from Consortium news

Is Impeachment the Answer?
While Washington pundits are advising George W. Bush how to “restart” his presidency, many Americans are more interested in how to “terminate” his presidency. But is impeachment the answer? Or is it a pipe dream that would distract from more attainable political goals? November 1, 2005

White House Feelin’ Edgy

Absolut Corruption

High Quality Political Humor

Take Action

A proposal is working its way through Congress that would deter thousands of advocates and stop them from educating voters about the issues. This provision to the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act (H.R. 1461) would “gag” non-profits from all voter outreach activities if they want to receive grants from the Affordable Housing Fund.

This means that groups who help low-income voters with affordable housing would lose their federal funding if they try to teach those same people to help themselves, by making informed voting choices at the polls.

If House members are successful in attaching the gag order, it is likely Congress would move to restrict the political speech of other non-profit organizations that receive federal funds.

Don’t let Congress put a chokehold on free speech by organizations. Urge your Representative to oppose the gag language.

Liberals With Guns

original appearing on Hullabaloo

Liberals With Guns

As of 5:49 am Monday (EST), it seems Jeffrey Goldberg’s already famous article on Scowcroft in the New Yorker will not be posted – you’ll have to buy the zine, unless it gets liberated and posted elsewhere. But the New Yorker did put up an interesting interview with the author.I’ll leave it to others to analyse the political ramifications and content. But I seem to be unusually sensitive to Republican rhetorical hanky-panky (“pro-life,” “tax relief,” etc), and I couldn’t help but notice some spanking new jargon bubbling up into the mainstream:

…the deeper meaning here is ideological: George W. Bush’s father was committed to a realist understanding of foreign policy. This served him well in Iraq, and not so well in Bosnia. George W. Bush, on the other hand, has become a leading proponent of democratic transformationalism; he believes it is America’s job to help non-democratic countries become democratic. The realists don’t believe that the internal organization of another country is any of our business; George W. Bush, evidently, does.

[snip]

Are the conservatives turning against the neoconservatives?

They’ve been doing so for some time. Just read George Will. Their complaint is that neoconservatives aren’t conservative; they’re liberals with guns. [emphasis added.]

You got that? “Democratic transformationalists” are “liberals with guns.” Those are the clowns that got us into that stupid mess in Iraq.

In other words, the term “conservative” has been surgically removed from the failed ideology of neoconservativism and replaced with the word “democratic.” This of course is purely coincidental, no associations to a certain political party should be inferred.

And “democratic” is paired with the brain-twisting neologism “transformationalist.” Only a paranoid mentality would wonder whether the pairing of “democratic” with something invented, something hard to understand, and something hard to say, is intentional.

As for “liberals with guns,” well…what could be a scarier image, given the relentless demonization of liberals that has been going on since McCarthy, if not earlier?

But never mind, as so many expert Democratic consultants are quick to tell us, it’s not the language that matters, but the ideas. I mean it’s not as if you can easily redefine failed Republican strategies as liberal and Democratic, y’know. That’s preposterous. No one would fall for that and repeat it. LIke if you tried, people would just get confused about what things mean and then they wouldn’t listen to anyone. What good would that be?

(By the way, reporter Jeffrey Goldberg shouldn’t, necessarily, be blamed for the terminology. It’s likely he’s probably just repeating jargon that’s getting tossed up into the air. As for passing it on, shame, shame, shame!)

{Update:} Content edited somewhat after original posting to focus the sarcasm.

StumbleUpon keeps getting better

If you haven’t checked out the StumbleUpon toolbar , the next few weeks will be the best it’s ever been. So now is a great time to hook up with this fantastic tool. They now allow tagging as well as some new ways to enjoy your blog. The StumbleUpon button, which takes you to a random site according to your interests, or just random period, is nothing to sneeze at either. It’s a great boredom killer. Or, you can use it as a great way to discover new and interesting (sometimes not so interesting) sites. I highly recommend it.

Molly Ivins gets it right

Let’s Fix This Mess
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate

Thursday 20 October 2005

Austin, Texas – I have been collecting material for a series of columns on the peppy topic, “How Do We Fix This Mess?” The news is dandy in that there are a lot of a sound ideas being passed around. Really serious messes, like the one this country is in, do not, in my experience, have simple, definitive solutions. And if they do, such solutions are politically impossible. We are looking for progress, not perfection, so anyone who tells you the entire tax code should fit on a postcard is a bona fide, certified, chicken-fried moron.

But listening to the Democratic debate on what to do now, it seems to me some of the brethren and sistren are asking the wrong questions. The question is not, “How Do We Win?” That’s a technical question that comes after, “What the Hell Can We Do About This Disaster?”

Link here

Lard is gOOd

Boy, those 1950’s sure were fun, huh?

Leading Historian Says U.S. ‘Empire’ To Fail

Published On Thursday, October 20, 2005 2:36 AM
By LEV MENAND
Contributing Writer
The American empire may actually cause disorder, barbarism, and chaos rather than promote peace and order, one of the world’s leading historians, Eric J. Hobsbawm, explained last night to a packed crowd at Lowell Lecture Hall.

While he didn’t take a final stance on that issue, Hobsbawm’s lecture on the differences between the American empire and the British empire was notable for his assertion that America is an empire destined for failure.

While many other historians do not consider America to be an empire, Hobsbawm argued yesterday that it is.

Concepts of imperialism and empire are “in flat contradiction to the traditional political self-definition of the U.S.A.,� Hobsbawm said, however, “there is no precedent for the global supremacy that the U.S. government is trying to establish.�

The American empire “will almost certainly fail,� Hobsbawm said. “Will the U.S. learn the lesson [of the British Empire] or will it try to maintain an eroding global position by relying on a failing political force and a military force which is insufficient for the present purposes which the current American government claims it is designed?�

Hobsbawm addressed America’s past and present foreign policy in his speech, the second of three William E. Massey lectures this week sponsored by Harvard’s Program in the History of American Civilization.

This year’s theme, crafted by Professor of History Sven Beckert, is the “American Empire in Global Perspective,� and features speeches from the perspective of three foreigners, Hobsbawm, who is from England, Jayati Ghosh, from India, and Carlos Monsivais, from Mexico.

Past Massey lecturers have included, Richard Rorty, Toni Morrison, Gore Vidal, and Alfred Kazin.

Mentioning the work of Tisch Professor of History Niall C. Ferguson and Weatherhead University Professor Samuel P. Huntington, Hobsbawm drew clear distinctions between his owns views and their theories.

“Unlike people like me, he regrets it,� Hobsbawm said, referring to Ferguson’s opinion of the end of the American empire.

He spoke at length on the crucial differences between the American hegemony and the British empire, focusing on their different foundations. Britain had an economy-based empire and never tried to dominate the world, he said, realizing that “they were a middle-weight country� that could only hold on to the “heavy-weight title� for so long.

The U.S. empire, on the other hand, was not created through economic dominance but crafted through political means, according to Hobsbawm. He pointed to this as the U.S.’s “biggest strength and weakness,� since the political forces that hold the empire together may not necessarily last.

He said that from its roots in the Monroe Doctrine, the U.S. has never viewed itself as a part of an international system of rival political powers. It lacks a foundation myth, Hobsbawm said, which is the basis for most other current nation states.

“Since the U.S.A. was founded by revolution against Britain, the only continuity between them that was not shaken was culture,â€? he explained, “so the national identity couldn’t very well be historical…[rather] it had to be constructed out of its revolutionary ideology.â€?

After graduating from the University of Cambridge in 1939, Hobsbawm went on to hold teaching positions at the University of London, the New School, Stanford, MIT, and Cornell. His most acclaimed book, “The Age of Extremes�—a history of the 20th century—has been translated into 36 languages.

Faced with the question of the future of the American empire, Hobsbawm concluded: “I’m an historian, I’m not a prophet. Don’t ask me that question.�