G.O.P.'s New Plan: Only The Rich May Run

If you want to see an animation of the 21 named hurricanes in the 2005 season, from Arlene to Wilma, go here, click on the arrow and wait for it to load.

I don't know why it should astound me that the media - virtually all right-wing owned at this point - has now created a spin about the hurricanes in which they, cleverly, mention Global Warming, but only do so to say that that this spate in hurricanes is "just part of a cycle" due to warming seas.

Hmmm. Warming seas.

Excuse me, but why are the seas so much warmer as we proceed through this la-de-da-no-problem-folks-ignore-that-man-behind-the-curtain cycle?

Could it be because Global Warming has caused the warming of those seas? Does the fact that 50% of Arctic ice has melted in the last 50 years tell them that this isn't an ordinary 25-year cycle, but part of a much bigger picture?

Nah, more people might actually wake up from their ignorance and demand changes if media admitted that the heat and smog we're created - that our industries have created - have turned us into Planet Greenhouse.

We are going to continue to get wacked until people wake up. Mother Nature is fighting back and in an all-out war, guess what? We're going to lose any way you cut it.

Speaking of getting wacked, today the New York Times finally printed a story that, after five years of watching the insanity unfold under Bush, should be anti-climactic, old news.

The headline reads: Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run By Cabal

It has been so clear since the days before we entered Iraq that our foreign policy, most notably represented by the debacle in Iraq, is the deformed brain child of a handful of wing-nuts, the main players of which are Rumsfeld and Cheney.

Yet, here we are two-and-a-half years later still getting wacked by Bush et al and still in denial about it.

Thanks to the great job by reich-wing media, Republican lockstep and the masters of spin and deception surrounding Bush et al - including Rove - the fact that this administration is completely dysfunctional is not only "news" but, hilariously - although in a dark way - "controversial."

Come on. For anyone paying attention for the last five years, it's not controversial at all, but the truth.

Wake up, people.

One quote says it all:

"Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that 'if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.'"

Oh we see it, those of us who've been looking for five years, have seen it and it makes our stomachs turn.

The tip of that iceberg in terms of the incredible incompetence and heartlessness - the disconnect from the reality of how their policies affect real people - is revealed today in the testimony of FEMA employee Marty J. Bahamonde.

His desperate e-mails to FEMA officials regarding the dire situation affecting people in New Orleans and the levee breaches were ignored, so he sent one directly to Michale Brown stating: "I know you know, the situation is past critical. Hotels are kicking people out, thousands gathering in the streets with no food or water."'

An aide to Mr. Brown responded hours later that Director Michael Brown would need a restaurant in Baton Rouge that night. "It is very important that time is allowed for Mr. Brown to eat dinner," the message said.

Like Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned, Brown ate while New Orleans drowned.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything's either been gutted or is on the table (such as the new move to privatize our national parks), part of the ongoing agenda to kill this country and all she had come to stand for: equality, opportunity, fairness, intelligence, preservation (of her land, water, air) and real liberty other than the choice to buy product a or b.

Fortunately, Wilkerson's got the credentials to say that Bush's adminstration is dysfunctional. Besides being Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff at the State Department from 2001 to early 2005, Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College.

It's so tragic, so wounding when you love your country and know what she could have been after Clinton. With our debt paid down and the love of the world after 9/11, we could have completely reshaped our energy priorities and created an entirely new philosophical paradigm promoting peace and sustainability.

Nope, we chose the $300 tax cut - who cares that billionaires get enough to fund some cities for a year as a result - and the "we're not changing, we'll just drop bombs and take Iraq's oil, and, now that that's done, how about we go out for Chinese tonight and stop at the mall afterwards?" mentality.

Now the coals are heaping upon our heads. This country's sin of not paying attention and electing such a selfish, stupid person as this President and his cabel of arrogant and self-serving fascists is coming home to each of us, up close and personal.

But it is said a people gets the leaders it deserves. If you, as a voter, insist upon remaining inept at understanding science, politics and the nature of the world and our place in it - while arrogantly proclaiming the U.S. can do whatever it likes - then you get someone like Bush.

If you understand, but you're too busy or "angry at the system" to get involved, refusing to study the issues, vote or support a good candiate for local, state and federal offices, you get someone like Bush anyway.

And those in perpetual denial who dared to label us "unpatriotic" in order to silence us from speaking about the lies, spite, corruption, ineptitude and callousness creating disasters for us?

Or those who have been justifiers or apologists for Bush, his henchmen and his policies while slandering Democrats?

I don't even want to go there. There would be a special place in hell reserved for them, if there were any hell other than the one we are seeing unfold right here, on earth.

As Dr. Phil says, there are no victims, only volunteers. And everyone who remained ignorant about who Mr. Bush was prior to both elections, who he surrounded himself with and what his agenda was going to be, is just as much to blame as those who love his agenda and would bring back poor houses and torture.

Democracy can be exhausting. It can require turning off American Idol and watching Senate debates instead. It can require actually learning that the earth goes around the sun and not vice-versa. (I'm talking to the 1 in 5 adult Americans who are confused on that issue.) It requires voting and being engaged and caring what the hell happens to the rest of your countrymen.

Oh, and it requires learning about history and science and getting over the acute insecurity that makes small-minded people reject facts because it's easier to deny them.

Our nation's people - especially those voting Republican - have been intellectually and morally lazy. Instead of studying, they like to label those interested in knowledge, language, science and the arts as "elitists." They think money - not the quality of our collective soul - is the measure of our lives.

Meanwhile the real elitists - the ones with private jets, five homes and no tie to reality who are controlling us all - have gotten to turn their pitchforks on those parts of government that actually helped people live, like schools, FEMA, Head Start, fire departments, Medicaid and those agencies that worked to give us air to breath, forests to visit and levees that could hold back water.

But whatever you name, there is nothing in this country that this adminstration and this Republican controlled Congress hasn't poisoned and diminished and overcharged us for.

Yet, Democrats helped them get elected through laziness and arrogance. They betrayed their roots, becoming "Republican Light" while still distancing themselves from all talk about God. Portrayed as godless, the DNC leadership failed this country and allowed the anti-Christ to do a cake-walk into power.

There's been a multitude of sins to which we've all, in one way or another, contributed. As more and more of us pay the price it will all become very real, up close and personal.

I predict few of us will remain unscathed. Before we're back on track I predict there will be no one in any economic class who has not suffered, be it from the war, hurricanes or some pandemic, as payment for our own ineptitude in allowing such ignorant and callous hooligans to take the reins of our government and declare government's task is NOT to look out for the welfare of it's citizens.

Yet now Republicans - in political danger due to their incredible list of follies and corruption - want to make their coup complete by getting rid of the $3 contributions we make to fund presidential campaigns for candidates poorer than George Bush.

If you want more George Bushes, Dick Cheneys, Don Rumsfelds, Karl Roves, et al in government from now on, then stop reading.

If you don't, then read the following editorial and send a letter or an e-mail to your Representatives and Senators today telling them you won't stand for it.

It takes time, but time will be all we have, eventually, as we look around at our nation of ruin.

October 21, 2005
New York Times Editorial

Hiding Behind Katrina

It takes gall to use Hurricane Katrina as cover to undermine the democratic process, but that's what conservative ideologues are attempting in the House. Among their budget-cutting proposals - being sold as "tough choices" for America to pay for the Gulf Coast recovery - is a startling plan to kill public financing in the presidential election system.

That program, financed by $3 checkoffs volunteered by taxpayers on their returns, has been a bulwark of presidential elections. It was enacted about 30 years ago, after the Watergate scandal exposed the big-money bagmen corrupting the heart of the political process. It makes politics more competitive for underdogs, more involving for the public and less reliant on floods of special-interest campaign money.

Congress should indeed turn its attention to the program - not to end it, but to repair its outdated limits. The primary calendar has become so front-loaded that the candidates with the strongest sources of private donations are now choosing to skip the limitations of public financing so they can spend early and furiously, leaving other challengers at a disadvantage.

The primary subsidy formula needs to be made more realistic to level the field, and the checkoff amount should be increased. Candidates should not be allowed to have it both ways by feeding on private money in the primaries, then switching to public money in the general election, as President Bush and Senator John Kerry did last year.

Under the current system, participating candidates in the primaries receive matching funds for the first $250 of each private contribution. This one-to-one formula should be increased to two-to-one matching or more as a way to invite more of the small donations that began showing up impressively last year from Internet users.

Sponsors of the House proposal must know they are wrong because they are trying to tuck the change into a budget bill without a public hearing and debate. If they want budget cuts, they should focus on government waste, not open elections.