Cottonmouth Press

As of today, Sunday, Feb. 24, 2008 Barack Obama has raised $132 million for his race and Hillary Clinton has raised $121 million. The television pundits are saying that she has not raised enough to compete.

Hello? When $121 million is not enough to carry a person forward in a race, you know something is rotten.
Stop for a moment and contemplate where those millions had to come from.

Then, contemplate how this long primary season leaves candidates open to more and more favors owed to big special interests.
Can’t make it through September? Thank you Gas and Oil Industry.

Need a little bump in January? Take a meeting with Big Pharmaceuticals. Strike a little deal: No ceiling on drug prices in the next health care reform package.

Got to buy 15 hours of prime time TV ads in the farm belt? Hello, Ethanol Makers.

But that’s not even my chief complaint.

What insults me more is that the front-loaded primary dates disanfranchise voters in the states that come after the Iowa, New Hampshire and Potomac primaries. When the results of the first three major vote-counts were in, my guy, John Edwards, bowed out. Ninety-five percent of voters never got a chance to vote for him or Denis Kucunich or Joe Biden.

This front-loaded system makes privileged, super-star voters out of those who go to the polls first.

They get wooed, wined and dined.

They get to meet the Clintons on their own front porches and town squares.

They get to sit in the glow of a winter fireplace sipping nog with Obama and Edwards, basking in the candidates’ desperate appeals for their approval. Farmers in Iowa and Yankees in New England get a seat at the banquet.
We get the scraps.

The current system of staggered voting dates not only lessens the choices of those who vote later; it not only makes beggars out of the candidates as the season drags on, it does one more dangerous thing to our Democracy [sic].

The current primary system has become a parimutuel horse race in which we bet on candidates and bet against others as the months wear on. Today, the pollsters announced the ODDS — as if this were the Preakness – between McCain and Clinton, and McCain and Obama.

In the figures given on nationwide television, the political bookies have declared the odds as follows: In a McCain-Clinton matchup, he beats her 48-40. But in a McCain-Obama matchup, Obama beats the GOP pale horse 48-40. Now, what Democratic voter in the remaining states of Texas and Ohio (both prized, delegate-rich states) wants to queer those odds?  With Obama named as the sure winner against McCain, will the remaining voters risk a chance on Clinton?

I think that’s perfidious.

Whether you like Clinton or not, you see that the system is weighted so that Democrat voters get frightened of making a genuine choice based on their genuine estimation  of her.

“What? She would lose in the General Election against  McCain? Omigod, Ethel, we HAVE TO vote for Obama, then.”

This is a plea for an early, universal primary date. The parties would pick a long weekend in March, allowing workers on all shifts the time and place to participate. Results would be released as polls close at the same time, coast to coast.

Thus, we could choose from the complete slate of candidates: From Romney to Kucinich, all along the spectrum, all names would be on the ballots.

Thus, with a short season of fundraising and spending, candidates would not need to go to the money well and draw from special interest groups.

Thus, there would be no presumptive winners or losers.

It would, as we love to say about elections in other nations, be a “free and fair election.”

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In a nation that is unparalleled for PR and marketing, it is small wonder that someone came up with a euphemism for the unthinkable treatment of another human.
It’s called “Rendition,” a word that used to mean a way of performing music.
“He gave his rendition of  a Bach cantata.”
“She gave her rendition of a Verdi aria.”

A movie opening this week in most cities tells the real story of how the U.S. treats those it wants to make disappear. We do not call it kidnapping with torture and endless imprisonment. That would be too upsetting to the gentle voters who still think that the war in Iraq is about freedom. We call it “Rendition,” you see. But inhumanity by any other name stinks as bad.

I find it interesting that one of the tortures seen in the movie, a technique called “waterboarding,” was a topic in  this week’s real-life hearings to confirm Bush’s latest nominee for U.S. Attorney General.
Michael Mukasey, a longtime federal judge known to both parties in Washington, was questioned about torture as follows:

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) asked Mukasey whether an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, known as waterboarding, is constitutional. We all hoped he would say “Hell, No.”
Instead, the nominee did not take the bait. He sidestepped the issue of whether waterboarding actually is torture.
“IF it amounts to torture,” Mukasey said carefully, “then it is not constitutional.”

Tell that to a man who is repeatedly submerged in water until unconscious but brought back up just short of drowning.
We do that, you know. Yes, we, this country, this government, WE do that among other things to people and some other things even worse.
I refuse to call the imprisonment and torture of “suspicious persons” for years, without showing them the light of day by a tricked out new name. We have to call it what it is. UNACCEPTABLE.
Calling it “Rendition” is a cover story.
Don’t let anyone fool you.

A Canadian citizen detained by U.S. authorities in 2002 on suspicion of having links to al-Qaida, and sent to Syria where he was tortured, has testified for the first time before a congressional committee. Maher Arar addressed a panel examining extraordinary rendition, in which U.S. authorities have sent terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation.

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The Bush administration is beating the war drums again, and this time the target country is Iran. Amid the growing buzz to that effect, a group of Peace protesters marched on the nation’s Capitol this weekend. We have nothing if we do not have hope that we can somehow make our government listen to the voices of reason.

How to maintain hope in this time of many plagues (environmental disasters around the corner, a president who lies to the people and condones torture and domestic spying, a national debt that will cripple us for the next three generations and the threat from Al Qaeda on every side)?

I cannot answer for you. But the answer came for me this weekend (as I carried my M-Peach sign down Pennsylvania Avenue) in the form of five new friends, each of whom inspired me to believe again that the spirit of goodness is alive in America. It often happens at protest rallies and marches that you get caught up in the moment and feel a rush of happiness because those around you share your beliefs. That’s a commonplace.

However, the five people I met over the past weekend were exceptionally hard workers in the Progressive community. Aaron is an environmentalist teaching others about sustainable energy and earth-friendly practices. He blogs at www.poweringdown.blogspot.com Grace is a healthcare worker in North Carolina who created a free health clinic for state employees and their families.
Diane, who had never practiced civil disobedience before this Sept. 15 march, rushed the barricades in front of the Capitol in solidarity with Iraqi War Vets and was taken to jail (all 90 pounds of her) for the night. She emerged the next morning not chastened but glowing from the experience of talking all night to veterans about their commitment. She and her husband, Dan, are going to show their photos from the march to friends and also show them a documentary, “Why We Fight.”  They are building a Peace movement in Cleveland.

Annie, who has the energy of a tsunami when she’s revved up about a cause, is a MoveOn organizer in Florida. She is building grassroots activism a stone’s throw from a major military base in a “red state.”

What struck me when talking to these and other new friends at the Peace and Impeachment rally was that they do not, and will not, give up. Even when faced with overwhelming odds, like a government hell-bent on expanding war into Iran, they have dug in their heels and they are working harder than ever.

As Grace said to me this morning over coffee in downtown Washington, D.C., “Never give up. Never stop. Period.”
That gives me hope and strength in this time of cholera.

M-PEACH

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It hasn’t received much recognition in previous years, but today, Aug. 6, is a noteworthy anniversary as well — six years ago today, the president, on vacation in Crawford, was handed an intelligence briefing document. It was titled, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.”

Thus begins an interesting blog — An Ignoble Anniversary — by Steve Brenen in the Carpetbagger Report. Benen goes on to detail how the news was delivered by a CIA agent and how Bush heard the briefing and replied: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”

I considered what has changed about the USA since that date six years ago. We now have warrantless wiretapping and email reading and snooping on ordinary folks.

We now have a Patriot Act (Ha - some P.R. agency sat up late thinking what to call that one; I bet they rejected quite a few, like the Fascist Society Act and the Authoritarian Regime Act and the Freedoms Suppression Act). We now have legal torture and legal indefinite imprisonment.

We now have a U.S. budget that spends more on a foreign war in one year than the entire budget of this nation from 1776 to 1905.  Ahh, but there’s more.

Our judicial branch of the government, unlike that of our founding fathers, are political activists. There are coverups at the highest levels of government for the misdeeds of a president and vice president, such that they will NEVER be prosecuted.

And what of the Congress? Did we not elect a Democrat majority to Washington in the hope of undoing some of George Bush’s damage? When faced with TWO QUESTIONS of tremendous importance to the voters, this Congress turned spineless and gutless on us.

Question one: Should we reinvest $100 billion in the continuing Iraq War? Fearing they’d look soft on Bin Laden and the Al Quaeda boogeymen, the Congress peed themselves and said, “Uh, okay.”

Question two — Should warrantless wiretapping continue unchecked? The Congress again shivered in its shoes and voted AGAINST THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE! “Umm, okay, I guess,” they said and gave the fascists more powers of the police state.

Ask yourself what might be different today had ANY OTHER CANDIDATE FROM THE 2000 SLATE been president and received that Aug. 6, 2001 message about Bin Laden’s intentions. You know and I know this would be a very different anniversary.

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From a story by Spencer S. Hsu in the Washington Post’s “Federal Insider,” comes this interesting factoid  about the trouble in our Department of Homeland Security:

“The Bush administration has failed to fill roughly a quarter of the top leadership posts at the Department of Homeland Security, creating a ‘gaping hole’ in the nation’s preparedness for a terrorist attack or other threat, according to a congressional report released Monday.”

Currently, there are 138 vacancies among the top 575 DHS positions, with the most voids reported in six sectors: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Coast Guard (our shorelines), policy-making, legal and intelligence sections, and immigration.

In other words, should disaster strike us on the coasts, via hurricanes, via intelligence-gathering and via terrorist immigrants, we are up shit’s creek, y’all.

The report on the DHS staffing problem was researched and written by the majority staff of the House Homeland Security Committee.

Putting aside for a moment the probability that we are no safer under this DHS than we were when terrorists struck in 2001, let’s consider the reasons for all these top-level vacancies.
Politics, politics, politics. And politics.

According to the Washington Post story by Hsu, the DHS employs the most senior political appointees in the federal government. PLAINLY PUT, Bush fills top agency posts with people who walk, talk and think like him.

Now, however, he can’t find 138 people who want to go to work at DHS in the jobs that are currently open.  “The department faces high turnover because top officials are in demand in a private sector willing to pay lucrative salaries,” the report goes on to say. “It is heavily dependent on contractors, yet its staff to manage them is overstretched. Partisan political combat over homeland security issues has also made jobs less attractive.”

Of those top posts that HAVE  been filled by Bush cronies, some of those guys appear to be, in a word, unqualified.

For instance,  Julie Myers, who heads up  Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has never been confirmed by the Senate since she went in there in 2005 as a “recess appointee.” Some lawmakers have questioned her political connections and management qualifications.

Or, take W. Ross Ashley III, nominated by Bush as head of FEMA.  Part of his job is to oversee huge federal  grants (we are talking billions of dollars).  Ashley was a senior executive for the Homeland Security contractor, ChoicePoint, but he has no experience in the area of federal grants. (If someone would please check the Bush campaign contributions to see how much ChoicePoint gave, I’d like to know.)

I have fondly called this president Mr. Grits-for-Brains in the past.
But now that I think about it, that’s unfair to grits.

The Department of Homeland Security was never my favorite federal agency, to start with. I liked it when Immigration and FEMA and the Coast Guard were separate from each other and decentralized.  I believe things work better that way.
 
So I wouldn’t shed crocodile tears because DHS had vacancies except for the fact that IT HAS A JOB TO DO AND THAT JOB IS TO PROTECT US FROM HARM.

Oh, you say, don’t be naive. Nothing can REALLY protect the USA from evildoers. Especially not a bloated, underfunded agency overstaffed by Bush campaign contributors.  And to you I say, it doesn’t HAVE TO  be that way. A REAL president who REALLY  cared about the safety of the American people would step up to the plate, fill the slots with QUALIFIED people and turn off the money spigot to the Iraq war.

Then we could pay for the Coast Guard and FEMA to keep us safe the next time the waters start to rise.

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