Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

• Dave G November 26, 2004 2:40 pm

  

  Well. Program today would not streem. They, at the other station were unable to hear you when you called in. Only bzy sigs for others trying to call in. Very strange. I know your not a terribly suspicious man Mark. This, however, is something that I get to experience all too often. So – I will say there are those with Patriot Act Powers who did not care to have your subject aired today. You may choose, however, to continue to believe that they’r above such behaviors. I understand that.

• Tommy Peterson November 26, 2004 1:46 pm

  

  I didn’t listen to the show but . . .
  “Do you think Members of Congress read legislation before it’s passed? Not in this Congress.”
  Since when does ANY Congress read EVERY line of EVERY piece of legislation?
  “Do you think that massive amounts of taxpayer money goes to fund pork to special interests who turn around and use the money to finance Congressional campaigns? Yep, barely concealed bribery.”
  As if this is something new to THIS Congress. That THIS Congress introduced “pork barrel” spending habits. It is as old as Congress. So to shroud a Republican controlled Congress in a cloak of bribery is hardly fair–it is “bipartisanism” at its worse–and contributes to distracting everyone from a true remedy to the solution of “pork barrel” iniatives.
  “Do you think that if the Majority Leader is indicted for taking illegal corporate cash and diverting the resources Federal Homeland Security agency to monitor Democrats trying to prevent an unprecedent gerrymandering scheme that he can still lead Congress? Absolutely. The Republican Caucus would not even allow a documented vote on this.”
  And the tactic of fillibustering has been used by Democrats of late to impede the progress of our Democratic process as well. But it should be pointed out that IF Mr. Delay is indicted it only means he is being charged, not found guilty. So to me this is fair regardless of who is Majority Leader. This isn’t England anymore. You have to be proven guilty before you are found guilty.
  “[O]verruling all state laws requiring abortions to be part of health care plans.”
  To make such a statement is rather arrogant, not only a logical fallacy. I clearly remember when the Clinton Administration “changed” things to allow abortions to be a federally, taxpayer fund procedure for all federal, military employees. Abortion is NOT health care. You can look at it as an egregious act or you can look at it as a correction of another administration’s over zealousness. But just realize that there are two sides to this issue.

• Dave G November 26, 2004 11:28 am

  

  Mark; We call upon your knowledge of Constitutional Law. It may call for new presidents. We know that the founding fathers could not have planned for computerized election fraud. As that becomes a clear fact, as it very likely will today, perhaps during the 2nd hour of the Thom Hartman Show (radiopower.org). Bev Harris, living proof of what one person can do, will be there with latest evidence. What kind of possible recourse might then be available to “we, the people”?
  Might this reality bring our nation back to the days of the Revaluation? Might it call for a Declaration of Independence from a government failing to represent our interests,
  Could we the people seek redress in a world court not answerable to the powers now wrongfully in place?
  Are their any presidents in our constitution which anticipated and provided for such an event?
  In the most general sense are their provisions in place affording recourse where it becomes evident that the voters have been defrauded. Would there be recourse that would not come under the control of those who rigged the election?
  Mark, you were one of many thousands of lawyers volunteering to monitor the election to assure that this didn’t happen. You discovered a lot of outrageous shenanigans but none of you could see how these e-machines were being invaded and votes being changed electronically. As that becomes known might they explore recourse with you?
  Could Sen. Kerry and Edwords get on board with their own capable legal minds?

• Skip November 25, 2004 5:08 pm

  

  Forgot the URL:
  http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/11/con04503.html

• Skip November 25, 2004 5:06 pm

  

  Here’s a great article written for buzzflash.com by the author (Jonathan Greenberg) of the new book “America 2014: An Orwellian Tale”. It’s directly applicable to today’s theme.
  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
  As President Bush moves to implement what he proclaims to be his “mandate,” millions of Americans find ourselves baffled that so many of our fellow citizens could have voted for a leader whose tenure has been marked by a series of failures and deceptions. For an answer, I suggest that we look to George Orwell’s 1984, and to the triumph, this election season, of a little known but essential component of the Republican right agenda known as ‘perception management.”
  Perception management, in short, operates under the principle that truth is unessential. Truth simply becomes what the Party is able to convince the electorate is true. During Bush’s first term, the President and senior Administration officials practiced perception management every time they announced their certainty that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, as well as connections to Al Q’aeda and the September 11 attacks.
  In the end, there were far more Bush voters who believed these widely-televised deceptions than those who understood the facts. A CNN exit poll found that 81% of Bush voters believed that the Iraq war was part of the war on terrorism, even though after exhaustive research, Iraq has never been found to have sponsored a single act of international terrorism.
  The closest thing to an admission of a “perception management” strategy came from a recent New York Times Magazine article, in which a senior advisor of the Bush Administration scoffed at Americans who exist in ‘the reality based community,” who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality. That’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
  A government that creates its own realities is frightening. But even more alarming — and more mystifying to American voters who don’t buy into this reality — is that 59 million of our fellow citizens voted to re-elect George Bush, despite overwhelming evidence of what could politely be called contradictory truths.
  George Orwell provides a ready answer.
  A central premise of the Big Brother world of 1984 was what Orwell called “Doublethink,” defined in the book as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
  In the mythical empire of Oceania in 1984, citizenship meant “not thinking — not needing to think.” The government of Big Brother alternates between war and alliance with two competing empires. At one point, the enemy changes in the middle of a patriotic speech, and the audience immediately accepts the new reality. They have no choice. In 1984, according to Orwell, “The heresy of heresies was common sense.”
  The Bush Administration has been tremendously successful at convincing its supporters to suspend common sense. Last month, a survey by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 72% of Bush supporters believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for producing them (25%). This survey was done after the widely-reported results of the CIA’s “Duelfer Report,” an exhaustive $1 billion investigation, which concluded that Hussein had dismantled all of his WMD programs shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and never tried to reconstitute them. The Duelfer Report also found that Saddam Hussein did not support Al-Qaeda terrorists.
  When asked whether the U.S. should have gone to war without evidence of a WMD program or support to Al-Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters polled said no. Yet these same voters support the war, suggesting an inability, or refusal, to accept “discernable reality.”
  This is no accident. For three years, the President and his Administration have used every opportunity to manage the perceptions of the public by distorting facts. Even after the conclusive CIA report, Bush and Cheney deliberately fused the war in Iraq with the war on those who caused the September 11 attacks. And who can forget the certainty with which the President declared, a few months after the Iraq war began, that “We found the weapons of mass destruction.”
  We have all heard the litany of assertions by this Administration that Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States, that the United Nations inspection program to disarm Hussein of weapons of mass destruction had failed, and that the Iraq War was necessary to prevent terrorist acts on American soil. Not one of these assertions was true. The truth, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil revealed last year, was that at their first cabinet meeting in January, 2001, the Administration was planning to go to war against Saddam Hussein — nine months before the September 11 attacks.
  Even the Administration’s pursuit of Al Q’aeda could have been culled from Orwell’s 1984, where ‘Ignorance is Strength” was another key Big Brother slogan. Right after September 11, the President swore that he would stop at nothing to get the perpetrators of the attack. This was right after his Administration allowed a plane full of Saudi Arabians, including bin Laden’s relatives, to fly out of the U.S. without being questioned by the F.B.I. Then, six months later, while laying the ground work to divert most of our country’s military resources to a war against Iraq, Bush said of bin Laden, “He’s a person who’s now been marginalized…I just don’t spend that much time on him…I truly am not that concerned about him.” By April, 2002, Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Myers followed that with: “The goal has never been to get bin Laden.”
  When Orwell created Doublethink and the dark world of 1984, he was satirizing the future of Stalin’s Soviet Union. It is a sad time for America when his message applies most fittingly to our own country.