A crime against the soul of a nation

caroline myss in the huffpo...

A conscious effort to "dumb down" the education of this nation qualifies as a crime against the soul of America. And dare I say this? If there was something as grievous as a mortal sin committed by a group against its own people, then the Republicans -- with Reagan at the helm -- and all the Democrats who stood by, or worse, backed this catastrophe -- committed that sin when they choreographed how they would dismantle the intellectual power and potential of our own children. (You should check your age -- you could be a product of this crime.)

[...]

There comes a time when we have to just stand up to these carnies (slang for carnival barkers) and tell them to stop polluting the soul of America with their constant and endless transmission of psychic free radicals in the form of lies, negative press, ridiculous criticism, overall lack of intelligent ideas and comments, and complete absence of creative thought. We should just blast them with emails and tell them to stop polluting the soul of our nation. Just stop it. We've had enough. I know I have. And I deeply believe the soul of our nation can't take much more of their strategy of deliberate division against the people of their own nation. That is a true crime -- and perhaps their greatest crime -- against the soul of this great nation.

as i sit in the food court of the airport on the first leg of the long trip back to afghanistan, a trip that will be punctuated by the next three nights in d.c., i'm surrounded by my dumbed-down fellow citizens, all sitting under the watchful eye of fox news, spewing worthless inanity in a constant reinforcement of our deteriorating collective mental capacity... what's supremely ironic is that, as i type this, fox is airing more of the completely bogus and manufactured controversy surrounding obama's address to the nation's schoolchildren...

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"I'm Not A Rich Man"

From the HuffPo

McCain says, "I'm not a rich man"
Jed Lewison

John McCain was joking around on Morning Joe earlier today about gambling on the baseball playoffs and let loose a verifiably false claim, saying "I'm not a rich man."

Well, so much for the "100% Truthful" Straight Talk Express

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Naomi Wolf weighs in on Sarah Palin, "FrankenBarbie"

i think naomi wolf is a truth-teller, one of the few people who, when i hear her speak or read what she has written, i respond to it immediately and intuitively as truth... in this article that first appeared in the huffington post and then in today's alternet, she takes a somewhat different view of sarah palin than i did with my "deck chair on the titanic" snark below... sadly, i don't disagree with her...

it's a somewhat lengthy article but well worth the time spent reading it... here's a teaser...

I believe the Rove-Cheney cabal is using Sarah Palin as a stalking horse, an Evita figure, to put a popular, populist face on the coming police state and be the talk show hostess for the end of elections as we know them. If McCain-Palin get in, this will be the last true American election. She will be working for Halliburton, KBR, Rove and Cheney into the foreseeable future -- for a decade perhaps -- a puppet "president" for the same people who have plundered our treasure, are now holding the US economy hostage and who murdered four thousand brave young men and women in a way of choice and lies.

not many people out there are capable of grasping the big picture, much less articulating it... naomi wolf is one of them...

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"Sibel Edmonds must be heard"

phil geraldi in the huffpo...

Sibel Edmonds is the FBI translator turned whistleblower who decided to go public late in 2002 and has been seeking to tell her story about high level corruption in the United States government involving Turkey and Israel. What makes her story particularly compelling is that the corruption relates to the theft and sale of United States defense secrets, most particularly nuclear technology. Sibel obtained her information while translating Turkish language telephone intercepts directed against several Turkish lobbying groups who had contact with senior officials in the Bush Administration, both at the Pentagon and in the State Department. Many of the officials involved are apparently the same neoconservatives who cooked the books to enable the rush to war against Iraq and who are continuing to urge more wars in the Middle East, most notably against Iran and Syria. Several of them are close allies of leading Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

To stop Sibel from telling her story, then Attorney General John Ashcroft subjected her to a state secrets privilege gag order after her appearance on CBS's 60 Minutes in October 2002 that not only forbade her providing details of her employment with FBI but also made the ban retroactive so that anything relating to her case would be considered a state secret. Edmonds had been discouraged by her experience with CBS as her most important points wound up on the cutting room floor. Then came the gag order, which she has observed while working assiduously to get bits and pieces of her story out in various ways. In October 2007 she decided to tell all without regard for the consequences, stating that she would provide details of her allegations to any American media outlet that would let her collaborate in the final edit so that her message would not be lost. There were no takers. Last month, The Sunday Times of London decided to pick up her story and has now produced a long feature article called "For Sale: the West's Deadliest Nuclear Secrets" plus two follow-ups. The story was picked up and replayed all over the world, but not by the mainstream media in the United States.

Why should Sibel be heard? Mostly because her story, if true, involves corruption at the highest levels of government coupled with the sale of secrets vital to the security of the United States.

goddam it... will a major u.s. news outlet PLEASE give her a forum...? PLEASE...?

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Weeping over the state of our nation

it's been over a week since naomi wolf posted this at the huffpo... i didn't stumble across it until yesterday when following up a link from another story... (i confess to having stopped visiting the huffpo, primarily due to the strong visceral reaction i get when confronted with arianna's insufferable self-promotion and name-dropping, although i acknowledge i'm missing some good stuff...)

I wish people would stop breaking into tears when they talk to me these days.

I am traveling across the country at the moment -- Colorado to California -- speaking to groups of Americans from all walks of life about the assault on liberty and the 10 steps now underway in America to a violently closed society.

The good news is that Americans are already awake: I thought there would be resistance to or disbelief at this message of gathering darkness -- but I am finding crowds of people who don't need me to tell them to worry; they are already scared, already alert to the danger and entirely prepared to hear what the big picture might look like. To my great relief, Americans are smart and brave and they are unflinching in their readiness to hear the worst and take action. And they love their country.

But I can't stand the stories I am hearing. I can't stand to open my email these days. And wherever I go, it seems, at least once a day, someone very strong starts to cry while they are speaking.

i've found that, over the years, i tend to tear up in moments of strong emotion, a reaction i've stopped trying to hide... two such times in our recent political history stand out... one was watching richard clarke's testimony before congress and the other was patrick fitzgerald's first press conference, both historical and increasingly rare moments of governmental honesty, integrity and accountability...

naomi wolf is involved with a group called the american freedom campaign...

The Constitution protects American Freedom. With checks and balances, and basic legal rights, it has prevented tyranny and safeguarded our liberty. Yet today, under the pretense of the "war on terror," the White House is dismantling the Constitution, concentrating power in the President and undermining the rule of law. THIS IS UN-AMERICAN. The American Freedom Campaign is dedicated to confronting and correcting these abuses of our America.

The mission of the American Freedom Campaign (AFC) is threefold. Our initial goal is to educate American citizens about the current Constitutional crisis in this country, about their individual rights, and about our Founders’ vision. As we educate, our secondary goal is to motivate and inspire individuals in order to build a grassroots citizens’ democracy movement. Finally, with the strength of this grassroots movement at our side, the American Freedom Campaign – through its advocacy arm, the American Freedom Campaign Action Fund – will push for the enactment of statutes that would end the infringement of fundamental rights by the executive and restore the Constitution’s hallowed system of checks and balances.

here's a bit of what the american freedom campaign agenda is all about...

At critical moments in our history, Americans have been called upon to protect our Constitutional guarantees of liberty and justice. We face such a moment today. The American Freedom Campaign is a non-partisan citizens' alliance formed to reverse the abuse of executive power and restore our system of checks and balances with these ten goals:

Fully restore the right to challenge the legality of one's detention, or habeas corpus, and the right of detained suspects to be charged and brought to trial.

Prohibit torture and all cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Prohibit the use of secret evidence.

Prohibit the detention of anyone, including U.S. citizens, as an "enemy combatant" outside the battlefield, and on the President's say-so alone.

Prohibit the government from secretly breaking and entering our homes, tapping our phones or email, or seizing our computers without a court order, on the President's say-so alone.

Prohibit the President from "disappearing" anyone and holding them in secret detention.

Prohibit the executive from claiming "state secrets" to deny justice to victims of government misdeeds, and from claiming "executive privilege" to obstruct Congressional oversight and an open government.

Prohibit the abuse of signing statements, where the President seeks to disregard duly enacted provisions of bills.

Use the federal courts, or courts-martial, to charge and prosecute terrorism suspects, and close Guantanamo down.

Reaffirm that the Espionage Act does not prohibit journalists from reporting on classified national security matters without fear of prosecution.

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A word to Matthew Dowd and other defectors

pachacutec, posting at huffpo, makes a terrific point that had simply not occurred to me...

The people you joined up with have had the very agenda you abetted since at least the days of Nixon, and unless we rid our public life of them, they'll be back again. You were an insider. Start talking about what you know. Grab your knife and start the stabbing. That's how you can restore some balance, wanker.

makes perfect sense to me... it's imperative that we rid our country of these destructive criminals and who better to help lead the charge...?

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I would not like Michael Smerconish as my next-door neighbor

and then find out what was going on in his backyard...

After my boys recently requested new targets for paintball in the backyard, I found myself online, ordering a 25-pack of Osama bin Laden likenesses for $19.97.

there's a wealth of information buried in just that one sentence... it was the opening to a huffpo piece by smerconish on his anger and frustration at the failure of the u.s. to apprehend osama, but it didn't matter what else he had to say because i couldn't get the image of his boys, taking aim at osama's likeness on a paintball target, out of my mind... first of all, let's be clear... paintball is simulated war... there's simply no other way to describe it... i happen to know paintball players (my own son is one) and they are uniformly good people, but, still in all, paintball is what it is... then add to that the fantasy of actually KILLING someone, whether it be osama or your paintball buddy, and i get cold chills... it's the little snippets like this one that give us clues to a person's real character, and i think i just got a big clue to the character of michael smerconish...

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