrogated Habeus Corpus right
• Right to Undue Search and Seizure weakened
• Right to due process weakened
• Martial Law now a legal possibility

What are the stakes?
Dr. Hulbeck's Adventures in Pessimism

The GOP's recent "These are the Stakes" ad, which we featured in an earlier post (and which the folks at Minitrue have rather nicely improved on) has been justly compared to, and almost certainly deliberately refers to, the infamous LBJ nuclear swipe at Goldwater:

A true marvel of fearmongering, even by modern standards. We ourselves can hardly watch it without urinating. The fact that the GOP ad so blatantly evokes its ancestor indicates a) desperation, surely; b) a certain snarky revenge impulse -- after forty-plus years they at last get their own back; and c) something larger and more ominous, which we will try to analyze.

Note the curious similarity of situation: an incumbent Texan president is busily prosecuting a war whose motives are unclear and which grows steadily in unpopularity. Facing a potential for political upset -- in Johnson's case the presidency itself, in Bush's his much-needed Congress -- the warmongerer-in-chief tries, through the miracle of advertising, to convince the people that the other candidate is the dangerous one to have around. Counterintuitive, yes, but it worked for Johnson. It may yet work for the GOP as well. But why on earth would they wish to invite yet another comparison to Vietnam? Do they really think that America has secretly yearned for a second chance at that? Do we?

fearmongering with a little side of fright
Yak Attack

I learned that Robert Jarvick, who invented one version of the artificial heart, is hawking Lipitor. I was dazzled by Nexium's esophageal healing properties. The Nasonex bee and SIM looking people were the Anticute.

GlaxoSmithKline folks are researching bird flu to make us all safer. After this, the commercials began to blur. I know they had to do with medicine; they all had side effects-- you know, like palsy, night sweats, unexplained love for politicians and body hair loss.

Tuesday is America's all-out fear face-off
By Arianna Huffington

This is a watershed election. It is the last time the voters of America will be able to cast a vote on George W Bush, and on what he represents. It is clearly going to be a referendum on Iraq, poll after poll identifies it as the number one issue on voters' minds. But, in a larger context, it is also a referendum on fear and on whether Americans want to live in a state of perpetual fear.

For years, the Bush White House has used fear as its trump card, banging the fear-gong and trying to scare the hell out of us every time it has needed a bump in the polls. And it has worked like a charm, causing jittery Americans to succumb to their lizard brains and vote their fears even as their logical brains tell them that the fear-mongerers have made us all less safe. But awash in foreign policy failures abroad and scandal after scandal here at home, fear was the only thing Republicans had left to sell. That's what the "conservative revolution" devolved to.

For their part, Democrats, who have spent much of the past six years cowering in the corner, searching for their spines, have shown intermittent signs of having acquired the backbone necessary to counter the Republicans' scare tactics.

Media-Based Fear Campaign is Right's Strategy for Latin American Elections
By Mark Weisbrot

The right in Latin America, allied with Washington, believes it has discovered a winning formula to prevent the spread of left/populist governments that have won power in Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Uruguay and come very close to winning this year in Peru and Mexico.

(In fact, Lopez Obrador may have won in Mexico - we don't really know since the election was very close and plagued by massive irregularities.) It's all about fear.

The strategy didn't work in Brazil in 2002, when there actually was a crisis in Brazil's financial markets at the prospect of a victory by Lula da Silva. He went on to win by the largest margin in Brazilian history and won re-election on Sunday by a margin of 61-39 percent. But if a good media campaign can be organized to scare the hell out of people, it can work, even if there is no basis for the fears generated. In Rachel Boynton's brilliant 2006 documentary, "Our Brand is Crisis," she shows how one of America's most powerful polling and public relations' firms, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, used the fear factor to win the 2002 Bolivian election for right-wing candidacy of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who fled the country six months later and is now wanted for corruption and the killing of dozens of unarmed demonstrators against his government. The title is a quote from a GQR strategist. (GQR is currently working against Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; the election is November 5. The campaign is running TV ads with corpses from the 1980's war and Ortega in military uniform).

Out of the Darkness
Ed Lewis

Foreword: The author began a quest in roughly 1995, which was to lead him down a path of anguish for the first two years. However, this anguish was nothing compared to the extreme pain he felt as cognitive dissonance set in for about the next three years after he was able to get on the Internet at the end of 1997. The Internet allowed him to intensify his studies to nearly every waking moment when he was not at work, accomplishing in minutes what did take him hours in the library. He learned, although trying to deny at every step of advancement, that everything he thought he knew from his 21 years of formal education and his informal studies through the years in relation to the united States of America was wrong. He learned that he – along with probably 99 percent of the American people – had been an indoctrinated, brainwashed American that in fact had not know diddly squat about the real America our forefathers gave us. He had been manipulated into believing that lies were
truth and that truth was lies. This was a very rude awakening, to say the least.

Eventually, cognitive dissonance was replaced with a desire for the truth no matter what, and no matter the degree it affected his thinking about America and his fellow American people. He eventually emerged from a shadow world in which nothing was right and usually criminal. We were living more as if in a gigantic prison controlled by corrupt criminal government elements or those controlling the corrupt criminal elements within the de facto governments that had replaced the de jure Republican form of government our forefathers had fought and died to give us.

politics, antidepressants, sexual side effects, and ultimate hopes
Silicon Valley Moms Blog

 I'm very proud of myself this year. I've almost totally ignored much of the spend-o-fest that is the upcoming election.  Somehow, in managing to absolutely drown myself in my schedule (have I mentioned houseguests? pesky medical stuff? palpitations about junior's performance? being stupid enough to volunteer for "helpmom" status at the school?) I have managed to put off the election.

I suspect that it's at the bottom of my "in" basket.  Below the, um, bills.

My son and I split an office, by the way, (The "toy office") and he has found that laying brightly-colored objects on mommy's workspace is a grand way to get attention.  On any given day I'll have three or four children's books, a toy accordian, some soldiers, a dragon, a small, stuffed turtle "aka Crystal Turtle," and other friends atop my interests. Is it any wonder that reading the fevered rantings of some "green" candidate drops in priority?  Or the water bill, for that matter?

Today, I read a wonderful column in which the columnist talked about those of us who still have the campaign literature piled on the refrigerator and are hoping to at least get to scan it before voting.  It made me laugh out loud.  Yes, even with those lovely telephone calls I've been getting (aren't those people jerks?), I've still managed to not be "imprinted" with my "message" to take to the polls.

In the Museum of Compassion
by Stephen Pitt

Copyright 2006 Stephen Pitt

All Rights Reserved.  Used with permission.

Visit the Stephen Pitt Political Cartoon Archive at:

Light-to-dark.com

The Christian Right’s scare tactics and the GOP’s retreat into homophobia
By Mel Seesholtz, Ph.D.

Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party used the Bible and their perversion of Christianity to promote bigotry, discrimination and hatred of Jews, gypsies, the physically and mentally impaired and, of course, homosexuals. The Klu Klux Klan still uses the Bible and their perversion of Christianity to promote bigotry, discrimination and hatred of Blacks, Jews and, of course, homosexuals. The American Family Association constantly uses the Bible and their perversion of Christianity to promote bigotry, discrimination and hatred, but they have a more focused target: homosexuals and any group or company that supports the social recognition or legal equality of gay and lesbian Americans, such as the dastardly “pro-homosexual” Wal-Mart chain.

Don Wildmon’s American Family Association -- which is dedicated to demeaning, denigrating and, if possible, destroying gay and lesbian Americans and their families -- "has called on Christian consumers to spend their dollars elsewhere as a sign of their displeasure with Wal-Mart’s pro-homosexual leanings, says the nation’s largest retailer is not just working with the homosexual agenda of the NGLCC [National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce], it is promoting it. As proof, AFA offers up examples of books available for purchase through Wal-Mart’s online bookstore -- books the pro-family group contends support or defend homosexuality. . . ."

Fabricated fear of Muslims is a cancer among us
Mike Carlton

LIKE a good red wine, Malcolm Fraser gets better with age. In Sydney last Tuesday, in the midst of the mounting national hysteria over Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, he gave a speech to the NSW Law and Justice Foundation that was possibly the finest of his public life.

Grounded in our history, resonant with reason and compassion, it was an elder statesman's call for a return to the humane and rational Australia that we, all of us, have flung overboard in the panic of the war on terrorism.

Here is a flavour of it:

"A civilised society is judged by its adherence to the rule of law, to due process and the ease with which all people would have access to the law. It is judged by the way it treats minority groups.

"Australia would be - is - judged badly. Today for a variety of reasons, but not least because the Government has sought to set Muslims aside, discrimination and defamation against Muslims has been rising dramatically. Too many have taken the easy path and accepted the Government's contentions that Muslims aren't like us and therefore it doesn't matter if discrimination occurs and if access to the law does not apply."