Fascism, the Truth

It seems that everyone besides Republicans today are fascists. There are islamofacists, there are those who support fascism and the islamofascists (Cheney and Rumsfeld tell us that, anyway). Let's take a look at fascism's poster child of the last century, Nazi Germany.

First, fascism was great for business, at least at the start. One of Hitler's early successes was getting the trains running on time. Business, the rich and Germany's remaining nobles made out well under the mustachioed one. Meanwhile, the peasants didn't. They were regarded as fodder for the army, which we'll get to next.

Once he'd consolidated his power, Hitler began to use extreme nationalism under the guise of patriotism to keep up his support. Anyone who disagreed was first derided then actually persecuted, either executed or thrown into prisons on weak or no charges, denied due process and access to lawyers. He also generated an enemy in the Jewish immigrants, some of whom had been in Germany long enough to develop their own language - yiddish - based loosely on German. The Jews, it was self-evident, were destroying Germany. They were less than humans, parasites on the German economy and as such, deserved their treatment - extermination of six million of them in the ovens of industrialized slaughter.

War was another of Hitler's devices - see the quote from Reichsmarshall Goering at the top of this blog. By keeping the country at war with some imagined enemy or to attain some needed resource (lebensraum), Hitler kept nationalistic fervor alive despite killing eventually millions of his own people. Business and the rich at least financed Hitler's wars by donation of treasures and by serving.

Internal espionage was also an industry under Hitler. The Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolezi, or secret state police) brutally persecuted anyone dissenting with Hitler or working against the regime. They used any form of espionage and required no oversight, instead they just acted, often against even Germany's laws. And there was no defense against them, legal or otherwise.

In short, those calling their enemies fascists seem to have more in common with fascism than those they accuse. Our leaders support the rich at the expense of all others, wage war for resources and to whip up nationalistic fervor, invent enemies and use those real ones for propaganda, violate national law in an effort to spy on and control their own citizens, neglect the fiscal health of the country and ignore the rights of citizens, all in the name of security.

Which, by the way, was Hitler's reason for everything he did.

Bush's Economic Effectiveness - Two Great Stats

I heard two great statistics on NPR this evening that pretty much sum up the effectiveness of Repug handling of the economy. First the number of cars "torched" in Colorado to get out from under loans or to generate cash has risen from 7 in 2000 to 83 in 2005. Second, the number of homeless in Co. has gone from about 3,ooo to about 15,000 in the same period.

Real wages, meanwhile, have fallen by two percent in the same period. Sounds like not much until you realize that during the entire period, productivity and corporate profits have risen, profitability to its highest percentage of GDP since the 1960's.

Like what's going on? Continue to vote Repug, the party of stay the course.

Want change?

Doesn't Understand the Nature of the World

Bush claims his opponents, particularly the Federal judge who ruled his warrantless wiretapping program unconstitutional, "do not understand the nature of the world in which we live." I would submit it is the Chimperor who is not quite aware of the nature of the world or the restrictions on the office he holds.

I just returned from a trip to Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, my hometown. I was met by an astonishing poverty, something I never noticed while I lived due to what Jared Diamond calls "creeping normalcy." I observed this trip quite plainly how many people were living at or below poverty levels, some above the minimum wage but below what the Democrats would raise it to. Yes, these were people living on less than $12,000 per year. Many were involved in the work of being poor, some of these family members willing to talk with me about it. If you've never known poverty personally, it's hard, uncertain work. Many in this situation turn to drugs - I have family members in jail for making meth to give their children Christmas presents. Yet the Shrub and his Republican allies would tie an increase in the minimum wage to a tax cut for the richest 1% of Americans. An increase to $14,000 per year won't pull anyone up out of poverty but it might have kept a cousin of mine out of jail.

It's this reality, the reality of my own situation of losing buying power faster than my salary increases, of urban and rural poverty, of hopelessness that the Shrub and the Republicans don't understand. They're not willing to listen when anyone talks with them about it, the poor don't have advocates with deep enough pockets to buy an audience with a Republican Representative, let alone a Senator or the President. The Judge who ruled the Shrub's wiretapping unconstitutional had a far greater grasp of the nature of the world.

Bush can't concern himself with his job, much less the plight of others.

Tomorrow's Primary

Tomorrow I'll be having dinner with a visiting cousin from Kentucky. There are no contested Democratic races in Colo. 40, Colo House District 6 and it's still two years before we can vote Allard the Torturer out. So I'll be going to a nice restaurant with visiting relatives.

In the loca race between Peggy Lamm and Ed Perlmutter, no decision. It's been a negative campaign, they all seem to be now. Down in House District 5, six wingnuts are duking it out to represent James Dobson and the upper 2% of El Paso County (Colorado Springs). No matter who wins, wingnut or Bush clone, that district is so solidly repugnant, I mean, Repugnica... No, Republican, that the poor Democrat has little chance except in the staunchly liberal district in and around Colorado College. In this year, I may be surprised.

Best news is an NPR poll I heard a few days back. In the 50 competitive house races, the Democrat is currently leading in all of them. By six percent. Talk about taking back control, that's a 35 seat majority if it plays out. It ain't over for a while and we still have a lot of work. Better still, it looks like Lieberman will be running as an Independent Repugnican with a chance to win in a three-way race. Controlling the Senate is a longer shot but one worth dreaming about. Imagine the hearings we could have (he rubs his hands in maniacal glee....).

So tomorrow, in Colorado as elsewhere, may the best Democrat win.

How Misdirection Works

This afternoon, I was surprised at first to read that half of all Americans believe that Iraq had chemical weapons when we invaded them (I refuse to use the over-used and inaccurate "weapons of mass destruction" when general officers have stated they'd rather be hit with a chemical round than a "conventional" high-explosive round because when a chemical round goes off, you have a chance). Are we as a people that thick, I thought, then I remembered some reports touted by such reliable outlets as Fox News that we'd found the mother lode, WMDs in Iraq.

Never mind that they were degraded shells, fifteen years old found in ones and twos in locations where they could have easily been overlooked and that the contents were about as dangerous as the Drano under your sink, Rick Santorem trumpeted the news. We were being deceived by the Pentagon (under whose control?), he bloviated, a cry readily taken up by Faux News and Radio Wingnut. We had justification (finally) for the invasion!

Some of it may just be true believers trying to find a reason to believe that the Values President, the darling of the Christian Right didn't just flat-out lie to us. Most of it is the fact that we get a lot of our news from suspect sources. The end result is Jefferson's dream of an informed public, despite our inundation with media at all times, just isn't happening. Fox asking "ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS" does little to dispel the misinformation, in fact, it only favors Fox's partisan cause.

We are uninformed. How else could the Bush Team not only be elected, but re-elected. I don't see things changing any time soon, unfortunately for our democracy and for our national policy.

Republican Primary in Wingnut Central

Colorado Springs is the epicenter of wingnutism in Colorado. Home to Cheyenne Mountain and James Dobson, the 5th Congressional District, Colorado College excepted, is a Republican wonderland, full of knee-jerk, unthinking Conservatives like Duncan Bremer who believes the way to peace in the Middle East is to convert all the Moslems to evangelical Christianity. I'd like to invite Mr. Bremer to take his campaign for the Republican nominee to Baghdad where he can start proselytizing to his heart's content, preferably outside the Green Zone.

Which brings us to Brantley Rayburn, who is concerned that Iraqi kids grow up chanting that they want to die for Allah. Uh, I believe the word for dying for one's God is martyrdom, something the Evangelicals have honored since there were Evangelicals. Rayburn believes Iraq is the key to rooting out terrorism in the Middle East. Personally, I believe Israel and our knee-jerk support of it is a more likely key to the problem but Mr Rayburn conveniently ignores the fact that we, the United States of America under Republican party rule made Iraq into a haven for terrorists, we're near to making it into a failed state and the primary war there is sectarian, kind of like when the Southern Baptists and the Missionary Baptists square off over immersion vs. sprinkling.

Jeff Crank has an interesting take on the war's failures, attempting to blame them on Congress, who authorized the war, rather than the President, who prosecuted it so ineptly. He's a Hefley and a Bush clone, stay the course and all, yada, yada. Doug Lamborn and John Anderson echo the party line, further emphasizing the intellectual bankrupcy of the Republicans. Neither of these people are willing to face the great, white elephant in the middle of the debate: We're losing both in Iraq and Afghanistan, the entire premise of the Iraq debacle was a lie and Bush was liar in chief.

Lionel Riviera wants to beef up the special forces, emphasizing the failed Neocon thinking that we can impose democracy at gunpoint and that American force can dominate the world. One need only look at how poorly supplied and funded Hezbollah is holding off nuclear power Israel to see how ineffective force is in an age when any kid with a shoulder-launched rocket can take down the mightiest of warplanes.

In short, unless Colorado Springs wakes up and realizes that the Republicans truely have lost their minds and the right to rule this country, one of these Wingnuts are going to become the Representative from Colorado's Fifth District. I'm not anticipating a Democratic win, the best that can be said of this race is that we won't lose a seat.

Non-News as News

This is not news: GOP Chair Says Democrats Weak on Terror

Ken Mehlman, Chairman of the RNC, saying Democrats are weak on terror is like a weather man talking about weather. I read the above article and noticed nothing in it that wasn't a misrepresentation or an attempt to reinforce Wingnut memes. An example of misrepresentation: "Will we elect leaders who recognize we're at war and want to use every tool to win it, or politicians who would surrender important tools we need to win?" I haven't heard of a single Democratic lawmaker who wants to surrender any tool, we simply want it supervised at least by the kangaroo court known as FISE. Mehlman claims that the Democratic party wants to keep the NSA from eavesdropping on terrorists - utter bullshit. All we want is to do it legally and by the way, to keep them from fishing expeditions involving, well, you.

This dollop of Rovian bullshit had no place in the news for the most part because it isn't news. It's nothing the Wingnuts haven't been saying for months and repetition will neither make it the truth nor will it make it newsworthy; they only hope to reinforce the meme. What Mehlman's pathetic attempt to predict disaster is the desperation in the Republican party. They see their absolute hold on government, wasted in bad policy and disastrous decisions, ending and they're scared as hell.

Imagine a Democratic Congress with Bush on the stand, under oath, explaining his policies? It scares the hell out of them. And that, friends, is also not news.

Denver's Republican Dream of Health Care

I have a rose named Denver's Dream. It's an orange blooming miniature, quite prolific. It has nothing to do with this blog entry. While the White House is attempting to grab dictatorial powers of infinite incarceration without access to the courts, while Bush vacations while the Middle East burns, while the Senate Republicans are loading up the minimum wage bill with tax cuts for Paris Hilton and sweetheart deals to restauranteurs, while Delay is forced to run in gerrymandered Texas as the courts contemplate yet another redistricting, while FDA staffers reveal that the decision to block over-the-counter sales of Plan B, a move that could stop more abortions than a Wingnut Supreme Court, was made in advance of even seeing the scientific evidence in its favor and the while Right continues to want to ban abortion rather than following their constituents' wishes for a balanced approach, Denver approaches the Republicans' dream of the American Health Care System, emergency room care for all.

According to Dr. Vince Markovchick, Denver Health’s director of emergency medicine in an interview on Denver's KCFR's "Colorado Matters," the emergency room has become the medical first stop for those without health care, a number that has ballooned to 47 million under the Republicans' compassionate conservative rule. As a result, at Denver Health, a safety net hospital, patients are waiting up to 48 hours to be moved from the ER to an inpatient bed. Dr. Markovchick attributes this directly to the medical insurance crisis in the country: Un- and Underinsured patients can't pay, they use the "safety net" hospitals as their primary care, the hospitals run in the red and are closed, compounding the problem. Many of the patients could have been treated earlier for chronic problems such as diabetes or hypertension, problem is, they can't afford it. Not only would the early treatment be cheaper, it would improve the patients' quality of life.

Think the Compassionate Conservatives are going to do anything about it? They've stood by as companies cut or eliminated medical benefits and done nothing. They stand by and let emergency rooms where it costs $450 if the doctor says good evening become primary care facilities and treat catastrophic conditions when a simple, low-cost intervention earlier might have prevented the problem. No, they'll continue to believe the problem will be solved by giving money to the richest 2% of Americans while allowing 47 million of us to go uninsured and to have to rely on emergency rooms for our medical care.

It's the Republican dream: Two percent of the population have access to 98% of our medical services. Meanwhile, some uninsured person has been suffering at Denver Health for the last two days waiting for a hospital room and, according to Dr. Markovchick, Denver isn't nearly as bad off as most cities. So if the interests of the top 2% of income earners in this country are yours, vote Republican.

The 2% Majority

If anything proves that Republicans have only the interests of the top two percent of income earners, the minimum wage bill now in the Senate should leave no doubt. First, they want to tie an increase in income for minimum wage earners of about $2,700 per year to an increase in earnings of an average of $1.4 million for the top two percent, those who would benefit from the estate tax reductions. Not content simply to allow an increase in wages for six million Americans, they now want to keep the wages of those who earn income from tips in states where they're paid the minimum wage the same. That means a waitress at a Nevada casino, paid minimum wage by state law and her tips by letting fat Republicans with money to waste pay her for service will get no pay raise. The raise in minimum wages will have to be offset by her tips, resulting in a pay cut of $3 per hour in seven states who demand minimum wage for service personnel.

It's a plan only a Republican could hatch. To use an overused word these days, this is evil. And of course, it's backed by the National Restaurant Association. We raise the minimum wage, then require the employers of those people to offset the pay raise with the employees' tips. Sweet deal! We "raise" the minimum wage, then cut the raise. It's like Rick Perry's Texas Repugnicans giving teachers a $2000 per year raise for one year only. Republicans call it a raise. I call it election year bribery, much like Frist's renowned $200 energy offset.

I wonder how many of those "restauranteurs", probably owners of restaurants on the Strip in Vegas, will be double-dipping with the estate tax cut? In any case, unless you're a part of the Republicans' two-percent majority, voting Republican is voting against your own self-interest.

Welkome to Amerika

As promised, tonight I'll comment on the more despicable Repugnican ploy, their attempt to convert the Guantanamo kangaroo courts into the norm for America. In the bill Bush submitted to have Congress authorize the tribunals was a provision that would allow the President to hold anyone suspected of terrorism, anyone including American citizens, on U. S. soil indefinitely without notification or access to a lawyer. Might as well name them gulags in my book.

Now, I'm sure all the Shrub and his most honorable legal staff, you know, the guys who played a shell game for years with Jose Padilla rather than grant him his civil rights, had only the country's best interest in mind. I'm sure they were just trying to close Guantanamo and provide for holding the detainees on American soil under the same legal status they held at Guantanamo and that the fact that their provision would grant the Administration the right to hold anyone based on a diktat was purely an oversight. Right.

This must be our line in the sand against the budding dictatorship of the Bush Administration. They aren't competent enough to lead, so now they attempt to rule. We must not allow that. Write your Representatives (unless, like me, you live in the Colorado 6th and have Tommy the Xenophobe Tancredo for a Representative) and Senators (Waste paper on Allard the Torturer but know it's a waste and vote accordingly) and oppose this unconstitutional attempt at absolute power.

Because that's all it is. By the time the Supreme Court overturns it - wait, it's stacked with Bushies. Disregard that. This bill must never become law.