Silence is Consent
If you don't speak up you accept what is happening. This site was born out of the mainstream media's inability to cover the news. I am just an American cititzen trying to spread the word in the era of FCC consolidation, post 9/11 Patriot Act hysteria, hackable voting machines and war without end. I rant and post news items I perceive to be relevant to our current situation.
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
- Thomas Jefferson
Social Security is not broken and therefore does not need to be fixed
So Called Social Security Crisis (SCSSC)
Comments, questions, corrections, rebuttals are always welcome.
Friday, July 30, 2004
I'm on vacation next week and I am not sure how often I will have an opportunity to post. If I don't read Cursor each day. As a matter of fact you should check it out today, it has some great story links. It has the best news update and is usually our by Noon central time weekdays. All the links to the right are great as well.
I like Ron Reagan a little more each day
The Case Against George W. Bush
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time."
Naomi Klein with her rationale for joining the ABB crowd
Anybody but Bush - and then let's get back to work
Under a Kerry government, the comforting illusion of a world united against imperial aggression will drop away, exposing the jockeying for power that is the true face of modern empire. We'll also have to let go of the archaic idea that toppling a single man, or a Romanesque "empire", will solve all, or indeed any, of our problems. Yes, it will make for more complicated politics, but it has the added benefit of being true. With Bush out of the picture, we lose the galvanising enemy, but we get to take on the actual policies that are transforming all of our countries.
The other day, I was ranting to a friend about Kerry's vicious support for the apartheid wall in Israel, his gratuitous attacks on Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and his abysmal record on free trade. "Yeah," he agreed sadly. "But at least he believes in evolution." So do I - the much-needed evolution of our progressive movements. And that won't happen until we put away the fridge magnets and Bush gags and get serious. And that will only happen once we get rid of the distraction-in-chief. So Anybody But Bush. And then let's get back to work.
A Washington Post liberals wrapup of the convention
Reclaiming the Center
If John Kerry is elected president, his speech accepting the Democratic nomination will be only part of the story. At least as important will be the antidote that Democrats brought to market at their convention this week to combat three decades of Republican attacks around social issues, "values" questions and patriotism.