“In the next few days we will know if Russia wants to be part of the international community or if they don’t give a damn what the worlds thinks of them”, is the stark warning given by 42 year old Georgian artist and writer Nick Gabrichidze, who is also coordinator of SOS Georgia.

This new NGO was set up by members of the Georgian community in Belgium to focus efforts to raise humanitarian aid and to promote Georgian independence by advocacy and campaigning. They are looking for donations and professional volunteers to help those in the improvised refugee camps.

Being based in Brussels they are close to the European institutions but Gabrichidze has found them unimpressive so far. “They’re all on holiday! We’ve had some discussions with the European Commission but we’re waiting for people to come back from their vacation. Throughout this crisis the European Parliament has been on vacation.”

“Although the French have made some initiatives, I haven’t noticed any response from the European Union as a body. The European Parliament hasn’t made any decisions yet, the Commission, in their first meeting, tried to postpone a decision until September. I can tell you the position of individual countries but the position of the European Union is unknown at this time. We’re having better luck with NATO.” Gabrichidze is also dismissive of a peacekeeping role for the EU. “They have no experience. They tried and failed completely in Yugoslavia.”

NATO is seen as a better bet because of their experience and ability to respond to rapidly changing events, while the EU could play a role in reconstruction and humanitarian aid.

Responding to the Georgia crisis is complex because the Russians are notoriously secretive and since the infrastructure has been heavily damaged, finding out the current situation on the ground is difficult. “I don’t know what’s going to happen this evening. Will the Russians withdraw? Will they attack? Nobody knows”.

With the tanks only 20 miles from Tbilisi, no sign of Russian retreat, how would SOS Georgia react if there is no change in the situation or the crisis deepens? “SOS Georgia was mainly set up for humanitarian aid, but if things get worse some people may decide to go and fight on the ground. This would be their own decision and nothing to do with the organisation.”

Gabrichidze admits that there are problems and differences between Georgia and the South Ossetians and Abkhazians, but says there is no hatred between the peoples. He recently attended a meeting with South Ossetians and found they had a lot of common ground. Significantly, he claims some Russians there tried to throw him out. He says that this conflict is not with his fellow countrymen but with Russia. “It was Russian soldiers, who invaded, Russian aircraft that did the bombing.”

When asked about a solution to the crisis Gabrichidze explained that he thought the agreement brokered by France is not a solution but the first step in resolving the conflict. The withdrawal of forces is more difficult for Georgia because of damage to roads and it would be hard to get supplies to refugee camps and there is still looting going on. For the agreement to work, “It’s entirely in Russian hands.”

“If the Russians don’t co-operate with the rest of the world, behaving as they did after the Cold War, then we’re entering another era, one in which Russia does whatever it wants.”

For Gabrichidze the immediate concern is for Russia to honour the agreement it signed. “Russia must withdraw. Not completely, but to show goodwill, they must return to where they were before the conflict.”

What does Gabrichidze think of the current cocktail of Russia threatening Ukraine and Poland and the USA and NATO stretched in Afghanistan and Iraq? Gabrichidze claims they are taking advantage and compares their actions to those of Germany in the 1930s when they annexed or neutralised one state at a time with no serious military opposition. He also predicts that Russia will soon start a propaganda campaign, depicting pro-Georgians as fascists, Islamic terrorists and so on.

The hardliners may be directing the military, but there are tensions within the Russian government as some wish to build on commercial and business relations with the world and see military actions as harmful to Russia’s long term interests.

The coming days will show the world the nature of the Russian bear. Will it be aggressive or can it be tamed? The Georgians will be the first to find out, but what happens in this small republic will affect all of us.

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From 2001-2003, I was Co-coordinator of the Green Party of Los Angeles County. The GP was growing fast then, lots of voter registration drives and outreach. It was fun. Other parts were not so fun. In my role of Treasurer, I had a legal obligation to file a complaint against a Green Party member for his disposition of a $10,000 check. This caused ruptures that the California Green Party still hasn’t recovered from.

From there, I got active in the ANSWER Coalition, helping to build antiwar demonstrations, some of them quite massive. Got involved with the group behind them, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and learned about Marxism. Got purged from PSL quite recently for reasons I’m unclear of (and no longer care about) - so now I’m a free agent.

So, it’s been a turbulent several years. Quite exciting too, at times. Worked on the 2000 Nader campaigns and Peter Camejo’s run for governor in 2003. Helped build antiwar protests where tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands came. Drove the truck that led L.A. mass protests several times. I’ve learned a lot about politics, organizing, and people.

So what’s next for me?

Lately I’ve become increasingly interested in the political ramifications of global warming and peak oil. How do we organize for change here? To work towards solving these problems societies as a whole need to work together. We no longer have time for squabbling (or idiotic wars). Also, solutions will require huge amounts of money and resources as well as new directions for the planet. This means governments and business must become involved on a massive basis.

The Green Party absolutely played a huge role in getting global warming and renewable energy into the national consciousness. Whether they can survive the 2008 elections as a viable party is uncertain, but their contributions have been crucial.

I’m reading The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman. It’s about how the planet is increasingly flattened by globalization, with work being done wherever it can be done the cheapest and most effectively. In it, he becomes startled when a Harvard political theorist tells him that his thesis, that the World is Flat, is almost precisely what Karl Marx wrote about in 1848. “The inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restraints to global commerce.” Of course, Marx believed once that happened, workers worldwide would discover their exploitation and then rise up and throw off their shackles. (They might also just sit back in the La-Z Boy and think, I’m glad I’m not living in a mud hut any more.)

So, am I an ecosocialist now? Maybe. But as you might guess, I’m currently a bit burned out on -isms, so no labels for me for a while, thanks.

As mentioned, to solve global warming, we all really do need to work together. I’m looking around for new groups to become involved with. What’s your group doing?

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Nader’s brand of crusade-like issue advocacy would seem perfectly suited for the Internet age. But he has a big problem: He doesn’t understand the Web.

“Doesn’t understand” is an understatement. More like “clueless and contemptuous.” I mean, he still refers to the Net as “virtual reality,” not understanding that for millions, their online and offlines lives mesh into one, without there being little separation between them.

Ron Paul doesn’t get the Net, but his hordes of libertarian geek supporters sure do, and they created a viral buzz that enabled Paul to raise tens of millions of dollars.

Much of the hard left doesn’t get the Net either. Oh, they have websites and blogs, but they lock them down and control the content, often not even allowing comments on blogs. Or they use blogs solely to re-post articles from their other sites. This totally misunderstands what blogs are about.

For blogs (and websites) to be successful, they need to be two-way. The comments that readers leave and the incoming and outgoing links are what gives life to a blog. Without that, you might as well post it on your refrigerator door, for all the effect it will have.

A blog needs to leave the doors open, letting lots of stuff fly in and out, and to have a personal point of view as well. That’s why the blogs for most politicians are dull. They have few if any outgoing links, hardly ever allow criticism (or even liveliness) in the comments, and present a bland personality to the reader. Someone told them they need a blog, so they got one, but don’t know why.

More than a few websites and blogs on the hard left have the same problems, except the personality presented is militant rather than bland. But it’s still one-dimensional, with humor, wry comments, links to organizations outside themselves, and feedback from readers often being nonexistent.

Like I say, they don’t get the Net.

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“Anyone who violates Egypt’s borders will get his leg broken,” said Egyptian Foreign Minister Aboul Gheit.

He blamed Israel for the humanitarian crisis and hardship that Gaza is experiencing, and for “responding to the Palestinian (Hamas) missiles with collective punishment.”

He also criticized Hamas for launching those missile attacks, describing the confrontation as a “laughable caricature” resulting in self-inflicted wounds.

This is an unusually blunt warning, not at all couched in the phrases of diplomatic niceties. But then, the breach of Egypt’s borders - a serious matter for any nation - were caused by conflicts that are not of Egypt’s doing and theoretically at least, not their problem.

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Lefti on the News video’ed PSL Presidential Candidate Gloria La Riva last week in Hollywood speaking at the unveiling of the Free the Cuban Five billboard and at the protest outside the Democratic debate.

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Here’s the WaPo chart: The Neocons: An illustrated progression. It starts with Leon Trotsky. Yes, that Leon Trotsky. But not for the reasons one might assume.

Lenin’s Tomb is not amused.

But [the chart] does so all to the purpose of linking it all back to a dead revolutionary, who in all likelihood would have had the neocons taken on a blind date with a firing squad (I like that phrase).

But the neocon-Trotsky link genuinely exists. From a LewRockwell.com rant.

The Trotskyist pedigree of neoconservatism is no secret; the original neocon, Irving Kristol, acknowledges it with relish: “I regard myself to have been a young Trotskyite and I have not a single bitter memory.”

Maybe this explains it better.

What is a NeoCon? Neocon is a neo-conservative who began as anti-Stalinist Trotskyist before moving to the far right in U.S. politics. NeoCons have roots in the Leon Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1950s and 1970s that movement morphed into anti-communist liberalism. Today the NeoCons are embedded in the imperial right and militarism of the U.S. defense and foreign affairs departments.

Trotsky vehemently opposed Stalinism and he and his followers were instrumental in getting the truth about what Stalin was doing out to the world at large. But that hardly makes him the fountainhead of the neocon movement. That many neocons began as Trotskyites then went sharply to the right is not because of anything Trotsky did. He opposed Stalin because he thought the revolution had been betrayed.

Peter Camejo comments.

Leon Trotsky’s efforts to argue that the Russian revolution of 1917 was betrayed and that one should not associate Stalinism with socialism was supported by only a small number of those considering themselves socialist.

The factual information on the crimes of Stalinism and truth about the internal regime in the USSR put out by the Trotskyist movement in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s is now accepted by almost everyone. In fact, all research has confirmed that the factual description of the internal reality of Stalinist society by Leon Trotsky was completely accurate.

Thus, the primary similarity between neocons and Trotsky is that both viewed Stalin as the monster he was. (Another might be his belief in the need for “permanent revolution.”) That some former Trots morphed into early, influential neocons yet still remained sympathetic to Trotsky appears a journey understandable only to those who were part of it. Doubtless the tangled history and resultant differences of far left sects are incomprehensible to outsiders too.

Trotsky of course paid dearly for his views. He was assassinated in Mexico in 1940 by a Soviet agent.

Trotsky’s last words were “I will not survive this attack. Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before.”

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Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff to Colin Powell, on why the US badly needs a new policy towards Latin America and Cuba.

Whoever is the new president in January 2009, two things need to happen with regard to Latin America and Cuba. First, Cuba, never on the front burner, needs at least to be put on the stove. Second, U.S. relations with Latin America should be completely refurbished. And there is the connection: no more effective and swifter way exists to signal a new approach to Latin America than to effect a rapprochement with Cuba as the opening gambit. Mr./Madam President, over to you.

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Juan Cole has a detailed analysis of this pitiful (and failed) propaganda attempt.

The Iranians analyzed the Pentagon video released to the US media and found that the audio track was not synchronized properly with the video, pointing to serious tinkering.

And sure enough, we now know that the tape is a fabrication in the sense that the Pentagon says the video and the audio were recorded separately and then combined. And they can’t even be sure where the audio came from!

This episode is just about the most pitiful thing I have seen since Bush came to power, and believe me I’ve seen plenty.

More MSU (Making Sh*t Up) from the Bushies. Do they ever stop lying?

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Nixon was Bad. These guys are worse.
– George McGovern, WaPo op-ed today

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Saul Alinsky organized Back of the Yards in Chicago in the 1930’s, which brought together poor East Europeans who worked at the meat packing plants into a genuine force. Their lives got better. In doing so, Alinsky also invented community organizing. He started other groups, one of which was in East L.A. In 1952 that group recruited a young farm worker named Cesar Chavez to become an organizer. More than once in Chicago he faced down the formidable Mayor Daley. He got results.

He was radical but not socialist. In the an interview with Playboy in 1972 he discusses one of the oldest debates within Left politics - organizing within the system to make incremental changes vs. working towards revolutionary change.

PLAYBOY: Spokesmen for the New Left contend that this process of accommodation renders piecemeal reforms meaningless, and that the overthrow and replacement of the system itself is the only means of ensuring meaningful social progress. How would you answer them?

ALINSKY: That kind of rhetoric explains why there’s nothing left of the New Left. It would be great if the whole system would just disappear overnight, but it won’t, and the kids on the New Left sure as hell aren’t going to overthrow it. Radicals in the United States don’t have the strength to confront a local police force in armed struggle, much less the Army, Navy and Air Force; it’s just idiocy for the Panthers to talk about all power growing from the barrel of a gun when the other side has all the guns.

America isn’t Russia in 1917 or China in 1946, and any violent head-on collision with the power structure will only ensure the mass suicide of the left and the probable triumph of domestic fascism. So you’re not going to get instant nirvana — or any nirvana, for that matter — and you’ve got to ask yourself, “Short of that, what the hell can I do?” The only answer is to build up local power bases that can merge into a national power movement that will ultimately realize your goals.

Such power bases need to be community-based with wide support. A Left group that tries to grow simply by playing to the fringe will grow little if at all and won’t have the broad-based support necessary to create mass change.

Every major revolutionary movement in history has gone through the same process of corruption, proceeding from virginal purity to seduction to decadence.

Look at the Christian church as it evolved from the days of the martyrs to a giant holding company, or the way the Russian Revolution degenerated into a morass of bureaucracy and oppression as the new class of state managers replaced the feudal landowners as the reigning power elite. Look at our American Revolution; there wasn’t anybody more dedicated to the right of revolution than Sam Adams, leader of the Sons of Liberty, the radical wing of the revolution. But once we won the fight, you couldn’t find a worse dictatorial reactionary than Adams; he insisted that every single leader of Shays’ Rebellion be executed as a warning to the masses. He had the right to revolt, but nobody had the right to revolt against him.

Take Gandhi, even; within ten months of India’s independence, he acquiesced in the law making passive resistance a felony, and he abandoned his nonviolent principles to support the military occupation of Kashmir. Over and over again, the firebrand revolutionary freedom fighter is the first to destroy the rights and even the lives of the next generation of rebels.

But recognizing this isn’t cause for despair. History is like a relay race of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by one group of revolutionaries until it too becomes an establishment, and then the torch is snatched up and carried on the next leg of the race by a new generation of revolutionaries.

I knew when I left Back of the Yards in 1940 that I hadn’t created a utopia, but people were standing straight for the first time in their lives, and that was enough for me.

And finally, from his classic book, Rules for Radicals

There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and chance the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.

To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families - more than seventy million people - whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let’s not let it happen by default.

Prophetic words indeed. The Left did ignore the blue collar working class, and it did, by and large, go to the Right by default, something which has culminated with eight years of Bush. Now many of them may well be looking for new political directions. The Left can attract them but it needs to try. Being dismissive or worse, openly contemptuous, of working class whites - stuff you hear way too much in some Left circles - is surely not the way. Forming alliances and helping them start their own organizations is.

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From a fascinating post by an American who knows Pakistan well

But what recent events demonstrate even more clearly is that the Bush administration’s policy of relying on a personal relationship with a megalomaniac manipulator like Musharraf to fight al-Qaida has strengthened that organization immeasurably and perhaps fatally damaged the U.S.’s ability to form the coalition it needs to isolate and destroy that organization.

Many, probably most or nearly all, Pakistanis don’t see the “War on Terror” as struggle of “moderates” against “extremists.” They see it as a slogan to legitimate the military’s authoritarian control.

Read the whole post. It also explains the precise mechanism by which  the Musharraf regime steals elections in a way “not visible to foreign election observers.”

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(From a tv feed via LA Indymedia)

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The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public.

“The people who were murdered on July 7 [2005 subway bombing] were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

Well put. Anyone who slaughters innocents for whatever political or religious purpose is a criminal thug. Along with being morally abhorrent, doing so usually backfires as a tactic because it inflames the other side to respond in even harsher ways.

Also, calling it a war raises non-state entities to the level of the state, a stupid tactic, because it legitimizes them as a major player, equal to the state.

May other countries follow the lead of Britain, especially the U.S.

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Musharraf wouldn’t allow it. If Bhutto had Blackwater or Armor security, she might still be alive, as the assailant probably couldn’t have gotten anywhere near her car.

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Moon of Alabama has a fine rant on the “new progressive movement” which appears to be faint bubblings from within liberaldom concerned that its leaders in DC are either comatose or ignoring them.

If you want to broaden your voter base, why not look where most of the potential votes really are? These are with the people who today do not vote. Those are mostly the poor, the disenfranchised, the people who have no reason to vote because the ‘liberals’ are not really different from the ‘conservatives’.

They of course are precisely the same groups that used to be a welcome part of the Democratic constituency. They didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the party deserted them. The poor, minorities, labor unions, the working class - they were the backbone of the Democratic vote. Until Bill Clinton, triangulation, and appealing to the swing vote, that is.

All that Democrats need to do to become a dominant force again is to genuinely become a Big Tent party again. Emphasis on “genuinely.”

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Farooq Tariq, general secretary of Labour Party Pakistan, gives an on-the-ground report of what’s happening in Pakistan now. Serious rioting. A general strike has been called.

It is very volatile, unstable, unpredictable, explosive, dangerous, impulsive, fickle and capricious political situation. It never happened before in many years that mass reaction has erupted to this degree.

The general strike was a total success. All roads were empty. No traffic at all. All shops were closed. All industrial and other institutions were completely shut down.

The Army has been given shoot to kill orders. The strike continues.

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Let’s not forget, Benazir Bhutto was removed as president twice because of corruption.

We need have no sympathy with her Islamist assassin and the extremists behind him to recognize that Bhutto was corrupt, divisive, dishonest and utterly devoid of genuine concern for her country.

And that’s from the opening paragraphs - the author is just warming up.

But the assassination may backfire on Islamists (which would be a good thing indeed.)

In killing Bhutto, the Islamists over-reached (possibly aided by rogue elements in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, one of the murkiest outfits on this earth). Just as al Qaeda in Iraq overplayed its hand and alienated that country’s Sunni Arabs, this assassination may disillusion Pakistanis who lent half an ear to Islamist rhetoric.

Extremists often think that violent actions on their part will provoke an overthrow on whatever government it is that they loathe. This rarely happens. Instead the populace, sickened by violence, often turns against them. The best possible move for the US would be to stay out of internal Pakistani politics. Any of the usual arrogant, blundering moves by the US will simply help the extremists. In fact, that’s precisely what they want the US to do.

A creature of insatiable ambition, Bhutto will now become a martyr. In death, she may pay back some of the enormous debt she owes her country.

No she won’t. She’s dead.

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Two dozen dead in Karachi

Juan Cole:

The seriousness of the situation in the streets of some of Pakistan’s important towns and cities doesn’t seem to me to be being reported in the US press and media. In contrast, Pakistani newspapers are giving chilling details of large urban centers turned into ghost towns on Friday morning.

Folks, I’ve seen civil wars and riots first hand, and revolutions from not too far away, and this situation looks pretty bad to me.

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There were multiple snipers shooting armor-piercing bullets, a decoy suicide bomb, and two of the snipers blew themselves up after firing. There was another attack at the hospital.

A working theory, according to this American source, is that Al Qaeda or affiliated jihadist groups had effectively suborned at least one unit of Pakistan’s Special Services Group, the country’s equivalent of Britain’s elite SAS commandos.

Or not. But clearly they were stone cold professionals. With help.

Police officers had frisked the 3,000 to 4,000 people attending Thursday’s rally when they entered the park, but as the speakers from Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party droned on, the police abandoned many of their posts.

Tip: FDL, who also has a fascinating piece by someone who knew Bhutto as a student at Harvard and says she was being groomed, even then, to lead Pakistan.

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So how did the assassin get close enough to Bhutto to be able to shoot her at point blank range? And how did they know when she’d be out of the protective bubble of her car? This seems a well-planned hit that had inside help.

The killing was clearly intended to create chaos and a collapse of the government. Indeed, Musharraf may not last in power much longer.

But why would anyone want to see the 4 horseman unleashed? It helps to recall Lenin. The early revolutionary leaders in Russia wanted to have a new democratic government - in effect they wanted to replace the Tsar with a kind of English system. Ms Bhutto = Kerensky.

Lenin had no ambitions to simply take over the existing state - he wanted to create a Theocracy - a new ideal state based on a religion. AQ have the same desire.

But Lenin had a disciplined mass party and enjoyed broad support. AQ has no such support, not even in Pakistan.

They want chaos in Pakistan that will lead to conflict with India. They want the US to back order and Musharraf so that when M falls, the loss for the US will be even greater. They want Europeans to fear the Muslim immigrants and to have a reaction thus building up the tension inside Europe.

But at some point chaos becomes no one’s friend. Even gun runners and drug smugglers need basic societal stability. Once chaos starts, almost by definition, the outcome is unpredictable.

This creates the ideal conditions for a tribal theocracy.

The brilliance of this move is that while I think I can see how it can all turn out, I can’t think of how I would do anything but follow the script that they have forced upon us. Like in 1914, the powder charges have been laid over 40 years. Now the fuse is lit - the bang is inevitable.

Maybe not. We don’t have to take the bait. There’s no need for the US to do anything militarily and every reason to not do so. Perhaps the absolute best thing the US could do, both ethically and in terms of power politics, is to let Pakistan handle their own problem. Not only would the world breathe a sigh of relief that the US is finally acting sensibly, it would also defuse much of the threat from AQ.

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Some thoughtful, if apocalyptic, views on the assassination from blogs

Moon of Alabama

Who did it?

Many people will point to Musharraf, as being behind the assassination, but according to the BBC, someone shot Bhutto and then blew himself up. Suicide bombing is not the hallmark of the Pakistani military, but of the takfiris.

Bhutto had promised to fight the U.S.’s war of terror against the Taliban and takfiris in the tribal North West Frontier State, certainly reason enough for those folks to kill her.

Then there’s the ISI, the shadowy secret police of Pakistan, considered among the best in the world, with murky ties to Al Qaida, Taliban, and more. In reality, anyone could have done it.

Futurejacked

With the death of Benazir Bhutto, we are now entering worst-case-scenario territory. A Pakistan that has devolved into Iraq-style globalguerrilla violence will create a huge node of instability, threatening India and Iran (not that I am losing sleep over that one) and pretty much guaranteeing that Afghanistan will not find stability for decades to come.

A destabilized Iran does no one any good and would simply spread the chaos. Nor does a destabilized Middle East. But we may get that anyway.

Robert Paterson

It has been easy for us to label all of this “Terror”.

I call it the Messy World.

Where there is a belt of so called states where the system shuts down all hope of social progress and produces millions of angry young men as a result. Where in the west, our huge bureaucracies impede any movement and our new belief system of Political Correctness precludes the development of an appreciation for the threat that is before us.

So here we are on the brink.

When extremists jack religion and use it for purposes of political manipulation and control then much madness can result, especially in the absence of any competing belief systems. Given the repressive nature of those regimes, which too often was backed by the US, political dissent was eliminated or marginalized, leaving the angry now no place to go but to Islamists.

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Reader Joe Hartley comments on our The problems on the Left post.

Most American citizens are so wedded to the concept of the United States as the Chosen Land, incapable of doing any wrong, that all anti-war activities will ultimately be meaningless until Americans change their view of themselves in the world. It didn’t happen after Vietnam; if anything, Americans are becoming more and more Wilsonian, imbued with a Protestant ethic of making the world perfect (and, not so coincidentally, in Our image.)

The differences between the Left and the Right on this issue are not because the left (or the Democrats) are weak or cowardly, but because there is no substantial difference once you believe that you have the right to intervene to change history or to rescue people. It will look somewhat different at the margins, but the logical incoherence we see is because neither Left nor Right truly disagree with the concept of American intervention around the world.

That’s precisely why Congressional Democrats don’t oppose the war or much of what Bush does. Most of them are in basic agreement that the US can and should invade countries. American exceptionalism isn’t just the domain of neocons. Yet the economy is wobbling and the wars are going badly - so of course that’s when cognitive dissonance often kicks in the hardest. It reminds me of the current sense of unreality in the stock market now. Uh no. Everything is not fine.

Interesting, isn’t it, that those presidential candidates at the left and right margins, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, are the most opposed to the wars?

I don’t have any magic answers. If Americans could see themselves as other nations do and witness their own heavy-handedness, maybe, but Americans have been so self-congratulatory for so long that no one can image a different reality where we do not go forth looking for dragons to slay. American would have to move beyond its adolescent self-indulgence toward something that approaches political maturity. I don’t see that happening anytime soon since it’s a LOT more fun to believe oneself to be invincible and of spotless morality.

It’s not that we need to speak truth to power and then people will understand. There’s a conscious desire not to understand. The Left will not break through that with angry protests or accusatory tirades. As I’ve mentioned before, we need a better story, a new approach, a way to get people to want to change. The antiwar movement needs to do what The Breakthrough Institute wants to do with the environmental movement. Forget the doomsaying. Make it optimistic. Don’t just preach to the choir, get everyone involved. Think big.

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The Spy Who Billed Me questions why DoD is claiming national security in withholding data about their outsourced contracts.

Well, lookie here.

22% of the $537 million of unclassified DIA contracts were subject to “full and open competition.” 30.6% of their unclassified contracts had only one bidder.

The situation at the NGA is similar, although their $6 billion of contracting dwarfs the DIA.

After examining the data and finding nothing even remotely of interest to potential evildoers, she concludes.

Again, I challenge anyone to show me how this data could help the enemy. It can’t. Unless, of course, in this case the enemy is the American taxpayer.

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From C&L

Wexler was hoping to get 50,000 signatures and it didn’t take long — it took just 24 hours to meet his goal and the signatures are still rolling in.

The more signatures Wexler gets, the more clout they’ll have with members of the Judiciary Committee who are on the fence.  Let’s show Wexler the power of the netroots to get behind and support elected officials who are representing our values and desires.

He’s got 61,889 signatures now.

Sign the petition

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