Slogans and sayings etc

Be a Wellstone Democrat: Love a Republican!!

Americans Against State Sponsered Human Sacrifice

Republicans are people too!! Even if they don't show it well

Progressives succeed, in this country, when their causes are firmly grounded in the Bible and the Constitution; Quit ceding the territory.

Liberals believe in the inherent benefits from our pursuit of the truth; Conservatives believe in the limitations inherent in our ability to recognize the truth. - Joe Schaedler

The pitfall for the Liberal is the belief that the truth is possessable; the pitfall for the Conservative is that the pursuit is not worth the effort.

A great slogan for whenever the prez or vice show up in your town

THANK YOU, GREAT LEADER, FOR OUR NEW 'CONSERVATIVE' RELIGION:

BLIND FAITH IN THE STATE

the NSA "scandal" (Draft)

The trouble with the many comments about using the NSA to spy on us is that they, almost universally, fail to note what it is that is scandalous about the story and in the confusion put all the blame on an activity which is legitimate. To unravel this start with the PURPOSE of the F.I.S.A. court. Without getting into minutia, the uncontroversial conclusion of the Church commitee was that power had been abused, that the executive branch had, in fact, lied about who it was wiretapping and why. The remedy was not to say that the executive could not wiretap but that it had to demonstrate to another branch of government, the judicial, (whose essential quality, in this debate, is that they don't work for the executive), that its desires were constitutional. The main point here is that the executive gets to wiretap!!!! The problem with the administration ignoring the F.I.S.A. court is that there is a vastly increased potential for abuse. Whenever anyone says that the problem is the wiretapping the rejoiunder is "we're looking for terrorists". Rhetorically the debate is now lost because the executive should be "looking for terrorists" and because the actual problem has been obscured, which is "how do we know who you're are wiretapping?". We used to have a perfectly American response to this conundrum which was the 'balance of powers' represented by the F.I.S.A. court. The administration's response is the unAmerican 'you've just have to trust us'.

Progressive Power (Draft)

When will the opposition identify what it opposes? Most importantly, when will it confront the fact that it opposes human beings??? the only way for progressives to get ahead of the right is to treat them as humans, deeply flawed maybe, but humans none the less, fully deserving of that basic acknowledgment. Progressive power can only come from the humanization of the opposition. This is the lesson of Paul Wellstone. Its up to those who believe that a better world is possible to do the work of seeing humans even when 'they' are doing everything possible to hide their humanness, i.e. their connectedness to all life, the connectedness that demands responsibility for the whole.

This is a war of rhetoric. How to undermine what the right has done should be the goal. But first the progressive or anti-Bush forces need to come to terms with the reality that the right has succeeded, with its rhetoric, in undermining the general public's faith in liberalism.

Torturous times (Draft)

I think the defining issue of our times is the 'normalizing' of torture. This activity taken by itself should evoke a response somewhat equivalent to pedophilia. The fact that this response is not common is a testimony to phenomena of media influence. Most people can imagine their reaction to witnessing someone they care about, even if that person is guilty of some horrendous act, being tortured. They would object. They would instinctively 'know' that to have complete control of a human being and then to cause pain is about the most cowardly act there is. The ability to have some connection/identification with people we don't know, as if we did know them is one of the bases of a democratic society and the notion of human rights.
Of course the issue with torture is more than the act itself but the purpose accomplished by the act. I argue that torture has no place in a democratic society because such a society as ours is predicated on the premise that humans have rights. That is, without enforcable rights, the title 'democratic'; has no meaning. On the other hand, a society which aspires to 'empire' , as is the normal aspiration in our collective past, must, by definition, destroy the reality of 'human rights' (that is, the enforcibility) for two basic reasons: 1) empires must be able to kill people to take what those people don't want to give, and 2) empires must retain the ability to terrorize their own populations in order to keep the wealth they 'garner' concentrated.
It makes perfect sense, in this arguement, for those who aspire to empire, to assert that they believe in human rights as long as those 'rights' are not enforcable.
The politics of empire are based on image not being. The highest crime in an empire is to make those who are 'above' you "look bad". The highest crime in a democratic society is to violate rights. Of coarse no society is perfect, however our amazing society is founded on the possibility of becoming more democratic as time passes. As we are collectively learning now, the movement towards greater democracy can go backwards.
In my mind, the best defense against those who would make the U.S. an empire is to assert the connection between human rights and democracy over and over again, always remembering that the guilty are human and have rights too.