Awake America
America Awake
The serpent's in your garden
And Hannibal at your gate

Glory, greed, and gluttony
The war of sins play on
Master, martyr, emperor
So sate you on your young

© Jill Stone

More screaming from Liberal Street Fighter

Study for the Head of a Screaming Pope, 1952 - Francis Bacon

Almost one year ago, I first posted Vichy Dems at Liberal Street Fighter and DailyKos, on April 24th, in response to the Democrats offering compromises on Bush's extremist judges:

The Dems are winning the PR war on these issues, AND THEY ARE OFFERING COMPROMISES?!?!

Tell me again how great Reid is. Let's hear the latest round of excuses as to why once again they will sell us out because they don't want to feel uncomfortable when bumping into their "collegues" in the cloakroom, or is it because the lobbyists are asking for everybody to work together?

Tell me again that they are "fighting dems" and not spineless Vichy Bastards that hold the doors open while the Republicans and lobbyists rob us all blind.

This is, of course, a running pattern with the party leaders. Just enough of them cross the aisle to give the Republicans what they want while still giving everyone votes to cover themselves with the voters at home. Bankruptcy, ANWAR, Torquemada Gonzales ... we all know the long, long list of failures and betrayals, yet we all keep hoping for the best, we keep cutting them some more slack, while the last appeaser Daschle settles into his cozy new job on K Street.

Support the real champions of the base, but stop cutting slack for the likes of Biden, Reid and the other center and center/right "leaders" so willing to work across the aisle. The continuing Faustian bargains with the right, the dividing up of districts so that both parties have "safe seats", the elimination of alternate voices, the willingness of Schumer and others to sell out their base for "centrist" candidates ... it's all of a piece.

They are not fighting for us, and they won't until we stop providing mindless support for the appeasement to the new one party state.  

Liberal Street Fighter

What else are we going to "privatize" in this country?

Storm-Wracked Parish Considers Hired Guns

ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. -- Maj. Pete Tufaro scanned the fenced lot packed with hundreds of stark white trailers soon to be inhabited by Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Shaking his head, he predicted the cramped quarters would ignite fights, hide criminals and become an incubator for crime, posing another test for his cash-strapped sheriff's department, which furloughed 206 of its 390 officers after the storm.

Tufaro thinks the parish has the solution: DynCorp International LLC, the Texas company that provided personal security to Afghan President Hamid Karzai and is one of the largest security contractors in Iraq. If the Federal Emergency Management Agency approves the sheriff's department's proposal, which would cost $70 million over three years, up to 100 DynCorp employees would be deputized to be make arrests, carry weapons, and dress in the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Department khaki and black uniforms.

xposted from Liberal Street Fighter

The constant drumbeat of bad news, the ineffectiveness of the Democratic Party as a whole ... some days it's hard to put fingers to keyboard and put anything up here. Tired of reading about blasphemous cartoons (why is it that people who claim to have the most certainty about the meaning of life always have the thinnest skins?), I certainly didn't feel that I had anything more to add to it. Ditto for Bush's latest fear-mongering and the scare directed at the legislative branch just as it's beginning to show some glimmers of doing it's job: it's just the same old tune, rearranged as a dirge.

So, what's a blogger to do? Well, sometimes pleasant suprises await as you flip link to link, and I stumbled across a Democrat who actually spoke clearly and firmly for values I hold dear.

Spitzer Strongly Defends Abortion Rights

"I want to make it clear from the start that if the new Supreme Court turns its back on women's privacy and limits or overturns Roe vs. Wade, I will do everything in my power to preserve that right here in New York," Mr. Spitzer said in remarks at New York Law School, where he was joined by his wife Silda, his 78-year-old mother Anne, and abortion rights supporters.

'There has been much debate about late-term abortion," Mr. Spitzer said moments later in his 17-minute address. "I want to be unequivocal that I support the right of a woman and her doctor to consider all necessary and appropriate options, including, as a last resort, late-term abortion when her life or health is at risk."

Wow, that wasn't so hard, now was it Senator Clinton?

Spitzer is reportedly positioning himself in case Nassau County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi enters the primary race for Governor. Mr. Suozzi, who has been a supporter of women's health freedoms in the past, has recently taken a well-thumbed page from the wishy-washy fare-thee-well wing of the Democratic Party.

Mr. Suozzi, a Roman Catholic, supports legalized abortion, but his plan to reduce the number of abortions helps position him as a moderate. In bringing disparate groups together, he also portrays himself as a conciliator and problem-solver.

Although Mr. Suozzi declined to respond to Naral, his aides called the group's criticism unjustified. At a news conference, he announced eight grants — most of them are for programs promoting adoption, housing for unwed mothers and school programs for teenagers intended to prevent unwanted pregnancies — all of which Naral supports.

What drew Naral's criticism were two grants to a Protestant-affiliated group and an anti-abortion group, to promote abstinence.

NARAL aside, this continuous embrace of so-called "centrist" policies serves only to help lock in the removal of options from women facing the hard choices of life when it comes to their reproductive health. Even though these proposals are always presented as being about "bringing people together", but all they really do is allow the forced pregnancy activists to codify more and more of their repressive agenda. As Mr. Spitzer puts it:

"As a public figure, I feel that the debate about a woman's right to make decisions about her reproductive health should not be about tinkering with a point here and there, or shading an argument to placate one crowd or another," Mr. Spitzer said. "It should be about courage of conviction and strength of belief."

If only more public figures, more supposed Democrats, would make such strong and firm stands about the freedoms and civil rights of the American people.

Crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter

"How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right." Black Hawk - Sauk

Do you ever think about how much of your life depends on faith? No, not the Hairy-Thunderer-in-the-Sky kind of faith. The faith that your green light means it's safe to proceed, and that the man in the car ahead waiting at the intersection knows that his red light means wait. The paycheck that lands on your desk, or appears in your bank account ... how much do you COUNT on it happening, and for the printing on that check to actually MEAN something? For that matter, pull a dollar bill out of your wallet. There is no gold, no silver, no firm asset or physical collateral behind that dollar. It has worth because an entire global economy made up of people have DECIDED and AGREE it has worth. This is a fundamental kind of faith.

People are often suprised how strongly I feel about Abortion being legal and freely available to women. I'm a white guy, middle class, raised in the "heartland" ... I look like I could be a talk radio fan. My "extreme" liberal point of view often suprises people. "Why do you care?" questions alternate with a suspicion that I just want to make sure my options are open if an "accident" occurs.

Well, I do have a selfish reason, I guess, but not in the way people would think. My life, ALL of our lives, are enriched when people are free. I honestly and deeply believe this basic humanist principle. Who can say how many poets, writers, doctors, scientists, engineers, entrepeneurs, singers and so on NEVER CAME TO BE, all because we as a culture have insisted for most of our history in making half the human race slaves to biological imperative?

stumbling over from Liberal Street Fighter

I really wanted to get a good hate on about the new piece in The American Prospect, regaling us with the latest scheme that the Democrats are considering to win back the trust and votes of Americans:

In the great debate about how Democrats can stage a comeback (beyond simply waiting for the coming Republican implosion that never seems to arrive), American Environics rejected some of the more popular recommendations out there. Rather than focusing on reframing the Democratic message, as Berkeley linguistics and cognitive science professor George Lakoff has recommended, or on redoubling Democratic efforts to persuade Americans to become economic populists, as another school of thought suggests, the American Environics team argued that the way to move voters on progressive issues is to sometimes set aside policies in favor of values. By focusing on “bridge values,� they say, progressives can reach out to constituents of opportunity who share certain fundamental beliefs, even if the targeted parties don’t necessarily share progressives’ every last goal. In that assessment, Shellenberger and Nordhaus are representative of an increasingly influential school of thought within the Democratic Party.

Warmed over "values" advice, only from a marketing point of view, targeted demographics using the most updated post-modern tools of the advertising trade, slicing and dicing Americans not into groups of citizens to be polled, but as consumers to be sold, and the product is ... the "world's oldest political party". Same old shit in bright shiny new boxes. Bring back the Dixiecrats to woo voters:

Today’s average American “worker� is, in short, very much on his or her own -- too prosperous to be eligible for most government assistance programs and, because of job laws that date back three quarters of a century, unable to unionize. Such isolation and atomization have not led to a new wave of social solidarity and economic populism, however. Instead, these changes have bred resentment toward those who do have outside aid, whether from government or from unions, and an escalating ethos of every man for himself. Against that ethos, voters have increasingly flocked to politicians who recognize that the combination of relative affluence and relative isolation has created an opening for cultural appeals.

crossposted from Liberal Street Fighter

It is in the interests of the ruling class of this country that the divisions between us be maintained. We are carefully separated into racial groups, income groups, educational groups ... into easily catagorized demographics. Easier to target commercials for things we don't need, easier to target agit-prop and hatred and envy ... easier to use words as rhetorical and psychological IED's to blow people away from one another. Economics is politics is opportunity is war is love is community is ... EVERYTHING. All connected, but better for the hoi polloi to remain blind to that.

Today we remember Dr. King's legacy on his time-shifted birthday, a life commemorated at least partly by the man who actually WAS elected President in 2000, only he didn't want it bad enough then to fight for it. Ever since he's been giving stronger and more impassioned speeches about the threat to a better America posed by the criminal cabal that occupies the White House, the Legislature and increasingly the Federal Courts. Al Gore highlighted something that connects Dr. King's struggles with the threats we face now from our own government:

Liberal Street Fighter

So how does it feel lefties? Once again, you've taken that leap of faith, hoped for the best, only to have your hopes dashed. A runaway at the bus station, led by the "nice" man, he buys you a burger with your own money, promises to help, yet here you lay on the cold tile of the dirty bathroom floor, the reverb of the station announcer washing over you as it sinks in that you're prey, you've been punked, you're turned out and working against your own interests. Too little, too late ... what to do?

It was bad, what you were running away from, with little future. Pretty promises echoed through hard hallways. "I'll look after you," he promised, "don't worry. After all, what choice do you have?"

Reid, Schumer, Emmanuel ... not to mention the Big Blog Boyos ... pimps, turning you out, emptying your pockets, letting you strut when it's convenient, but always within limits. "Don't worry, I'll protect you when it really counts!"

Punked, again.

It's time to walk away. It's time to realize that your paranoia was justified. It's time to understand that sometimes patriots have to look far down the road.

The Democratic Party is dead to progressivism. Yes, there are individual office holders we can look upon as allies, but it's time to remember the lessons of the past. The Dixiecrats live, only now they serve the Corporations rather than the descendents of the plantation owners, but it's also time to realize that they are the same thing. America, born from a feudal state, has always had elements that longed for feudalism. They are ascendant now, and the Democratic Party serves them.

It's time to walk away from that dirty bus station bathroom. Leave the pimp behind.

We who believe that the best future, the best world, the best country, rests in an open society, a society where people pursue their own happiness, where diversity and opportunity and equality reign ... we are, and always have been, a minority. We know that great creators, neighbors, friends, teachers and students rest within EVERY group of people. That is a rare view. We need to remember that the suffragists, the abolitionists, the humanists, the feminists and dreamers and labor leaders and HOPEFUL were always freaks, always the odd kid who had to run away from home. It's no fluke that the bluest cities are full of people who RAN, who struck out into the world to create themselves. Americans like to tell themselves that this country respects and supports people like that, but our history shows that we've done everything BUT support the iconoclast, the explorer, the creators and artists and scientists and freethinkers. We're a Know-Nothing nation. Wear their petty scorn as a badge of honor, because you KNOW they'll be looking to you for what is cool, what to think, what to do in due course.

Embrace your otherness, and quit being suckered. Not another dime, not another millimeter of boot leather ... the national Democratic Party is dead to you, whether you care about feminism or civil rights or labor or health care or the environment ... it doesn't matter. Support local leaders. Support national candidates who support your values, but not another penny, not another mile, not another phone call or pixel for the national Party, or even for the national activist groups. They've sold you out to the corporations and a highly motivated movement of zealots who worship an imagined nineteenth century.

Remember those who've gone before. What we hope to preserve and expand took centuries to obtain. Current events are a setback, but we can join the fight again. It may take the rest of your life, but us creative types KNOW that the process is at least as important as the end product, right? The generation before us sat back on their heels too quickly. Time to go to war again. We're already in a cold Civil War, as Peter Daou put it. Time to make it hot.

Walk away from the national party. Work locally. Withhold your vote from candidates that are nowhere near your values, and not another dime to these bastards who turn us out then pretend not to know us.

Runaways throughout time have known the power in pooling resources, going underground, working together. Find compatriots of like mind, and do what you can. Whether it's writing or running a soup kitchen or manning a phone bank, follow your heart. No more modern Dixiecrats. They take us for granted, think we can't survive without their "protection". It's time to prove them wrong. It'll be a long fight, but lets face it ... we have no other choice.

Liberal Street Fighter

Much is made by the anti-women zealots of an old "documentary" called Silent Scream, which is credited with arrousing the passions of this oppressive political movement. (For a thorough debunking of this work of exaggerated agitprop, go here). As we watch an extremist movement conservative slouch his way onto the Supreme Court this week, helped along by radicals in the Republican Party, a lapdog media and a disinterested "opposition" party, we must sadly note that the "screams" of undeveloped masses of human tissue matter more than the actual screams of an a majority of Americans.

We scream at our televisions as CNN's news-poodles regurgitate GOP talking points, apparently fed directly into their teleprompters from RNC fax machines. We scream through faxes, letters, emails and phone calls to our "representatives" in Washington, but apparently those faxes arrive blank, or garbled into incomprehensible hieroglyphs when they pop out on a staffers desk. The emails must arrive rearranged into UNICODE symbols, the letters wet with ink and graphite running together and our phone calls must sound as though we're calling on cheap cell phones as we drive into tunnels, because it's quite plain that our alarm, our absolute disgust and FEAR of what this country is becoming, HAS BECOME, is manifestly not having an impact.

So we can look forward to an America where more young woman scream into their pillows, fearful of an abusive parent finding out about an unwanted pregnancy she can no longer get help ending. More and more women will cry in their bathrooms, quietly so as not to upset their children, as they look down at a positive pregnancy test knowing that they can't afford another mouth to feed, horrified that there is no way out. More husbands will cry by their wife's bedside as high-risk pregnancies go bad, left to watch helplessly as she suffers, no trained doctors available to save her with a now-illegal lifesaving procedure. Hell, that America already exists in far too many states, but it can and will get worse under this new court, as this lying, Bork-worshipping conservative activist joins his buddies Scalia, Roberts and Thomas on the bench.

What else can we look forward to? More people screaming as their mouths fill with flood waters, as their lungs fill with noxious gases and their children's cries are silenced by asthmatic hacking, as more and more enviromental laws, workplace safety laws and public health systems are gutted by a rapacious corporate culture and their Republican shocktroops. These citizens will find less and less recourse from the courts as the Supreme Court will be packed now with corporate friendly ladder climbing ambitious assholes who've made it painfully clear they were willing to say anything, join any hate group to advance either their careers or their own bigotries. It's hard to tell which, since they are utterly unable as a group to speak honestly and forthrightly about what they do believe. Monsters cloaking themselves in Hallmark platitudes.

In today's America, the only tears that matter are of the crocodile variety, leaking down the privileged cheeks on cue of the wealthy woman standing by her man, political theater for the Oprah nation. No, the tears in flooded neighborhoods, in Appalachian mines, in low-rent bedrooms and bathrooms and over-crowded public hospitals don't matter a whit, nor do the screams crying out for justice and representation and an actual fight for civil rights and a better tomorrow.

Those screams may as well be silent, because no one is listening.