Winners and Loosers in the 2008 Kansas Legislature

by Christopher E. Renner

As the Kansas Legislature opens for the 2008 session, in typical fashion the storm clouds are beginning to form. Once again the agenda of the Right seems to be what will dominate by using wedge issues and negative rhetoric to hold back any progress for the people of Kansas.

Two Republican legislators from Olathe and Wichita have already announced they will seek punitive legislation against undocumented workers in the state (denying them state services like health care, nutrition, and education) - even if numerous studies show that the immigrant population makes an important contribution to the economic well-being of our state. Their ire isn’t directed only against adults, these legislators also what to punish children, who have no voice in their parents’ decision to go after the American dream.

Those of us who have worked with the immigrant population and understand that children are often double victims in the immigration debate, see the move to repeal the 2004 Kansas law that allows SOME children of undocumented workers to pay in-state tuition provided they have graduated form Kansas high schools and have attended school in Kansas for more than three years, for what it is: bigotry legislated into law.

I a dumbfounded by the Right’s insistence on calling human beings “illegal” - as if their own ancestors somehow arrived here “legally.” It shows how deep their ignorance is when it comes to immigration law and the history of this nation. The first systematic immigration laws only went into effect following WWII. Prior to that, if you weren’t Chinese or an anacharist, mentally unstable, or had a serious contagious disease like TB, you were welcomed to enter the US and become a citizen.

By using “illegal” as their mantra, the Right successfully creates cultural gridlock and once again demonize a whole class of people who are doing nothing more than what my grandfather did -- come to this country to improve his economic lot. No human being is illegal. The sooner we accept this fact, the sooner we can begin looking at immigration is terms that benefit the nation as a whole - not limit the rights and responsibilities of many of our residents - and find answers to how we can deal with the issue in modern terms.

But getting back to the issue of in-state tuition. Why don’t we treat everyone equally here by requiring those children who were lucky enough to be born US citizens, but who were not lucky enough to attended Kansas schools for at least for three years as well as being KS graduates, to pay out-of-state tuition as well? I don’t see how people can tell a young person who has attended Kansas schools their whole lives, that they cannot enjoy in-state tuition. Oh! I forget, we aren’t talking about white folks here - we’re talking about THOSE brown, black and yellow “illegal” folks. Sounds like Jim Crow all over to me!

Then we have to face the question of funding higher education. Without a doubt, the anti-education lobby of the Right will once again do everything in its power to stop any attempt to fund the amount needed to do basic maintenance at our state university system and to invest in improving educational programs to meet the growing needs of our state. Do these same legislators not maintain their own homes? I mean really - were talking about fixing broken windows and leaky pipes for goodness sake!

The Right has repeatedly shown during the past twenty seven years that maintaining our state’s (and nation’s) infrastructure is something they will have no part of. As such not only do they fail to meet their responsibility as elected officials, but also will once again show their disregard for “family values” by passing the bill to the next generation to pay. What parent does such a thing to their children? This failure will negatively impact the future of our state for generations to come as we deny educational opportunities to the present generation, which will negatively impact their children and their children’s children. But when you are afraid of people who can think critically about the decisions you as a lawmaker are making, denying people educational opportunities, or limiting those opportunities only to the ruling elite, is probably a major objective in your efforts to destroy our state.

But it doesn’t end just with university education. The Kansas State Board of Education has recommended the public school funding be increased in order to improve teacher salaries and phase in all-day kindergarten. Kansas public schools are scheduled to get a $122 million increase in funding for the 2008-2009 school year. The final installation of a three-year finance package the Legislature approved under duress in response to a Kansas Supreme Court order. The Right has never been able to get over this and they have done everything they can to derail the checks and balances of our constitution to do what they are required to do: fund public education.

The teacher salary issue is more complicated. In research conducted by the National Education Association, in 2000 college-educated males working in the private sector earned 60% more than males working in education; in 1960 the difference was only 20%. Women on the other hand have done even worst. Considering that in 1960 women working outside of education earn 12.7% less than women working in education; in 2000 women working outside of education earned 16.4% more, for a total change of 29.1% compared to 1960 salaries.

When the economy roared back after years of stagnation in 1992, the teacher/non-teacher wage gap rapidly expanded as a result of no real increase in teacher pay in combination with the strong wage gains that college-educated workers in non-teaching occupations enjoyed, especially in the information- and technology-based industries. As a result of the declining pay scale and an aging population, Kansas faces a real crisis in having highly qualified teachers in our classrooms. We have a chronic shortage of mathematics, science and special education teachers. My bet is the same legislators who will fight against any attempt to see basic maintenance completed at our university system, will do everything in their power to also fail our children in public schools.

And if failing our children’s education isn’t going to be enough, these same legislators also want to leave our next generation dirtier air and more pollution. Following the Sebelius administration’s rejection of the permits to build coal-fired power plants in western Kansas, legislative leaders like Melvin Neufeld, R- Ingalls (a Global Warming nay-sayer), and Steve Morris, R - Hugoton, have announced plans to override this decision in total disregard to the will of the people (recent polls indicate the majority of Kansas are opposed to coal-fired power plants).

A grand old man in my hometown used to say “you need to get out of the county every now and then to see how the rest of the world lives.” When it comes to Rep. Nuefeld, he really does need to get out and see what is happening to our planet. Rather than looking for clean alternatives to provide our energy needs and understanding that the future is now, he is hell-bent on putting us back to London of the 1800s where TB and other contagious diseases were endemic.

I predict this one issue will paralyze the legislature and prevent us from moving forward in the direction the people of Greensburg has shown us is the way to go in becoming energy independent.

The Kansas Health Policy Authority has produced a package of recommendations designed to make insurance more affordable for low-income Kansans, emphasize better health and personal responsibility for health, as well as works to make the health system in Kansas more efficient in general. According to current figures, over 300,000 Kansas have no health insurance, including myself. The biggest block to having health insurance is cost. In order for myself to have health insurance, I would have to devote a third of my monthly income to cover premium costs. This is one issue where the Right will probably fail in their attempts to deny people basic coverage. The proposal put forth by KHPA will be funded by a 50-cent per pack tax on cigarettes. I cannot see, in an election year, legislators saying they will not support health care coverage, but the Right never fails to amaze me.

Finally, the Right’s poster child, Rep. Lance Kinzer, R-Olathe, is still upset that he wasn’t able to block Lawrence’s Domestic Partner Registry, which allows unmarried couples, regardless of their sexual orientation, the ability to document that they are in fact a family. Rep. Kinzer has vowed he will try again to get this registry overturned - as if local governments can’t make decisions for themselves. I just love how the Right screams for “less government” on issues like economic exploitation, but feels totally in their right to dictate how individuals have to live their private lives. In the same venue, get ready to see Rep. Kinzer lead an attack on Governor Sebelius’ executive order banning discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in state employment.

And if all this isn’t enough, we have a growing issue with predatory lending in the state -- those “pay day” loan sharks that are ubiquitous these days. Family advocacy groups like Kansas Action for Children have called on the legislature to place restrictions on these predatory lending practices. Given the Right’s position of free-market capitalism, I don’t see much happening on this front. Regardless of the fact that these practices threaten the prosperity of Kansas families because the interest rates charged diver family resources away form basic necessities as food, clothing and shelter, the same legislators who refuse to fund education, will undoubtably see interfering with this sector of the economy as something the government shouldn’t do -- after all someone is making money off it, aren’t they?

Edwards' Withdrawal is America's Loss

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on January 30, 2008
To view original click here

America just lost its best and brightest hope for real change when John Edwards gave up the presidential ghost. Edwards did something that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and certainly none of the Republicans would dream of doing: He made poverty no longer a dirty word in the mouths of many, and that included Clinton and Obama, for a minute anyway.

But Edwards didn't stop there. He relentlessly pushed the envelope on America's next greatest crime and sin, the absolute refusal of the nation to provide decent health care for more than fifty million persons no matter whether poor, working class, middle class and even some with a few bucks to spare. He didn't stop even there. He hammered corporate and special interests for their shameless and unabashed pillage, loot, and rape of American consumers.

Edwards was truly a modern day Jeremiah crying in the wilderness against poverty, corporate greed, and the health care abomination, and predictably was bum rushed by the gaggle of ultra-conservative slam artists, the Fox network crowd, talk shock jocks, and the New York Times neo-liberal bunch. They slandered, slurred, and ridiculed him, and ultimately tried to marginalize him as a bare after thought, warm up act to Clinton and Obama.

Edward's much needed and almost never heard populist message didn't mark him as a threat. The fact that he could win and would have been in a position to deliver on his heartfelt advocacy made him a threat. The seeds of the attack were there from the start. He had barely stepped out of the barber salon early in the campaign when the pokes and digs started. He was the butt of laughs and late night TV talk show gags for committing the unpardonable sin of blowing $400 on a haircut. The barbs and the taunts didn't stop even after he shrugged it off as fun and games stuff. Months later David Letterman took another hair shot at him when he grabbed at his hair and tried to muss it up during his appearance on Letterman's late night show.

This slapstick silliness wouldn't have raised an eyebrow since he is a wealthy guy who made millions as a corporate lawyer. But it was the poverty thing that raised the hackles of his rich pals. This was not just a cheap campaign ploy to give him an edge over the other candidates. He made the case that nearly forty million poor people in the world's richest country is an abomination that nobody seemed to want to talk about it, let alone do anything about it. It was irksome enough that the GOP presidents and presidential candidates would stay silent on the plight of the poor. It was downright infuriating that his Democratic opponents would also stay mute on the issue.

Edwards put his body where his mouth was. He barnstormed through eight poor regions of the South in July 2007 with his modern day version of an anti-poverty fact finding campaign. He kicked off his three day campaign in New Orleans 9th Ward. The nearly all-black area suffered the worst Katrina flood devastation and had become the universal symbol of poverty and neglect. Worse it stood as tragic testament to the failed and broken promises of recovery made by corporations and the federal government.

His poverty crusade stirred a mild flutter for a couple of months with Obama and Clinton, but again only a mild flutter, and any talk of a crusade against poverty has disappeared from their campaign lexicon faster than a Houdini disappearing act. And now that he's out of the White House hunt, the chance that it'll reappear in their spiels is zilch.

Edwards became the first Democratic presidential candidate to go where no other Dem or certainly Republican candidate has gone in four decades and talked up poverty disgrace, universal health and economic democracy. He bucked history, negative public and political attitudes, and of course ridicule for championing these populist causes. But here's the deal. Edwards may be out of the race but his message and the reason for that message won't disappear like Houdini. Obama and Clinton will continue to pilfer and repackage parts of his message, while of course giving no credit to the messenger.

No matter. Edwards did himself, us and the nation proud when he boldly stepped up and tried to shame the shot callers into facing up to their sorry and disgraceful neglect of millions of poor and uninsured Americans. We owe Edwards a profound debt of gratitude for that. Here's a guess. Edwards won't and shouldn't go quietly into the night. We still desperately need his voice and we should do everything we can to make sure that his voice continues to be heard.

John, you have my eternal thanks for who you are and what you did. You are truly the better angel of America.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).

By the Numbers

By John Cory
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 30 January 2008

By the numbers we count the fallen
And all the syllables that kill
And all the lies that bury hearts
And make our breathing still
And cold. By the numbers we mourn the fallen
In this whirlwind of war and lie
Where one tear is too many
And a thousand not enough
For each one that has to die
Because - Why?

- John Cory

While the high school heathers of the press corps rush to generate in-depth analysis of the hairstyle and cleavage of candidates or who looks presidential as opposed to who acts presidential, the real issues get shuttled aside in polls and punditry and primary politico-image management.

At some point there will be one of those staged affairs where they take questions from the audience, the everyday folk - the voters. So let me step up to the microphone and ask a question:

When does 9/11 + 935 = 3,391?

When lies kill.

Nine hundred thirty-five false statements (lies) moved this nation into a war that has resulted in 3,391 deaths so far.

The folks who see profit and growth in the numbers of veterans of this war - the health care insurers - know an opportunity when they see one. In her December 2007 report, Emily Berry for American Medical News gives us a tour by the numbers:

There have been 30,000 troops wounded in action; 39,000 have been diagnosed with PTSD; 84,000 vets suffer a mental health disorder; 229,000 veterans have sought VA care, and 1.4 million troops (active duty and reserves) have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan so far. Estimates run between $350 billion to $700 billion needed for lifetime care and benefits for veterans.

And now, making the rounds in Washington is a plan that has become known as "The Psychological Kevlar Act of 2007" which reaches out to the pharmaceutical industry to partner with the Department of Defense to use the drug Propranalol to treat symptoms of PTSD even before a soldier succumbs to full-blown PTSD. An ounce of prevention, after all, is worth funding for experimentation, I mean research. A numb soldier is a happy soldier.

If you haven't visited Penny Coleman, you really ought to drop by and read up on her articles. Thanks to Penny and people like my friend Miss Remy, we learn the truth about the terrible sweet beauty we call war. The price - human toll - and numbers.

A CBS study of 45 states over the past 12 years reveals disturbing and tragic patterns of suffering veterans, whether Korean Conflict, Vietnam War or the newer versions, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2005 alone, there were 6,256 veteran suicides. That's 120 every week, or an average of 17 suicides every day.

The Bush administration has no waiting period to go to war, only waiting lines that take months to treat veterans and provide the health care they need. It is an amazing irony that Bush has presided over the longest delays and waiting periods for veterans in VA history, and yet he has generated more veterans faster than most any other administration. As the Democratic Policy Committee pointed out in 2004: "During Bush's four years in office, the average millionaire has received a tax break of $123,000. In contrast, President Bush has broken all previous records for fees paid by veterans - proposing to collect $1.3 billion from veterans themselves in 2005, a 478 percent increase during his time in office."

I know this issue about veterans care won't poll well for the presidential primaries or even for television debates. After all, how many debates and candidate talks even acknowledge the war, let alone its aftermath?

I know, there are the economy and jobs, health care for everyone, the loss of privacy amid the ruins of greed and corporate malfeasance. These are important and more glamorous topics to be debated. They give sizzle to what passes as journalism and media coverage these days.

So why is this so important to me that I would take up your valuable time? Because it is our soul, the very soul of America that is in pain and jeopardy.

If we cannot care for our veterans, what makes you think any of these politicians will care for the citizens?

If you take all those numbers above and multiply them by the members of families and wives and children and friends, well, the effect is mind-boggling and touches every one of us. And yet the number "1" can affect them all.

One person can soothe the midnight tremors and hold us quietly in the dark when the demons and ghosts hang on the corners of our pillows. One person can hire a veteran so we can fill a heart full of holes. One person knows seven others who know seven others and pretty soon they know a veteran, and now fifty people reach out and become a part of the power that heals - all because of one.

My friend Britta Reque-Dragicevic is writing a book on PTSD because she has come to know and care and wants to do something. Her sister has just completed a tour in Iraq as a combat medic, Britta is a journalist who knows firsthand the price of war. She has covered war in Sarajevo and other places around this globe. And, of course, Britta and Miss Remy are joined at the heart. And that makes them aces in my book.

I care so much because I've known the madness of war and the insanity of returning only to be told to wait or ignored or having to fight tooth and nail for a friend who needed the VA and couldn't get in and took his life. I know what it is to feel like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle but all the pieces are olive drab or sky blue and no matter how hard I tried to make them fit, I kept ending up with a thousand little tiles that had no rhyme or reason or shape. I know the smell of lonely rain and empty streets that hang between there and yesterday on the border of here and now.

So let the politicians blather and blab. Give me a vet on a midnight afternoon who needs my ear for a while and we'll wait until they gather us up and then we'll step up to the microphone and ask:

If one tear is too many and a thousand not enough, what will it take?

Christianists on the March

by Chris Hedges
Originally published on 28 January 2007 on Truthdig

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School and worked for many years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, warns that the Christian Right is the most dangerous mass movement in American history in his recent book: "American Fascist: The Christian Right and the War on America." Hedges will be our guest on Community Bridge, Thursday 31 January.

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age—he was then close to 80—we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” were stories of this failure—personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers—those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding. The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic—to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true—the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement. And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens. We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in “The Cycles of American History,” wrote that “the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense—not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide.”

Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them “demonic” and “satanic,” would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me, I suspect half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America “60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute.” But this too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.

Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups—the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right. Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck—who also used “values” to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched “Kulturkampf,” the word from which we get culture wars, against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck’s attacks, which split Germany and made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis’ more virulent racism and repression.

The radical Christian right, calling for a “Christian state”—where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens—awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement—the most dangerous mass movement in American history—will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance. The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.

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Video Files
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On 22 May 2007, Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith (2004), which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), and Chris Hedges debated religion and politics in Los Angeles.  Here is the streaming video version of the event, broadcast on KPFK’s Beneath the Surface with Suzi Weissman.

Does Hillary Clinton Cross Ethical Lines?

By Paul Rogat Loeb

~Paul Rogat Loeb as a Lou Douglas lecturer and conducted several workshops on civil engagement here in Manhattan in 2004. I post this article here because I am very disturbed with how the Democrats are acting and what this will mean for the future of our nation after eight years of Bush's greed and corruption.

Politics can be a rough game. Candidates need to hold their competitors accountable, to challenge distortions and lies. And God knows, we need a Democratic nominee who's willing to fight. But Hillary Clinton's campaign has crossed so many ethical lines it risks embittering so many potential supporters as to cost the Democrats the November election. If all the new voters that Obama's bringing in are so angered they decide to stay home, it's going to be extremely difficult for the Democrats to beat a candidate like McCain, particularly if the Republicans have Hillary to mobilize against.

The media finally seems to be paying some attention to Clinton's scorched-earth campaigning, particularly to Bill Clinton's role as attack dog. We've seen plenty of recent examples of ways that Clinton and her political allies have embraced an approach in which truth and fairness become expendable. But the pattern of questionable approaches runs deeper than just the most recent arguments. You're probably familiar with many. But it's the broader pattern that disturbs me--how much the Clinton campaign goes beyond drawing legitimate political lines to an all-too-Rovian approach where they'll do whatever's deemed necessary to take down her competitors. Here's a representative list of actions that, taken together, offer a disturbing portent, even if Clinton does get in.

Start with the hiring of chief campaign strategist, Mark Penn. He's CEO of a PR firm, Burson-Marsteller, that prepped the Blackwater CEO for his recent congressional testimony, is advising the giant industrial laundry corporation Cintas in fighting unionization, and whose website proudly heralded their union-busting expertise until it became a potential Clinton liability and they removed that section. B-M has historically proudly heraldedrepresented everyone from the Argentine military junta and Philip Morris to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster.

Then there are Clinton's campaign donors. Any major candidate has some dubious supporters, but Clinton's gotten money from a succession of particularly noxious sources. Start with her donation from Rupert Murdoch, who's given to no other Democrat. Add in massive amounts of money from Washington lobbyists and from industries like defense, banking, health care, and oil and energy providers (though Obama's also gotten a lot from some of these industries). Then there's Norman Hsu, who brought in over $850,000 to Hillary's campaign after returning to the US following his flight to evade a fraud conviction (Hsu was subsequently rearrested, sentenced to three years, and is facing further federal charges, and the campaign eventually returned the money he'd raised). There's the Nebraska data processing company InfoUSA, whose CEO, Vin Gupta, used private corporate jets to fly the Clintons on business, personal, and campaign trips, gave Bill Clinton a $3.3 million consulting contract, and is now being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegedly diverting company money to his own personal uses. Mississippi attorney Dickie Scruggs recently canceled a major December 15 Hillary fundraiser (with Bill Clinton headlining) after being indicted for trying to bribe a judge. Major international sweatshop owners, the Saipan-based Tan family, have given Clinton $26,000, complementing their previous massive support for Jack Abramoff and Tom Delay. That doesn't even count dubious supporters from the past, like Peter Paul, the convicted con-artist turned event producer who coordinated a massive Hollywood Clinton fundraiser during the 2,000 election, but has now become a bitter Clinton critic. Yes, Obama has Tony Rezko, but even there, Clinton grossly exaggerated the relationship. Taken together, it's a tainted constellation of backers.

Like most candidates, Clinton spends the bulk of her money on ads and mailings, and she's taken some pretty problematic approaches there too. I wonder how many of the New Hampshire women who voted last minute for Clinton were swayed by a mailing claiming that Obama wasn't really committed to abortion rights because he'd voted "present" on some abortion-related legislative votes. Except that Obama had done so as, mentioned, as part of a strategy devised by Illinois Planned Parenthood to protect vulnerable swing district representatives. New England Planned Parenthood's Board Chair strongly refuted Clinton's letter, pointing out that Obama had a 100% record on all the votes that really mattered. But the misleading mailing may well have helped give Clinton her narrow margin.

The distortion of Obama's position on abortion echoes both Bill and Hillary taking Obama's statement that Reagan created major political shifts and rewriting it to imply approval of Reagan's politics. It also echoes Hillary's audacious argument that Obama Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justicereally wasn't against the Iraq war and betrayed his promises by failing to vote against war appropriation bills after the Democrats couldn't override Bush's veto. I wish Obama had bucked the Democratic leadership and taken a stronger stand. But it's a gross distortion of history to equate his positions with Clinton's overt support for the war authorization, refusal to apologize for her vote, and claim that she and Bill were really against the war all along.

We can find further distortions in a mailing sent out before the Iowa caucuses by the independent expenditure committee of a key Clinton ally, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The AFSCME mailing attacked Obama on his health care plan by using a John Edwards quote that was featured so prominently that recipients could assume that his campaign was the source of the attack piece. This and other actions so disturbed a group of seven AFSCME International Vice Presidents wrote a public letter to their union president, saying that although the union had endorsed Clinton on a split vote, the political committee had no mandate to attack Obama. They demanded the committee stop what they called "fundamentally dishonest" attacks.

Other surrogates have attacked Obama's character. Twice they've tried to raise Obama's early drug use as a campaign issue--despite his having addressed it directly and frankly in his book Dreams From My Father. Hillary's New Hampshire campaign chair, Billy Shaheen, mentioned it first, claiming that he was only worried about how the Republicans might use it. Sheehan resigned from the campaign after a storm of criticism, then Black Entertainment Television CEO Robert Johnson (who has backed Bush on issues like the estate tax and privatizing social security, and been virulently anti-union in his own company) raised it again, with Clinton standing next to him at a South Carolina rally. After Johnson's words drew major heat, Clinton belatedly distanced herself from them, but the smear still stands, along with the disingenuous claim that those making it were just neutral participants, only trying to serve the Party's best interests.

Clinton's campaign also attacked the John Edwards campaign for appearing in New Hampshire with the parents of Nataline Sarkisyan, the 17-year-old leukemia patient who died after CIGNA refused her a liver transplant. Clinton press secretary Jay Carson claimed that the US needs to elect "somebody who's actually going to help people and not use them as talking points." Never mind that the Sarkisyans had initiated the chance to speak out by contacting Edwards about appearing at a Manchester New Hampshire town hall campaign appearance. To the Clinton campaign, their appearance had to be suspect, because they were supporting Edwards and his ideas.

The campaign has also attempted more directly to discourage participation by voters who might support Clinton's opponents. Think of the lawsuit filed by the pro-Clinton leadership of the Nevada teacher's union (and supported overtly by Bill Clinton), which sought to prevent long-scheduled caucuses from being held at central locations on the main casino strip, under the assumption, which turned out to be false that Obama's endorsement by the dominant Culinary Workers Union would lead these caucuses to give him massive support. New Hampshire saw parallel voter suppression tactics, as the campaign encouraged the New Hampshire Democratic Party to evict Obama get-out-the-vote observers from the polls. In Iowa, the Clinton Campaign tried to discourage out-of-state students from returning to their campuses to participate in the caucuses. In the Michigan primary, Clinton kept her name on the ballot after the state violated Democratic National Committee rules by moving its primary ahead of the Feb 5 "Super Tuesday" vote, while Edwards and Obama took theirs off. She's now arguing that the DNC should reverse its rule and count the delegates from Michigan and from a somewhat similar situation in Florida.

When the Nevada caucuses actually took place, eye-witnesses produced repeated accounts of Clinton supporters who tried to close the doors before supporters of other candidates supporters could get in. Pro-Clinton registrars tried tried to stop people from checking in if they were planning to caucus for another candidate. Others told Edwards supporters that they had to go home after the initial vote--without giving them the opportunity to switch to Obama. Still others had Clinton literature blanketing the supposedly neutral registration tables, and pre-marked voter cards for Clinton, while telling supporters of other candidates that they'd run out. There was even one reported case where Clinton supporters who'd just finished caucusing and voting in one precinct attempted to have their votes counted again in another adjacent one. These efforts may not have had official sanction. They may have been just overzealous supporters confused about the rules. But the volunteer instruction sheet created by the Clinton campaign did include the line "it's not illegal unless they tell you so," which certainly seems an invitation for abuse.

Campaigns can have either closed or open information styles. Clinton's comes far too close to the Bush-Cheney model, as when the Clintons successfully killed a major story in the national men's magazine GQ about Clinton campaign infighting. Author Josh Green had written a long critical previous piece on Clinton for The Atlantic, and campaign press secretary Jay Carson threatened to deny the magazine access to Bill Clinton for a separate cover story on his international foundation work. GQ acquiesced and pulled the critical piece.

The flip side of trying to stop negative coverage is manufacturing praise. Clinton's campaign did this when they gave planted questions to Iowa student Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff, and according to Chasanoff, to other students as well. After being driven to a public event by Clinton interns, Chasanoff was introduced to a Clinton staffer who showed her a list of suggested questions to ask, one of which she used at Clinton's forum. It's not quite like Bush inviting the softball inquiries of former male-prostitute turned right-wing blogger Jeff Gannon. But it isn't so different either.

Taken together, these examples echo the Bush's administration's tendency to attack anyone who challenges them. They echo Clinton's refusal to apologize for her Iraq war vote or for an Iran vote so reckless that Jim Webb called it "Dick Cheney's fondest pipe dream." They hardly bode well for reversing the massive erosions of transparency of the past seven years.

The list could go on, but it's the pattern that's important. It's true that one person's cheap shot artist is another's fierce competitor. Obama himself has called politics "a full-contact sport," and used legal maneuvers to block a long-time state legislator when he first ran for office. And Democrats will need to be fierce in their campaigning if they're going to defeat the right-wing Swiftboating machine that gave Bush the last two presidencies. So maybe I'd be more charitable if I didn't disagree so strongly with Clinton's Iraq and Iran votes, and utter failure to take leadership in standing up to Bush when he was riding high in the polls. But I think I'd still have a problem. I look at the actions of her campaign, and see an ugly example, a ruthlessness not remotely equaled by either Obama or Edwards. I'll vote for the last Democrat standing, because the Republicans will continue the current administration's disastrous priorities. But Hillary's scorched-earth approach threatens to fracture the party if she does get the nomination, and to leave a trail of bitterness even if she wins. We can do better for the Democratic nominee.

Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles

Move to cut domestic registry stalls: Report finds more same-sex couples in state

Move to cut domestic registry stalls
Report finds more same-sex couples in state
By Scott Rothschild
Lawrence Journal World
January 25, 2008

To view original click here

TOPEKA — The fate of a legislative proposal that is aimed at repealing Lawrence’s domestic registry remains up in the air, just as a new study shows rapid growth in the number of same-sex couples in Kansas.

In 2000, 3,973 same-sex couples were living in Kansas; by 2005, the number had increased to 6,663, according to research released Thursday by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. The growth in same-sex couples in Kansas equals a 68 percent increase.

Adam Romero, a public policy fellow at the Williams Institute, said the increase is due to both general migration of same-sex couples to the Midwest and more couples feeling at ease in reporting their relationships.

He said the study based on Census data could be used by policymakers in debates on issues concerning domestic partnerships, hate crimes and employment discrimination.

“Our hope is that by providing state-specific information, we can better inform the debate within Kansas so that people know what same-sex couples look like,” Romero said.

Meanwhile, state Rep. Lance Kinzer, R-Olathe, said he wants to advance his proposal — House Bill 2299 — that would prevent cities and counties from adopting domestic partnership registries.

Last year, the Lawrence City Commission established a domestic partnership registry, at the request of gay and lesbian couples who said it could help them secure health insurance benefits for their partners.

The registry allows unmarried couples — both same-sex and heterosexual — to register their domestic partnerships at City Hall.

But Kinzer said the registry violates a Kansas constitutional amendment that voters approved in 2005, recognizing marriage as only between one man and one woman. He also says that rules affecting couples and families should be uniform throughout the state. A legal opinion by Attorney General Paul Morrison, however, says the registry doesn’t violate the constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

During the 2007 legislative session, a House committee approved Kinzer’s bill, but it never received a vote before the full House.

Currently, the bill is listed on the House calendar and could be brought up for consideration if House leaders want to do so.

“It’s still my desire that we have that debate and move it through the process,” Kinzer said. But Kinzer said he has received no word from House leaders on what will happen with that bill.

House Speaker Melvin Neufeld, R-Ingalls, said no decision has been made yet on whether Kinzer’s bill will be debated.

Demographics of gays, lesbians in state
The study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law provides a snapshot of information about gays and lesbians in Kansas. The study also shows 17 percent of same-sex couples in Kansas are raising nearly 1,800 children. Other findings include:

• An estimated 72,557 gay, lesbian and bisexual people live in Kansas.

• Same-sex couples were in every county with the highest percentage in Kearny County (0.71 percent of households); Jackson County, 0.68 percent; and Douglas County, 0.62 percent.

• Same-sex parents in Kansas have fewer financial resources to support their children than married parents. The median household income of same-sex couples with children is $50,400, or 11 percent less than that of married parents at $56,530.

The full report is available at: http://www.law.ucla.edu/williamsinstitute/publications/KansasCensusSnapshot.pdf

Kansas Presidential Caucuses

On our first show of 2008 Kathryn Focke, Riley County Democrat Chair, and Tim Bagby, Riley County Republican Chair, came to our studio to discuss the up-coming Kansas Presidential Caucuses. Here is the basic information you need to remember:

Democratic Caucus: Will be held Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 7:00 pm, Grand Ballroom, K-State Student Union.

Doors at caucus sites open at 6:00 PM. Anyone not in line by 7:00 PM will not be admitted.

The caucuses will be held in each senate district across the state. Specific locations are listed on the website of the Kansas Democratic Party: www.ksdp.org/caucus.

Eligible individuals wishing to change their political affiliation to Democrat- or individuals registering to vote- may do so at the door.

Individuals who are currently under age 18 but will turn 18 by November 4, 2008 MAY PARTICIPATE in the caucus.

To determine your senate district, visit http://www.ipsr.ku.edu/ksdata/vote/.

Democratic candidates filed in Kansas: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama.

More specific questions about the Kansas Democratic Caucus should be referred to the Kansas Democratic Party at 785.234.0425 or www.ksdp.org/caucus.

Republican Caucus: Will be held Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 10:00 am, Pottorf Hall, CiCo Park.

Please arrive prior to 10:00 AM to allow sufficient time for voter registration verification.

The caucuses will be held at a variety of locations in each congressional district across the state. Specific locations are listed on the website of the Kansas Republican Party Caucus: www.ksgopcaucus.org.

Only registered Republicans- who have registered by January 25, 2008- are eligible to participate. Registrations will not be allowed at the door.

A state-issued form of identification is required to participate.

All individuals must be registered voters and be 18 years of age or older by February 9, 2008.

Republican candidates filed in Kansas: Rudy Guiliani, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, Alan Keyes, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo, Fred Thompson.

More specific questions about the Kansas Republican Caucus should be referred to the Kansas Republican Party at 785.234.3456 or www.ksgopcaucus.org.

The Lessons of Violence

by Chris Hedges
Published on Monday, January 21, 2008 by TruthDig.com

To view original click here

Chris Hedges will be on Community Bridge, Thursday 31 January at 5:00PM on KSDB 91.9FM.

The Gaza Strip is rapidly becoming one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the world. Israel has cordoned off the entire area, home to some 1.4 million Palestinians, blocking commercial goods, food, fuel and even humanitarian aid. At least 36 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since Tuesday and many more wounded. Hamas, which took control of Gaza in June, has launched about 200 rockets into southern Israel in the same period in retaliation, injuring more than 10 people. Israel announced the draconian closure and collective punishment Thursday in order to halt the rocket attacks, begun on Tuesday, when 18 Palestinians, including the son of a Hamas leader, were killed by Israeli forces.

This is not another typical spat between Israelis and Palestinians. This is the final, collective strangulation of the Palestinians in Gaza. The decision to block shipments of food by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency means that two-thirds of the Palestinians who rely on relief aid will no longer be able to eat when U.N. stockpiles in Gaza run out. Reports from inside Gaza speak of gasoline stations out of fuel, hospitals that lack basic medicine and a shortage of clean water. Whole neighborhoods were plunged into darkness when Israel cut off its supply of fuel to Gaza’s only power plant. The level of malnutrition in Gaza is now equal to that in the poorest sub-Saharan nations.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert uses words like “war” to describe the fight to subdue and control Gaza. But it is not war. The Palestinians have little more than old pipes fashioned into primitive rocket launchers, AK-47s and human bombs with which to counter the assault by one of the best-equipped militaries in the world. Palestinian resistance is largely symbolic. The rocket attacks are paltry, especially when pitted against Israeli jet fighters, attack helicopters, unmanned drones and the mechanized units that make regular incursions into Gaza. A total of 12 Israelis have been killed over the past six years in rocket attacks. Suicide bombings, which once rocked Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, have diminished, and the last one inside Israel that was claimed by Hamas took place in 2005. Since the current uprising began in September 2000, 1,033 Israelis and 4,437 Palestinians have died in the violence, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. B’Tselem noted in a December 2007 report that the dead included 119 Israeli children and 971 Palestinian children.

The failure on the part of Israel to grasp that this kind of brutal force is deeply counterproductive is perhaps understandable given the demonization of Arabs, and especially Palestinians, in Israeli society. The failure of Washington to intervene-especially after President Bush’s hollow words about peace days before the new fighting began-is baffling. Collective abuse is the most potent recruiting tool in the hands of radicals, as we saw after the indiscriminate Israeli bombing of Lebanon and the American occupation of Iraq. The death of innocents and collective humiliation are used to justify callous acts of indiscriminate violence and revenge. It is how our own radicals, in the wake of 9/11, lured us into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Israel has been attempting to isolate and punish Gaza since June when Hamas took control after days of street fighting against its political rival Fatah. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a Fatah leader, dissolved the unity government. His party, ousted from Gaza, has been displaced to the Israeli-controlled West Bank. The isolation of Hamas has been accompanied by a delicate dance between Israel and Fatah. Israel hopes to turn Fatah into a Vichy-style government to administer the Palestinian territories on its behalf, a move that has sapped support for Fatah among Palestinians and across the Arab world. Hamas’ stature rises with each act of resistance.

I knew the Hamas leader Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, who was assassinated by Israel in April of 2004. Rantissi took over Hamas after its founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, was assassinated by the Israelis in March of that year. Rantissi was born in what is now Israel and driven from his home in 1948 during the war that established the Jewish state. He, along with more than 700,000 other Palestinian refugees, grew up in squalid camps. As a small boy he watched the Israeli army enter and occupy the camp of Khan Younis in 1956 when Israel invaded Gaza. The Israeli soldiers lined up dozens of men and boys, including some of Rantissi’s relatives, and executed them. The memory of the executions marked his life. It fed his lifelong refusal to trust Israel and stoked the rage and collective humiliation that drove him into the arms of the Muslim Brotherhood and later Hamas. He was not alone. Several of those who founded the most militant Palestinian organizations witnessed the executions in Gaza carried out by Israel in 1956 that left hundreds dead.

Rantissi was a militant. But he was also brilliant. He studied pediatric medicine and genetics at Egypt’s Alexandria University and graduated first in his class. He was articulate and well read and never used in my presence the crude, racist taunts attributed to him by his Israeli enemies. He reminded me that Hamas did not target Israeli civilians until Feb. 25, 1994, when Dr. Baruch Goldstein, dressed in his Israeli army uniform, entered a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs, which served as a mosque, and opened fire on Palestinian worshipers. Goldstein killed 29 unarmed people and wounded 150. Goldstein was rushed by the survivors and beaten to death.

“When Israel stops killing Palestinian civilians we will stop killing Israeli civilians,” he told me. “Look at the numbers. It is we who suffer most. But it is only by striking back, by making Israel feel what we feel, that we will have any hope of protecting our people.”

The drive to remove Hamas from power will not be accomplished by force. Force and collective punishment create more Rantissis. They create more outrage, more generations of embittered young men and women who will dedicate their lives to avenging the humiliation, perhaps years later, they endured and witnessed as children. The assault on Gaza, far from shortening the clash between the Israelis and Palestinians, ensures that it will continue for generations. If Israel keeps up this attempt to physically subdue Gaza we will see Hamas-directed suicide bombings begin again. This is what resistance groups that do not have tanks, jets, heavy artillery and attack helicopters do when they want to fight back and create maximum terror. Israeli hawks such as Ephraim Halevy (a former head of Mossad), Giora Eiland (who was national security adviser to Ariel Sharon) and Shaul Mofaz (a former defense minister) are all calling for some form of dialogue with Hamas. They get it. But without American pressure Prime Minister Olmert will not bend.

Israel, despite its airstrikes and bloody incursions, has been unable to halt the rocket fire from Gaza or free Cpl. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured in the summer of 2006. Continued collective abuse and starvation will not break Hamas, which was formed, in large part, in response to Israel’s misguided policies and mounting repression. There will, in fact, never be Israeli-Palestinian stability or a viable peace accord now without Hamas’ agreement. And the refusal of the Bush administration to intercede, to move Israel toward the only solution that can assure mutual stability, is tragic not only for the Palestinians but ultimately Israel.

And so it goes on. The cycle of violence that began decades ago, that turned a young Palestinian refugee with promise and talent into a militant and finally a martyr, is turning small boys today into new versions of what went before them. Olmert, Bush’s vaunted partner for peace, has vowed to strike at Palestinian militants “without compromise, without concessions and without mercy,” proof that he and the rest of his government have learned nothing. It is also proof that we, as the only country with the power to intervene, have become accessories to murder.

Chris Hedges, the former Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and author most recently of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America,” can be found every other Monday on Truthdig.

Tom Ridge: Waterboarding Is Torture

By Eileen Sullivan
The Associated Press
Friday 18 January 2008

To view original click here.

Washington - The first secretary of the Homeland Security Department says waterboarding is torture.

"There's just no doubt in my mind - under any set of rules - waterboarding is torture," Tom Ridge said Friday in an interview with the Associated Press. Ridge had offered the same opinion earlier in the day to members of the American Bar Association at a homeland security conference.

"One of America's greatest strengths is the soft power of our value system and how we treat prisoners of war, and we don't torture," Ridge said in the interview. Ridge was secretary of the Homeland Security Department between 2003 and 2005. "And I believe, unlike others in the administration, that waterboarding was, is - and will always be - torture. That's a simple statement."

Waterboarding is a harsh interrogation tactic that was used by CIA officers in 2002 and 2003 on three alleged al-Qaida terrorists. The tactic gives the subject the sensation of drowning.

The CIA has not used the technique since 2003, and CIA Director Michael Hayden prohibited it in 2006, according to U.S. officials. The debate was recently revived when the CIA revealed it had destroyed videotapes showing the interrogations of two alleged terrorists, both of whom were waterboarded.

Ridge's comments come a week after a report that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said he would consider waterboarding torture if it were used against him.

In a separate interview with The Associated Press on Thursday, the current Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, refused to say what he thinks of the interrogation technique. Chertoff, a former federal prosecutor and judge - who was also assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Criminal Division in 2002 - said the question should be asked in the context of a specific set of facts and a specific statute and should not be posed abstractly.

"This is too important a discussion to have based on throwing one question at somebody," Chertoff said.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has declined so far to rule on whether waterboarding constitutes torture. An affirmative finding by Mukasey could put at risk the CIA interrogators who were authorized by the White House in 2002 to waterboard three prisoners deemed resistant to conventional techniques.

Ridge, homeland security adviser and then secretary from 2001 to 2005, said he was not involved in the discussions about CIA interrogation techniques. Rather, his department was a consumer of any intelligence gleaned from them.

"I have no idea how any of the intelligence community extrapolated any information from anybody - where they got it, how they got it, and from whom they got it. But waterboarding is torture."

Ridge, a lawyer, wades into the waterboarding debate with both a military and civilian background. He is also a former Pennsylvania governor and congressman. He has since started his own homeland security consulting firm.

"As a former soldier, I will tell you that we go to great pains, and a lot of men and women, who serve in the military at risk of their own lives, do everything they can to minimize civilian casualties and certainly do everything they can to respect the Geneva Convention."

The House and Senate intelligence committees want to prohibit the CIA from using any interrogation techniques not allowed by the military. That list includes waterboarding. If their intelligence bill containing the restriction is approved by Congress, it almost certainly will face a veto from President Bush.

Check out "Democrats Divided 2008" on NOW at PBS.

NOW on PBS
t r u t h o u t | Programming Note
Saturday 19 January 2008

This week's NOW on PBS program, "Democrats Divided 2008," can be viewed in its entirety right NOW on their website . Where you will also find web exclusives: A guide to democrats, and an extended interview with Matt Bai and a response to Mr. Bai by Joan McCarter, a progressive blogger on DailyKos .

Overview:
With the primary season underway, America is focused on whether the next president will be Democrat or Republican. Meanwhile, within the Democratic Party another struggle is unfolding. NOW on PBS reports on a rift between progressives who believe the party has sold out its liberal values and centrists eager to capture a broad swath of the more conservative voters. It's a struggle that is taking place at all levels of government.

In Maryland, six-term incumbent Al Wynn is facing a tough challenge from newcomer Donna Edwards. According to Edwards, Wynn has sold out to big business and the Bush agenda, including a vote for the war in Iraq and the 2005 energy bill. Wynn says his challenger is naïve and doesn't understand that there are choices in politics between compromise and doing nothing. Fueling candidates like Edwards are the foot soldiers of the progressive battle - bloggers and other political outsiders like Matt Stoller of OpenLeft.com, who are drumming up national support on the Internet. Maria Hinojosa speaks with the candidates and Matt Bai, author of "The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics."

Martin Luther King and LBJ

By Bill Moyers
You can watch this segment of Bill Moyers Journal by clicking here.

Friday 18 January 2008

The following is a transcript from Bill Moyers Journal.

Bill Moyers: If William Shakespeare were around I suspect he might describe the recent flap between the Obama and Clinton camps as much ado about nothing or a tempest in a teapot. Senator Clinton was heard to say that it took a president - Lyndon Johnson - to consummate the work of Martin Luther King by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Almost no one in the media bothered to run the whole quote. Here it is:

Hillary Clinton: Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done."

Bill Moyers: There was nothing in that quote about race. It was an historical fact, an affirmation of the obvious. But critics pounced. THE NEW YORK TIMES published a lead editorial accusing Senator Clinton of "the distasteful implication that a black man needed the help of a white man to effect change." Suddenly we had a rhetorical inferno on our hands, with charges flying left and right, and pundits throwing gasoline on the tiniest of embers. Fortunately the furor has quieted down, and everyone's said they're sorry, except THE NEW YORK TIMES. But I can't resist this footnote to the story.

Many, many years ago, I was a young White House Assistant, when President Johnson at first wanted Martin Luther King to call off the marching, demonstrations, and protests. The civil rights movement had met massive resistance in the South, and the South, because of the seniority system, controlled Congress, making it virtually impossible for Congress to enact laws giving full citizenship to black Americans, no matter how desperate their lives. LBJ worried that the mounting demonstrations were hardening white resistance.

He had been the master of the Senate, the great persuader, who could twist your arm with such flair and flattery you thought he was actually doing you a favor by wrenching it from its socket. He reckoned that with a little time he could twist enough arms in Congress to end, or neutralize, the power of die-hard racists - all of them, including some of his old mentors, white supremacists who threatened to bring the government, if not the country, to its knees before they would see blacks eat at the same restaurants, go to the same schools, drink from the same fountains, and live in the same neighborhoods as whites.

As the pressure intensified on each side, Johnson wanted King to wait a little longer and give him a chance to bring Congress around by hook or crook. But Martin Luther King said his people had already waited too long. He talked about the murders and lynchings, the churches set on fire, children brutalized, the law defied, men and women humiliated, their lives exhausted, their hearts broken. LBJ listened, as intently as I ever saw him listen. He listened, and then he put his hand on Martin Luther King's shoulder, and said, in effect: "OK. You go out there Dr. King and keep doing what you're doing, and make it possible for me to do the right thing." Lyndon Johnson was no racist but he had not been a civil rights hero, either. Now, as president, he came down on the side of civil disobedience, believing it might quicken America's conscience until the cry for justice became irresistible, enabling him to turn Congress. So King marched and Johnson maneuvered and Congress folded.

News Coverage: President Johnson calls for all Americans to back what he calls a turning point in history.

Bill Moyers: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places.

Marchers: "We shall overcome ..."

Bill Moyers: But they weren't done. King kept on marching, this time for the right to vote, and once again Johnson kept his word, and did the right thing. As one of his young assistants, I stood on the floor of the House that Ides of March when morality and politics converged, and watched the faces of Congress transfixed ... mesmerized ... knowing they were riding the surf of history as the president of the United States enlisted all of us in the cause.

Lyndon Johnson: It's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Bill Moyers: As he finished, Congress stood and thunderous applause shook the chamber. Johnson would soon sign into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and black people were no longer second class citizens. Martin Luther King had marched and preached and witnessed for this day. Countless ordinary people had put their bodies on the line for it, been berated, bullied and beaten, only to rise, organize and struggle on, against the dogs and guns, the bias and burning crosses. Take nothing from them; their courage is their legacy. But take nothing from the president who once had seen the light but dimly, as through a dark glass - and now did the right thing. Lyndon Johnson threw the full weight of his office on the side of justice. Of course the movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many, championed bravely now by the preacher turned prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history, someone has to seize and turn it. With these words at the right moment - "we shall overcome" - Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color, and history, too - reminding us that a president matters, and so do we.

More perversion of history by the neocon Right

By Christopher E. Renner

Recently a friend brought to my attention the most recent chapter in the neoconservative war on history. Noecon pundit, Jonah Goldberg, has published a new book: Liberal Fascism - The Secret History of the American LEft, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. As someone who lived in the former fascist state of Italy for seventeen years and saw first hand the lingering effects fascism has had on the society, I feel some comment needs to be made about Goldberg's distortion, no perversion, of history to suit his own agenda.

From the book review at Amazon.com:

Goldberg seeks to identify who the real fascist in our midst are. Liberal Fascism claims to offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

Contrary to what most people think, Goldberg claims that the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National Socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Excuse me - a contributing editor to the National Review and a former employee of the American Enterprise Institute - the flag ship of neoconservatism and Bush and Cheney's biggest supporter along with the Heritage Foundation - is calling liberals Fascists???? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! (Oh, and lets not forget who his mother is and what launched his career as a pundit: his mother Lucianne Goldberg, was the one who advised Linda Tripp to record her conversations with Monica Lewinsky and to save the dress which led to the Clinton sex scandal. This coming form good old Lucianne who would know about such affairs since she reported to anyone within ear-shot that she had had an affair with both Lyndon Johnson and Humbert Humphery. Both of whom denied the affair, but that didn't keep Lucianne from loudly spreading the fact that she had.)

Goldberg obviously doesn't understand the first thing of political ideology - yes the Nazi's began out of the socialist workers movement, but it's policies, which quickly took on nativist and hyper-nationalism tones, were reactionary and placed it on the opposite end of the political spectrum; in the same league as the Czar of Russian and other depots.

I totally disagree with his comment "they loathed the free market" - whereas in socialist economies the state controls most, if not all, of the economy for the benefit of the workers, under fascism the state control was to prop up a pre-existing capitalist elite which, for pledging to support the politicial agenda of the Nazis, directly benefitted from state contracts and slave labour while they were protected from competition based purely on political ideology - much as what the Bush/Cheney administration has done. This is hardly analogous with the economic model used in socialist-based economies of Sweden or Denmark or even in Japan's "pink" economy - where a "capitalist elite" has been difficult to form.

As someone who lived in a country that had been ruled by the fascist, I can tell you Goldberg's claims are only half turths - yes the Italian fascist did provide the first nationalisze health care systems and pension plans in Italy, but people were denied such benefits if they were enemies of the state, which any member of the Communist, or even the more moderate liberal democrat parties were labeled. Neapelotians starved because they consistently voted against the fascist - and Mussolini moreover rewarded them by building a steel mill on once of the most pristine beaches in all of southern Italy and imported fascist workers form the north to work in it. A legacy which only recently was finally tore down and the first attempts were made to address the environmental damage which will take generations to clean up.

Goldberg's claim that the fascist "purged the church from public policy" is also wrong. While many modern fascist are atheists, in the 30s the church was entwined, as it always is, with the political power machine the fascist built. They supported Mussouli in his colony building in Lybia and Albania, and his leaders were in the front pews each Sunday. The Church, as in Spain, became a partner with the fascist against modernism, socialism and the radicalization of young people to the facilities of religious belief.

Goldberg's (isn't that a historically Jewish name???) assertation that the Nazis "maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities" is placed to attack affirmative action in our modern times. But he misleads the reader. The Nazi matrix was to prevent a whole class of people, the Jews, form attending university, not make sure that people who had suffered historic discrimination - African Americans, Hispanics, and women - were part of each Freshman class. Goldberg, in true neocon fashion, perverts history to to support his own propaganda. Shame on him.

Goldberg's whole effort with this book is to deflect the attention the Left has been placing on the policies of the Bush/Cheney administration and the neoconservative war on civil (and human) rights while rewarding a capitalist elite, just like the fascist they are!

MSNBC's Chris Matthews problem

Update from Media Matters, January 18, 2008
by David Brock

Last night on MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews addressed the firestorm sparked by his comment that "the reason [Hillary Clinton is] a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win there on her merit."

>> Watch Matthews' comments, click here.

He addressed the controversy after more than a week of intense pressure from Media Matters, several major national women's organizations, and thousands of people just like you.

Matthews has admitted that his comments about Sen. Clinton have been unfair, "inappropriate," and "callous." He went on to make the following assurance:

"On those occasions when I have not taken the time to say things right or have simply said the inappropriate thing, I'll try to be clearer, smarter, more obviously in support of the right of women - of all people - of full equality and respect for their ambitions."

That is what this effort has been about from the very beginning -- Matthews' treatment of women. Over the years, his commentary has shown a clear pattern of sexism directed at prominent women such as Sen. Clinton, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Michelle Obama, our nation's female governors, and so many others.

Matthews' claim that going forward he will try to be more supportive of the right of women to full equality and respect for their ambitions is a pledge that MSNBC has a responsibility to hold him to. Media Matters certainly will, and I hope you will as well.

Without the overwhelming response from progressive leaders, advocacy groups, bloggers, and dedicated activists like you, Matthews' commitment to change would never have happened.

This is a victory for the progressive community and women everywhere.

I want to thank everyone for contacting Matthews and MSNBC over the past week to express your concerns over his continued sexist commentary. I also want to thank all the bloggers who have posted on the Matthews controversy and/or linked to contact information that helped people to take action and make their voices heard.


Original Media Matter Alert concerning Chris Matthews' comments:
Posted 11 January 2008

by Jamison Foser, Media Matters for America

I do not care which person is your candidate. I don't care what you think of Hillary Clinton as a potential president. What is being done in the press is akin to a pack of rabid 7th graders trying to haze the nerdy girl in school simply because they can. It has nothing to do with her qualifications -- it has to do with gender, and these lemming pundits think that it's perfectly acceptable because everyone is doing it, including women like Andrea Mitchell and Anne Kornblut.
-- Christy Hardin Smith, Firedoglake

"OK, let's put the gender thing in here. I love gender politics, guys."
-- Chris Matthews

The behavior Christy Hardin Smith describes has its epicenter on MSNBC's Hardball, where rarely a day goes by without host Chris Matthews sputtering and shouting about Hillary Clinton, often in terms that would give Bobby Riggs pause.

Put simply, Matthews behaves as though he is obsessed with Hillary Clinton. And not "obsessed" in a charming, mostly harmless, Lloyd-Dobler-with-a-boom-box kind of way. "Obsessed" in a this-person-needs-help kind of way.

More than six years ago, long before Hillary Clinton began running for president, the Philadelphia Inquirer magazine reported that, according to an MSNBC colleague, Matthews had said of Clinton: "I hate her. I hate her. All that she stands for."

Even before that, Matthews told the January 20, 2000, Hardball audience, "Hillary Clinton bugs a lot of guys, I mean, really bugs people like maybe me on occasion. I'm not going to take a firm position here, because the election is not coming up yet. But let me just say this, she drives some of us absolutely nuts."

Not that there was much chance his feelings would go unnoticed by even the most casual Hardball viewer.

Matthews has referred to Clinton as "She devil." He has repeatedly likened Clinton to "Nurse Ratched," referring to the "scheming, manipulative" character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest who "asserts arbitrary control simply because she can." He has called her "Madame Defarge." And he has described male politicians who have endorsed Clinton as "castratos in the eunuch chorus."

Matthews has compared Clinton to a "strip-teaser" and questioned whether she is "a convincing mom." He refers to Clinton's "cold eyes" and the "cold look" she supposedly gives people; he says she speaks in a "scolding manner" and is "going to tell us what to do."

Matthews frequently obsesses over Clinton's "clapping" -- which he describes as "Chinese." He describes Clinton's laugh as a "cackle" -- which led to the Politico's Mike Allen telling him, "Chris, first of all, 'cackle' is a very sexist term." (Worth remembering: When John McCain was asked by a GOP voter referring to Clinton, "How do we beat the bitch?" Allen reacted by wondering, "What voter in general hasn't thought that?" So Allen isn't exactly hypersensitive to people describing Clinton in sexist terms.)

Matthews repeatedly suggests Clinton is a "fraud" for claiming to be a Yankees fan, despite the fact that all available evidence indicates that Clinton has been a Yankees fan since childhood. In April of 2007, former Washington Post reporter John Harris, who has written a book about Bill Clinton, told Matthews to his face that the attacks on Clinton over her history of being a Yankees fan were false. Harris said: "Hillary Clinton got hazed over saying she was a New York Yankees fan. It turned out, actually, that was right. She had been a lifelong Yankees fan. But people were all over [her] for supposedly embroidering her past." But Matthews doesn't let a little thing like the truth get in the way of his efforts to take cheap shots at Clinton: At least twice since Harris set him straight, Matthews has attacked Clinton over the Yankees fan nonsense, once calling her a "fraud."

Matthews has described Clinton as "witchy" and -- in what appears to be a classic case of projection -- claimed that "some men" say Clinton's voice sounds like "fingernails on a blackboard." In what appears to be an even more classic case of projection, Matthews has speculated that there is "out there in the country ... some gigantic monster -- big, green, horny-headed, all kinds of horns coming out, big, aggressive monster of anti-Hillaryism that hasn't shown itself: it's based upon gender."

Matthews has suggested that Hillary Clinton "being surrounded by women" might "make a case against" her being "commander in chief." He once asked a guest if "the troops out there" would "take the orders" from "Hillary Clinton, commander in chief." When his guest responded, "Why wouldn't they listen to a [female] commander in chief? Sure," Matthews responded: "You're chuckling a little bit, aren't you?" When his guest responded "No," Matthews couldn't quite believe it, sputtering: "No problem? No problem? No problem?"

Matthews has wondered if she is unable "to admit a mistake" because doing so would lead people to call her a "fickle woman." He has said that Clinton is on a "short ... leash" as a presidential candidate, lacking "latitude in her husband's absence" to answer a question. He has, at least twice, called Hillary Clinton an "uppity" woman -- both times, pretending to attribute the phrase to Bill Clinton. But, as Bob Somerby has explained, there is no evidence Clinton has ever used the term.

One of Matthews' favorite topics is Clinton's marriage. After The New York Times ran an article purporting to count the number of nights the Clintons spend together, Matthews' imagination ran wild, and the MSNBC host couldn't get the Clintons' marital life out of his mind. At one point, Media Matters counted 90 separate questions Matthews asked guests about the topic during seven separate programs; the number undoubtedly grew after we stopped counting. In the middle of one of Matthews' bouts of obsessive speculation about how often the Clintons are "together in the same roof overnight, if you will," Washington Post reporter Lois Romano asked him, "[W]hat is your obsession with logistics here?" In response, Matthews snapped at her: "Because I'm talking to three reporters, and I'm trying to get three straight answers, so I don't want attitude about this. It's a point of view -- I want facts. Tell me what the facts are, Lois, if you know them. If you don't, I don't know what you're arguing about."

Matthews has claimed: "[T]he reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around." John McCain's political career got started after he left his first wife for a wealthy and politically connected heiress, married her, and ran for Congress. But Chris Matthews doesn't suggest that the reason McCain is a "U.S. senator ... a candidate for president ... a front-runner" is that he "messed around." Even Fox News' Bill O'Reilly said Matthews' comments about Clinton went too far: "I mean, it's rough business what these people over there [at MSNBC] are doing. We don't do that here. We would never say that Senator Clinton got her job because her husband messed around. I mean, that is -- that is a personal attack. And it is questionable whether a network should allow that or not."

Matthews periodically gets it into his head that the most important question in the world is whether Bill Clinton will be a "distraction" or whether he will "behave himself." He badgers Clinton aides about the question and warns that Bill Clinton "better watch it." He asks if Clinton will be a "good boy" or be guilty of "misbehavior." Matthews is not so subtly referring to Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. But curiously, he doesn't have the same concerns about McCain or about Rudy Giuliani, as I wrote nearly a year ago.

Think about this for a second: Chris Matthews is holding it against Hillary Clinton that her husband cheated on her. But he doesn't hold it against John McCain and Rudy Giuliani that they cheated on their spouses. Matthews seems to think women are to blame when their husbands have affairs -- and men who cheat on their spouses are blameless.

And then there's Matthews' fixation on Hillary Clinton's "ambition." In December 1999, Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson appeared on Hardball to discuss Clinton's Senate campaign. Matthews asked Wolfson eight consecutive questions about whether Clinton was "ambitious." Finally, Matthews said, "People who seek political power are ambitious by definition," leading Wolfson to tell him: "if you say so. If it will make you happy, I'll agree." If Matthews has ever displayed as much interest in the "ambition" of male candidates like John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, or Mike Huckabee, he has done so in private.

And, in the midst of his years-long assault on Hillary Clinton, much of it either directly based on her gender or on a sexist double standard, Matthews has the audacity to accuse Clinton of being "anti-male" and to insist that "she should just lighten up on this gender -- 'the boys are coming to get me' routine."

None of this should surprise us. Chris Matthews acknowledged his feelings about Hillary Clinton long ago: "I hate her. I hate her. All that she stands for." And "she drives some of us [guys] absolutely nuts."

But Matthews' questionable treatment of women extends beyond Hillary Clinton.

Matthews has described House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as "scary" and suggested she would "castrate" House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. And he has wondered how she could disagree with President Bush "without screaming? How does she do it without becoming grating?"

Just this week, Matthews claimed there isn't a plausible female presidential candidate "on the horizon" because there aren't any "big-state women governors" -- but Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Connecticut Gov. Jodi Rell, and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius all run states with populations comparable to male governors who have recently run for president, including Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Bill Richardson. How large a state does a woman have to run before she qualifies as a plausible presidential candidate to Chris Matthews? One that is twice as large as Mitt Romney's Massachusetts? Three times as large?

Last October, Matthews mused aloud about a hypothetical couple trying to decide who to support for president. In Matthews' mind, the wife just wants to see "the first woman president." According to Matthews, the husband has to explain the math to his wife: "[T]he husband says, 'You know, dear, you know, this is going to kill our tax bracket. You know that tuition thing we pay every couple of years for the kids, every year, we can't do that if we get a higher tax bracket. We have to pay more money.' "

After the Des Moines Register endorsed Hillary Clinton earlier this year, Matthews suggested that the paper's "female editors and publisher" succumbed to "lobbying" by Bill Clinton.

Matthews has repeatedly focused on the physical characteristics of his female guests. He recently began an interview with conservative radio host and author Laura Ingraham by telling her, "I'm not allowed to say this, but I'll say it -- you're beautiful and you're smart." He ended the interview by saying: "I get in trouble for this, but you're great looking, obviously. You're one of the gods' gifts to men in this country. But also, you are a hell of a writer." Note that Matthews said Ingraham is also a good writer -- apparently, to Chris Matthews, there is no reason for men to care about whether a woman can write, only about how she looks.

Matthews' comments about Ingraham came only a month after he told CNBC anchor Erin Burnett, "You're a knockout," adding: "It's all right getting bad news from you." Matthews also told Burnett: "Come on in closer. No, come in -- come in further -- come in closer. Really close." Matthews made such a spectacle of himself during the exchange that The New York Post said "it sure looked" like Matthews had been "perving on CNBC hottie Erin Burnett on live TV the other night." Matthews explained that he had merely been "kidding around."

During MSNBC's April 26, 2007, coverage of the first Democratic presidential debate, Matthews discussed the "cosmetics" of the evening. In doing so, he complimented Michelle Obama's pearl necklace and declared that she "looked perfect," "well-turned out ... attractive -- classy, as we used to say. Like Frank Sinatra, 'classy.' "

Matthews also appeared to argue that many viewers would be basing their decisions about the candidates on how, in Clinton's case, the candidate was dressed, or, in the case of the male candidates, how their spouses were dressed: "Some people are, by the way, just watching tonight. They stopped listening a half-hour in, and they noticed how pretty she is -- Michelle -- and they said, 'I like the fact he's [Barack Obama] got this pretty wife. He's happily married. I like that.' They like the fact that Hillary was demure, lady-like in her appearance." When NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell interjected, noting "You're talking about two ... lawyers," who went to "Harvard and Yale," Matthews defended himself, saying, "Cosmetics are a part of this game."

Nor is any of this new: In August 1999, Matthews hosted notorious liar Gennifer Flowers, during which he told her: "I gotta pay a little tribute here. You're a very beautiful woman, and I -- and I have to tell you, he knows that, you know that, and everybody watching knows that; Hillary Clinton knows that. How can a woman put up with a relationship between her husband and somebody, anybody, but especially somebody like you that's a knockout?" After Flowers told him "Gosh, you make me blush here," Matthews replied, "[I]t's an objective statement, Gennifer. I'm not flirting."

In 2000, Matthews responded to linguist Deborah Tannen's explanation of then-presidential candidate George W. Bush's efforts to appeal to women voters by saying, "So is this like the political equivalent of Spanish fly? That these seductive number of words you just drop out there and women just swoon." That led another Hardball guest, Lynn Martin -- a Republican -- to point out, "You wouldn't suggest he's seducing men."

Chris Matthews has been treating female guests as sexual objects for years. He has been judging women -- senators, presidential candidates, the speaker of the House -- on their clothes and their voices and their appearance for years. He has been referring to women as "castrating" for years. He has been applying double standards to male and female candidates for years.

This is who Chris Matthews is. He is a man who thinks that men who support women politicians are "eunuchs."

He isn't going to stop unless you make him stop. Chris Matthews uses his voice to marginalize women. Use yours to tell MSNBC you've had enough.

It's time to play a little "hardball." Please contact MSNBC and Chris Matthews today and let them know what you think.