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From: Todd Lockwood
Date: Fri Nov 5, 2004 12:45:34 PM US/Pacific
Subject: Farewell-for-now Digest # 207
To everyone who still opens these, if only to browse the headlines, thanks. I can't keep this up. I know I've been preaching to the choir, and it's frustrating. When I started this, it was out of anger and frustration with the media, knowing that most people don't have time to hunt down news stories and uncover truths. I was intent on doing it, and wanted to share what I found. Perhaps I became self-indulgently evangelical about it. If so, I apologize. I apologize, too, for the sheer volume of these before the elections. ICH, Greg Frost, myself... it's an awful lot to look at, let alone read. I admit that I didn't read all of it myself, so much of it was repetitive or familiar. But I hoped that each of you would at least scan the topics, and forward information, or better yet, sign up for email delivery of news from many sources.
I have to do something different, though I don't yet know what it is. In the meantime, I hope you stay informed on your own. Make time every day to read newspapers online, and visit some of the better blog sites daily.
You can sign up for home delivery of these news providers here:
The best American newspapers:
The New York Times:
The Washington Post:
One of the best email newsletters, the Progress Report:
MoveOn.org. If you aren't already a member, why the hell not?!?:
I send these two a little money every month, to keep them going:
One of the best for insightful commentary, TomPaine.com
An independent source for headlines, delivered daily, the International Clearing House. I've been forwarding these daily, but I'm not going to continue. If you value these, sign up for email delivery:
Also worth bookmarking and visiting regularly:
Finally, if you don't have a local radio affiliate, get streaming audio of Air America's broadcasts here:
I may send stuff yet from time to time, but the firehose is now off. Stay busy. Please.
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, no.1 1777
To close, three editorials from my three favorite writers who are saying in today's editions what I am feeling; Bob Hebert, Paul Krugman, and William Rivers Pitt:
O.K., Folks: Back to Work
By BOB HERBERT
Published: November 5, 2004
An iron rule of life is to be careful what you wish for.
President Bush can take his re-election victory to the bank, and his political portfolio has been bolstered by enhanced Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. That's the good news for the president. Nearly all the other news is bad.
A story in the business section of yesterday's Times noted, "Even as President Bush was celebrating his election victory on Wednesday, his Treasury Department provided an ominous reminder about the economic challenges ahead."
With budget deficits exploding, the government will have to borrow $147 billion in the first three months of 2005, a quarterly record. But the record won't stand for long. The government is hemorrhaging money, and the nation has a war to pay for. A new record is almost sure to be set before the year is out.
Managing money is not one of this president's strong points. Plus and minus signs mean nothing to him. If he were actually writing checks, they'd be bouncing to the moon. The federal government's revenue was $100 billion lower this year than when Mr. Bush took office, and spending is $400 billion higher.
Yesterday, at his press conference, the president made it clear that his campaign promise of more - not fewer - tax cuts for the wealthy is at the top of his second-term agenda.
Much has been made of the support Mr. Bush has gotten from religious people. He's going to need all of their prayers that some miracle happens to suspend the laws of simple arithmetic and keep his fiscal house of cards from collapsing.
Meanwhile, the situation in Iraq, overshadowed by the election, is as grim as ever. Insurgents blew up a critical oil pipeline on Tuesday, the latest severe blow to efforts to get the Iraq economy on track. Three British soldiers were killed in an attack yesterday. The assassinations, kidnappings and car bombings continued. The humanitarian aid group Doctors Without Borders announced that it would cease operations in Iraq because of the unrelenting danger. And Hungary became the latest U.S. coalition partner to announce that it would withdraw its troops from Iraq.
In other words, nothing has changed. Mr. Bush's victory on Tuesday was not based on his demonstrated competence in office or on a litany of perceived successes. For all the talk about values that we're hearing, the president ran a campaign that appealed above all to voters' fears and prejudices. He didn't say he'd made life better for the average American over the past four years. He didn't say he had transformed the schools, or made college more affordable, or brought jobs to the unemployed or health care to the sick and vulnerable.
He said, essentially, be very afraid. Be frightened of terrorism, and of those dangerous gay marriages, and of those in this pluralistic society who may have thoughts and beliefs and values that differ from your own.
As usual, he turned reality upside down. A quintessential American value is tolerance for ideas other than one's own. Tuesday's election was a dismaying sprint toward intolerance, sparked by a smiling president who is a master at appealing to the baser aspects of our natures.
Which brings me to the Democrats - the ordinary voters, not the politicians - and where they go from here. I have been struck by the extraordinary demoralization, even dark despair, among a lot of voters who desperately wanted John Kerry to defeat Mr. Bush. "We did all we could," one woman told me, "and we still lost."
Here's my advice: You had a couple of days to indulge your depression - now, get over it. The election's been lost but there's still a country to save, and with the current leadership that won't be easy. Crucial matters that have been taken for granted too long - like the Supreme Court and Social Security - are at risk. Caving in to depression and a sense of helplessness should not be an option when the country is speeding toward an abyss.
Roll up your sleeves and do what you can. Talk to your neighbors. Call or write your elected officials. Volunteer to help in political campaigns. Circulate petitions. Attend meetings. Protest. Run for office. Support good candidates who are running for office. Register people to vote. Reach out to the young and the apathetic. Raise money. Stay informed. And vote, vote, vote - every chance you get.
Democracy is a breeze during good times. It's when the storms are raging that citizenship is put to the test. And there's a hell of a wind blowing right now.
E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com
No Surrender
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 5, 2004
President Bush isn't a conservative. He's a radical - the leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the barriers between church and state. And thanks to a heavy turnout by evangelical Christians, Mr. Bush has four more years to advance that radical agenda.
Democrats are now, understandably, engaged in self-examination. But while it's O.K. to think things over, those who abhor the direction Mr. Bush is taking the country must maintain their intensity; they must not succumb to defeatism.
This election did not prove the Republicans unbeatable. Mr. Bush did not win in a landslide. Without the fading but still potent aura of 9/11, when the nation was ready to rally around any leader, he wouldn't have won at all. And future events will almost surely offer opportunities for a Democratic comeback.
I don't hope for more and worse scandals and failures during Mr. Bush's second term, but I do expect them. The resurgence of Al Qaeda, the debacle in Iraq, the explosion of the budget deficit and the failure to create jobs weren't things that just happened to occur on Mr. Bush's watch. They were the consequences of bad policies made by people who let ideology trump reality.
Those people still have Mr. Bush's ear, and his election victory will only give them the confidence to make even bigger mistakes.
So what should the Democrats do?
One faction of the party is already calling for the Democrats to blur the differences between themselves and the Republicans. Or at least that's what I think Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council means when he says, "We've got to close the cultural gap." But that's a losing proposition.
Yes, Democrats need to make it clear that they support personal virtue, that they value fidelity, responsibility, honesty and faith. This shouldn't be a hard case to make: Democrats are as likely as Republicans to be faithful spouses and good parents, and Republicans are as likely as Democrats to be adulterers, gamblers or drug abusers. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country; blue states, on average, have lower rates of out-of-wedlock births than red states.
But Democrats are not going to get the support of people whose votes are motivated, above all, by their opposition to abortion and gay rights (and, in the background, opposition to minority rights). All they will do if they try to cater to intolerance is alienate their own base.
Does this mean that the Democrats are condemned to permanent minority status? No. The religious right - not to be confused with religious Americans in general - isn't a majority, or even a dominant minority. It's just one bloc of voters, whom the Republican Party has learned to mobilize with wedge issues like this year's polarizing debate over gay marriage.
Rather than catering to voters who will never support them, the Democrats - who are doing pretty well at getting the votes of moderates and independents - need to become equally effective at mobilizing their own base.
In fact, they have made good strides, showing much more unity and intensity than anyone thought possible a year ago. But for the lingering aura of 9/11, they would have won.
What they need to do now is develop a political program aimed at maintaining and increasing the intensity. That means setting some realistic but critical goals for the next year.
Democrats shouldn't cave in to Mr. Bush when he tries to appoint highly partisan judges - even when the effort to block a bad appointment fails, it will show supporters that the party stands for something. They should gear up for a bid to retake the Senate or at least make a major dent in the Republican lead. They should keep the pressure on Mr. Bush when he makes terrible policy decisions, which he will.
It's all right to take a few weeks to think it over. (Heads up to readers: I'll be starting a long-planned break next week, to work on a economics textbook. I'll be back in January.) But Democrats mustn't give up the fight. What's at stake isn't just the fate of their party, but the fate of America as we know it.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
Still Standing, Still Fighting, Still Here
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 05 November 2004
"It's a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired."
- Robert Strauss
I've been working on digesting the results of the election. Mark Moford of the San Francisco Chronicle gave perhaps the best description of how I am feeling: "It simply boggles the mind: we've already had four years of some of the most appalling and abusive foreign and domestic policy in American history, some of the most well-documented atrocities ever wrought on the American populace and it's all combined with the biggest and most violently botched and grossly mismanaged war since Vietnam, and much of the nation still insists in living in a giant vat of utter blind faith, still insists on believing the man in the White House couldn't possibly be treating them like a dog treats a fire hydrant."
But I wound up getting some help on perspective from an unexpected quarter. I stood in the wind and the rain outside the Boston Public Library in Copley Square for eight hours on Tuesday night with tens of thousands of Kerry supporters, watching the election returns come in on giant screens, listening to speakers whip up the crowd, listening to girls scream while Jon Bon Jovi worked his way through 'Living on a Prayer.' That last bit was one of the low points. There were others.
As the night wore on and the wind got colder, the returns took a turn for the Bush. When Tom Brokaw came on the big screen and declared that NBC was putting Ohio in the Bush column, you could hear the air go out of the crowd. When the gospel singers came out and started singing 'God Bless America' for the fourth time that night, I decided enough was enough. I walked down to my favorite bar and fired down a pint of Mojo IPA, feeling the outer edges of a truly epic hate-frenzy beginning to work its way into my bones. I shrugged my coat back on, gave the disconsolate bartender a hug, and headed home. On the way, I stopped at the 7/11 and bought a can of Chef Boy-Are-Dee Beef Ravioli.
That's when the unexpected help showed up. As I was sliding my key into the back door of my apartment building, a young man emerged silently from the bushes behind me. I turned the key, and suddenly it felt like my head had exploded. The man from the bushes had thrown what was later revealed to be a large, 20 lb. cobblestone at me. It bounced off my shoulder, blasted into my jaw, and dropped heavily at my feet.
I reeled into the door but didn't fall. The fellow, assuming that anyone struck with a 20 lb. rock was ripe for the picking, started to come at me. I turned, and in a moment of truly dumb Braveheart macho testosterone rage, charged the guy. He stepped back in surprise, and then turned to flee. I pursued him down the street, brandishing the can of ravioli over my head while screaming unkind comments about his inappropriate sexual relationship with his mother, until my jaw reminded me that it might be broken.
After the cops and the EMTs and the x-rays were finished with me, the diagnosis was that nothing was broken or loose. My face is pretty torn up, but I should be able to chew solid food in a couple of days with the help of the Ibuprofen/Percocet cocktail the folks in the emergency room were kind enough to give me. As for the guy who threw the rock, I have no idea where he came from or what he was about. There are a few junkies wandering my neighborhood, so I assume this was an attempted mugging...possibly the first mugging in American history to be thwarted by a thick skull and a can of Chef Boy-Are-Dee.
Beyond the pain and the big scare, I am actually grateful for what happened. This may seem strange, but getting belted with a boulder did wonders for my perspective. If his aim had been a little better, just a couple of inches to the left, I'd probably be dead right now. I have the rock sitting on my desk in front of me, with an inscription written on it in indelible ink: 'There Are Worse Things Than Losing An Election.' A narrow perspective, to be sure, but a hard one to avoid while living inside my own bruised head.
Without a doubt, a second term for George W. Bush promises to be a debacle of generational proportions. The courts will be stacked with ideological brothers of Antonin Scalia. Roe v. Wade will be cast down. The full frontal assault on the Federal budget, on Social Security, on Medicare, on anything resembling government-subsidized assistance for people who did not get the lion's share of Bush's tax cuts, will continue unabated. The war in Iraq will grind on, and likely be expanded to include Iran and Syria. If those military adventures fare as poorly as what has happened in Iraq, a military draft will not be far off.
Sidney Blumenthal described it this way: "Now, without constraints, Bush can pursue the dreams he campaigned for - the use of U.S. military might to bring God's gift of freedom to the world, with no more 'global tests,' and at home the enactment of the imperatives of 'the right God.' The international system of collective security forged in World War II and tempered in the Cold War is a thing of the past. The Democratic Party, despite its best efforts, has failed to rein in the radicalism sweeping the country. The world is in a state of emergency but also irrelevant. The New World, with all its power and might, stepping forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old? Goodbye to all that."
Perhaps the best indicator of what a now-unfettered Bush is going to be like over the next four years came during his Thursday press conference. Associated Press reporter Terence Hunt opened the questioning with a three-part query. Bush responded to his questions by saying, "Now that I've got the will of the people at my back, I'm going to start enforcing the one-question rule. That was three." When another reporter dared to ask a multi-pronged question, Bush's response was, "Again, he violated the one-question rule right off the bat. Obviously you didn't listen to the will of the people." In other words, journalists, sit down and shut up.
There are a few bright spots to point to in the aftermath. John Ashcroft will reportedly resign his position before the inauguration. While it is certain that Bush will nominate another far-right lunatic to replace him, unless that nominee is Atilla the Hun, any new Attorney General will be an improvement. There is also the brewing fight between the conservatives and the neo-conservatives within the Republican Party. A number of old-style conservatives were secretly hoping for a Kerry victory, because it would give them an opening to purge the GOP of the neo-cons and the far-right religious fundamentalists from the party. Now that Bush has a second term, this fight will probably break wide open.
Finally, the long fight to bring the glaring problems associated with the new electronic voting machines may finally break fully into the mainstream. There are some ominous discrepancies between the pre-election polls, the exit polls, and the final results out of counties in Florida and Ohio that used the machines. While eating an electoral defeat seems an incredible price to pay for initiating this dialog and investigation, consider the long term. If an investigation into the use of these machines in this election winds up requiring voters be given a paper confirmation of their vote, this democracy will look back on Tuesday November 2, 2004 as a necessary and beneficial trauma.
Despite these bright spots, the inscription on my memorial rock - 'There Are Worse Things Than Losing An Election' - seems absurd in the face of all this. Maybe it's the concussion talking, but I honestly believe the rock is right. For one thing, worse than losing the election would be a collective acceptance of the reasons we are being given for why the election was lost. We hear from every mainstream media quarter that the election was lost because more people lined up with Bush on the question of 'Values.' There is a degree of truth to this. Eleven states had referendums on the ballot about gay marriage, for one example. The Republican base flooded to the polls to vote against it. This helped Bush, surely, along with some other 'Values'-oriented issues, but this does not account for the final result. He was going to get that vote anyway. There is an elephant in the room here, and ignoring it would be worse than the electoral defeat.
The result of this election is nothing more or less than the culmination of a three-year terror campaign waged by the Bush administration and his campaign crew. Every day for three years, the American people were bombarded with messages of fear from the administration. Day after day, the Bush administration used September 11 to cow any and all dissent, to bend popular will, to frighten people into thinking that voting against Bush was a vote for death and destruction.
It worked. Millions of Americans, after three years of state-sponsored fear roaring out of their televisions 24/7/365, went to the polls and solemnly voted against their best interests. Buying into the idea that 'Values' alone determined the election outcome would be a disaster, as would buying into the idea that America is now a center-right nation, as would buying into the argument that Bush now has a mandate. It isn't true. The election turned on Bush's willingness to terrify the people he is supposed to be leading, and any refusal to acknowledge this will compound the wretched result of this election by orders of magnitude.
It is amazing that this election was as close as it was. Kerry should never have come as close as he did to victory, given the campaign of fear that was waged against the American people by this administration. Worse than losing the election, therefore, would be an acceptance of the idea that all the work, all the shoeleather spent in the movement to vote Bush out was a complete failure. It wasn't. The movement did better than it had any right to, and it still has work to do. Worse than losing the election would be an abandonment of that movement. It isn't over, but has only just begun.
Howard Dean recently wrote, "There is more to politics than elections. Thousands of young people have discovered, as generations have before them, their efforts matter. Their actions matter because by getting in the game instead of staying on the sidelines, they are empowered, whether or not their candidate wins. Historically, whether through the campaign of Gene McCarthy in 1968 or John McCain in 2000, the enthusiasm and hard work waned after the election. This time we cannot let that happen. Democracy is the most highly evolved system of government ever created by human beings. And like everything else we create, it will wither and die unless we nurture it."
Now more than ever, the movement that began on December 12, 2000 must continue. Billions of people around the world woke up on Wednesday afraid, fully convinced that the United States of America has finally and completely lost its collective mind. The movement must assure them that we have their back. The soldier and civilian death toll in Iraq continues to climb unabated, and those still alive in that cauldron of violence need to be assured that we have their back. The millions of Americans who do not fit in to Bush's grand evangelical plan for the country need to know that we have their back.
If despair and despondency still color your world after the election, remember this: Every second-term President since Eisenhower has met with a blizzard of shame and disgrace before they left office. Nixon didn't get to finish his term and needed Ford to keep him out of prison, Reagan needed Bush Sr. to pardon a whole mob of cretins to kill the Iran/Contra scandal, and Clinton was impeached for lying about consensual sex.
If the first four years of this administration are any indication of what is to come, and if the movement continues to hammer him for the next four years as it has for the last four years, the name of George W. Bush will wind up echoing down the hallways of history as the single worst President the nation has ever known. The name of George W. Bush will stand as a grave warning and a strident reminder of how badly and how quickly things can go wrong in our democracy.
I'm going to stick around to see that happen. It will take more than a rock, or a lost election, to blow out my pilot light. I'll see you on the battlements.
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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'