As death and misery in Iraq rise every day and 2008 nears, we cannot forget the question of accountability.  You have to go back to the start and ask why and how we got into this pernicious, perfectly foreseeable quagmire. Why didn’t rational, smart people that run our government, like Hilary Clinton, do something to stop it?  The June 3, 2007 New York Times Sunday Magazine had some disturbing answers. ...

It's simple: the record through the years proves that Angelides will stand up for the majority of Californians and Schwarzenegger will stay wrapped up in corporate money.  Because of that, another Schwarzenegger administration will plague California with the government incompetence, corporate cronyism and abandonment of most Californians that has come to embody the Bush administration. Worse, Schwarzenegger is an actor who can pretend very well that it's not true.  Unfortunately, so far Angelide's commercials linking Schwarzenegger to Bush have been utterly ineffective, as recent polls show.

They allow the GOP to control the message.  Our sheepish corporate media just tows the party line of those in power.  That's what the Dems. need to fight.

 

Let's face it, we have the most credibility  among people we know (hopefully).  For about two years I've been growing an e-mail list of family, friends and acquaintances, and it's almost 200 people today.  My goal is to give them political information they would not otherwise have, and turn everyone of them into active progressives.  It's a battle with some (I grew up in Texas after all), but I think I've had influence on many.  Here is a post of my most recent letter to the list, about the election and moving forward from it.  I thought some of you might enjoy the thoughts.  Several ideas came from DailyKos.

ACT and the NY Times have good summaries of local officials trying to suppress the vote in the swing states. We all should have seen this coming. After all, in 2000 Katherine Harris supervised a shady election that shook the foundations of our democracy, but rather than being punished, she got elected to Congress. Politically-ambitious election officials accross the land obviously took due notice. The tragedy is that in four years our elected officials did nothing of substance to solve these problems. THE HOPE IS ALL OF US, AND IT'S A GREAT HOPE.  THIS YEAR, WE'RE WATCHNG THEM. Below follow a few doozies from either ACT or the NYT. Use the list to get you fired up: Get-Out-The-Vote hard this weekend to counter these affronts to our democracy!!!

Bush is trying to assuage the Al QaQaa "October surprise" by ranting that the weapons may have disappeared before the U.S. could even get there.  The well-publicized reporting about the 101st Airborne Division arriving at the cite on April 9, 2003 says little either way, because they didn't search the site.  

But on April 5, 2003, the AP reported that the 3d Infantry Division had found THOUSANDS of 5x12cm boxes at Al QaQaa, each containing three vials of white powder, and that a senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be EXPLOSIVES.  Link to the full story: http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030405-chem-readiness01.htm