This is it, folks, the end of freedom as we know it.

Watch it go down on C-SPAN

Alito Likely to Win Committee Approval TODAY

King Bush and the End of ‘Unalienable Rights’

Washington Post Blog on the Supreme Court

“Democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse,” former Vice President Al Gore said. “I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled ‘marketplace of ideas’ now functions.”

Speech Text

by Glynn Wilson

Morris Gardner of Locust Fork, Alabama, lost both legs to a land mine in Vietnam. He now opposes the war in Iraq.

by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Sept. 24 – Morris “Mo” Gardner of Locust Fork wheeled up to the microphone on the stage in historic Kellly Ingram Park on Saturday and pleaded with his government to end the war and bring the troops home.

“During the 20th century, 100 million people died as a direct result of war,” he said. “When will we ever learn that war is not the answer?”

Mr. Gardner, 55, a medic in Vietnam when he was only 19 in 1969, set off a land mine. It blew off both his legs, one above the knee.

In an interview, he said he totally opposed the war in Iraq.

“It is based on a lie,” he said, “just like Vietnam.”

In his speech to a couple of hundred peace activists in the park where the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King changed the country in the 1960s, Mr. Gardner pointed out that 30 percent of those who serve in war zones, injured or not, develop severe psychological problems.

“This is caused by getting so scared, or seeing such horrendous acts of death and destruction that one cannot get the horrors of war out of their heads,” he said. “Flashbacks and nightmares won’t let you forget.”

He talked about the health effects of war on the local populations in countries America has attacked and occupied.

“In Vietnam today, babies are still being born with terrible deformities by Agent Orange and other toxins we left there,” he said. “Now they use depleted uranium in bombs. Are we all just cannon fodder?”

He insisted that there should never be a draft.

“If there isn’t enough volunteers then there isn’t enough public support and we shouldn’t be there,” he said. “No one should ever be forced to fight a war he doesn’t believe in.”

The government owes the American people the truth, Mr. Gardner said. “We have not been told the truth about Iraq.”

In spite of his debilitating injuries, Mr. Gardner does not regret serving.

“I do not regret my service to my country,” he said. “I do regret that my country did not use my service and my sacrifice more wisely.”

by Glynn Wilson

Vietnam veteran Morris Gardner speaks out against the Iraq war to a crowd of peace activists in Birmingham.

The Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War has had two constants – deception and wishful thinking – a dangerous mix of falsehoods used to justify the conflict and unrealistic expectations about success, argues experienced analytical journalist Robert Parry at Consortium News in today’s report.

“This pairing has brought the United States one of the most unnecessary military disasters in its history,” Parry writes. “Yet the Bush administration is sticking with the same tactics, more deceptions and more wishful thinking – from claims that the Iraq War has reduced terror threats worldwide to optimistic talk about upcoming troop withdrawals.”

Parry’s analysis is very good, better in fact than what readers get these days from the New York Times and Washington Post, but there is a little something even Mr. Parry doesn’t quite get yet.

He says, in part, “…a U.S. military withdrawal might not create the catastrophe that Bush and his supporters predict, if the less alarmist analysis is true. Instead, the Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis might be forced into practical negotiations for resolving their differences.”

He goes on to say: “The departure of American troops also would eliminate a chief recruiting pitch that terrorists have exploited to get young Muslims to strap bombs on themselves. Without the American presence – and assuming progress on other problems such as the Israeli-Palestinian dispute – the appeal of Islamic extremism might fade rather than grow.”

The analysis is correct here, except for one thing. It is naive. As we have pointed out several times now on this site since going online back in March, the neo-cons who didn’t have to con Bush very hard to undertake this war, rather than focusing on Afghanistan and bin Laden, have no intention of pulling out – not next year, not in 2009, not ever.

As we reported before, this was spelled out in 2003 before the war by Jay Bookman, deputy editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, weeks after I tried to get the New York Times national desk to put me on the same story.

“This war … is intended to mark the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire, seizing sole responsibility and authority as planetary policeman. It would be the culmination of a plan 10 years or more in the making, carried out by those who believe the United States must seize the opportunity for global domination, even if it means becoming the ‘American imperialists’ that our enemies always claimed we were. Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?”

The Bush administration will make a show of bringing a few reserve units home in time for the mid-term elections in 2006, just to try holding onto a GOP majority in the Senate. But let’s be clear. We are never leaving Iraq, just as we never left Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the first Gulf War, just as we never left Germany after World War II or South Korea or the Philippines, etc.

Later on in his analysis, Parry says: “Impeachment of Bush is widely regarded as impossible given the Republican control of the House and Senate and the strength of the conservative news media … but impeachment may be the only political option left if the American people hope to force a U.S. withdrawal before 2009. Also by making Bush’s impeachment a focus of the congressional campaigns in 2006, the American people would be given a chance to impose some measure of accountability for the gross mismanagement of the Iraq War.”

More power to the impeachment movement, but I’m afraid it is not going anywhere for the reasons Parry cites.

The Republican Party sees on the horizon the kind of long-term political realignment envisioned by Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove. This includes the kind of dominance for Republicans that Democrats had after the Great Depression and WWII for half a century, until Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority came along and produced a “shining city on a hill” happy revolution.

That revolution, aided by the Newt Gingrich “revolution” that produced a Republican majority in the U.S. House for the first time in about 50 years, turned American politics back from a progressive march into the future to a religious retrenchment that now has the Christians facing off against Muslims in what can only be described as a religious war by anyone who knows what they are talking about.

Of course the Bush administration and the New York Times will not call it that, because Dog forbid, it might be true – and that would be disastrous for sure.

Well, it is disastrous, and not just for the economy stupid. And it is not going to get any better any time soon. And George Bush is not going to turn around and get out of Iraq as long as he is standing and still the president of the United States and the neo-cons still pull his strings.

The view from here is, there may be no reasonable, democratic, peaceful way to turn this situation around. The corporations are in control of the U.S. government in a way we have not seen since the heyday of what journalism historians call, “The Muckraking Era.”

The scandal over Karl Rove’s role in outing a CIA agent, and a decision by the mother of a slain soldier to camp out in Crawford, Texas, to make news by trying to meet with Bush and hold him accountable, may be the beginnings of another revolution of sorts.

Karl Marx once wrote, “Workers of the world unite.”

How’s this for a new slogan for today

“Smart people of the world unite.”

It is possible to throw the bastards out and force reform. Just ask the artists, writers, professors and teachers in the old Soviet Union, who swarmed Red Square and refused to leave until the Soviet Empire collapsed. Ask the people of Kurdistan, who only last year ran their corrupt leader – who stole the election – out of the building and gloated in his desk chair.

Mother of Slain Soldier Keeps Vigil in Crawford, Texas

by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
Locust Fork Publishing
LocustFork.Net

SOMEWHERE IN THE BLOGOSPHERE – Cindy Sheehan, the mother from Vacaville, Calif., who co-founded Gold Star Families for Peace after her son Casey was killed in Iraq, said in a blog conference call today that the U.S. Secret Service had been harassing her to leave Crawford, Texas, saying she was at risk of being run over by a car in the middle of the night.

She praised the Internet and the blogosphere for helping her cause and for keeping her safe.

“I attribute everything to the Internet and the blogosphere. When we put it out Saturday night that the Secret Service was trying to intimidate us into leaving, it went all over the blogosphere and the Internet,” she said. “I just wanted everybody to know that if something happened to us it was probably the Secret Service. They know that. They watch the blogs too.”

But she said she would not be intimidated into leaving or giving up.

“This is something that can’t be ignored and they can’t shut us down,” she said. “It’s truly amazing and thank God for the Internet or we wouldn’t know anything. We would already be a fascist state. Our government is run by one party, every level, and the mainstream media is a propaganda tool for the government. If we didn’t have the Internet, none of us would know what was truly going on.”

She said she never got involved in activism before her son Casey was killed in Iraq, “because I didn’t think one person could make a difference. But one person with millions of people behind you can make a difference. . . . I have said since my son died and the ‘elections’ in November that it is ‘we the people’ that has to cause the change.”

In response to a question from a blogger, Ms. Sheehan went into more detail about the treatment she received from the Secret Service.

“The first day we were here, they kept on coming and telling us, ‘you know you really don’t want to stay here because chances are you’re going to get hit by a car during the night,’ ” she said. “Finally, one of the people here with me asked, ‘Does that mean if we get run over it’s going to be one of you?’ And the guy goes, ‘That’s not what I’m trying to say.’ ”

When asked if she got the impression that the Secret Service was trying to intimidate her, she said, “Yes, definitely. They wanted us to leave. Of course they wanted us to leave. But they really don’t know who they are dealing with here. They know now, but they didn’t know then.”

When she was asked if she has had daily contact with the Secret Service, she said yes, and that the so-called “Camp Casey concierge” was asked about the number of people expected to show up.

“But we can’t tell,” she said. “People are just spontaneously coming. It’s been a really amazing thing.”

From another blogger, she was asked about the smear campaign from the White House and the right-wing bloggers, including Matt Drudge, saying she changed her story on what President George W. Bush told her in an earlier meeting with parents of troops killed in Iraq.

She said the comments Drudge used were taken out of context and she insisted she is telling the truth about how Bush treated her by calling her “mom” and making bad jokes.

When asked about the controversy over whether she would appear on Bill O’Reilly’s show “The Factor” on Fox News, she said she had decided not to go on the show after being attacked by the conservative talk show host who is not a journalist.

“I don’t like it when people lie about me and attack me for exercising my freedom of speech,” she said. “It’s one thing for Bill O’Reilly to disagree with my politics and my view on the war, but it’s absolutely another thing that he attacked me personally. I’m not going to dignify his show with my presence because I believe his show is an obscenity to the truth and to humanity.”

She also said she was not going to allow anyone to distract her from the true mission of her cause.

“The true mission is bringing attention to this occupation of Iraq and ending the war, bringing our troops home,” she said. “I don’t think they have the support of a majority of America. I think we do.”

She said there were only three things that would make her leave Crawford: A good meeting with the president, the end of August or if she is arrested.

She said if they try to force her to leave, “I am just going to sit my butt down on the ground. This is America. Every inch of America is a freedom of speech and freedom to peaceably assemble zone. If you want me gone you’ll have to carry me out of here.”

When asked specifically what she would ask the president if she were granted a meeting, she said she would ask what the noble cause is that her son Casey died for.

“I don’t believe a war of aggression against a country that was no threat to the United States of America is a noble cause,” she said.

She indicated she would ask about his statement that we have to honor the troops by completing the mission, since the mission is unclear and keeps changing.

“The only way they can honor my son’s sacrifice is by bringing the troops home,” she said.

She was asked how she felt about the media’s minimal coverage of her compared to crime news such as the ongoing story about the Alabama teen missing in Aruba.

“They don’t want this to be the story,” she said. “A lot of people have a lot at stake by keeping this occupation going. They are making lots of money. We all know who owns NBC. If they were truly reporting the news objectively, they would be reporting this. It strikes me as a bigger story than Natalee Holloway, which is a tragedy for one family. What we are trying to do here is save millions of families from going through tragedy.”

One of the callers pointed out that her story was the lead editorial in Tuesday’s New York Times.

“It is getting a lot of mainstream attention,” she said. “That is a gratifying result of what is happening. It’s putting the war back on the front pages, back in the news where it belongs. It belongs there every day whether a grieving mom is sitting outside the ranch in Crawford or not. We have to realize we are a nation at war.”

She said again if not for the Internet, “We wouldn’t know the truth about what is going on over there.”

The blog conference call was hosted by Joe Trippi of JoeTrippi.com, Bob Fertik of Democrats.com and AfterDowningStreet.org, and Jodie Evans of CodePink4Peace.org.

Editor’s Note: I will be calling the Secret Service this afternoon to get their reaction to this story.

But I just wanted to inform my regular readers that while I was working on this story, several things happened that make it clear there are forces in this country trying to prevent the truth from getting out.

First of all, just as I started to blog, this site was attacked again by a series of trackback pings and comments from a Texas spammer flooding us with Texas hold ‘em poker and casino sites. Our home phone and cell phone were flooded with telemarketing calls. And, although a minor, scattered thunderstorm came through this area during the conference call, it was over by the time I started to blog. Yet Alabama Power tripped the power here as I was trying to post, forcing me to restart the computer and reset the cable modem. Fascism indeed.

President George W. Bush was seen on cable news this morning signing the CAFTA trade agreement, in what CNN’s White House correspondent called “a gloatfest,” since the bill only passed in the U.S. House of Representatives by two votes. Are you feeling the screws turning yet?

Meanwhile, the Birmnigham Snooze did manage to eke out a story of sorts today on the sneaky visit of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Although it just demonstrates the pathetic and rear-end kissing nature of mainstream journalism these days.

Even in my early days in journalism at the University of Alabama’s Crimson White student newspaper, I would have been laughed out of the newsroom for reporting that a government official such as Gonzales was “pleased with Martin and the direction the U.S. attorney’s office is taking.”

So he is pleased that the U.S. attorneys office in Birmingham has lost every high profile case to come before it? And to change the subject, they indict former Jefferson County commissioner Chris McNair, who lost his daughter in the 16th Street Church bombing, for some renovation work on the photography studio dedicated to the memorial of his daughter?

Aren’t you so pleased that the Birmingham News is pleased with the pleasing idiots who are running the country? I guess it beats hiding out in the bushes and catching a Democrat in an affair with a reporter, eh? How’s that circulation doing these days? Do you think people are pleased with your pleasing BS?

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has issued an Action Alert against New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for his July 22 column: “Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide.”

Friedman says the federal government, in the form of the State Department, should “produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report,” to “focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others.” He also wants the government to include “excuse makers,” which, according to FAIR, includes “a majority of Americans, according to recent polls.”

I must say I used to love reading The New York Times and admit that I have reported and written for that once great newspaper. Perhaps this entire episode can be chalked up to post-9/11/Jayson Blair stress syndrome, but I stopped reading Mr. Friedman’s columns a couple of years ago when he flip-flopped on the war in Iraq. You see he was for it and against it, sort of like Sen. John Kerry on the funding for the war, about the time I was trying to tell the national desk that something was fishy in Bush’s D.C.

The Times plans to start charging for editorial columns in September, so Mr. Friedman’s audience will no doubt shrink considerably at that time. Somehow I doubt the FAIR action alert will do any good anyway, since all the activist’s e-mails will just go unread by the management at the paper. And besides, the State Department will ignore Friedman. Why shouldn’t we?

I’m sure there were newspaper columnists all over the land who stood with McCarthy and his blacklist during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Luckily, they are long forgotten.

This Web site just came to my attention from a regular reader, the mom of this creative Web artist who goes by the name of Ava at PeaceTakesCourage.Com.

In Honor of the Fourth of July

Written By Ava

“Thus may the 4th of July, that glorious and ever memorable day, be celebrated through America, by the sons of freedom, from age to age till time shall be no more. Amen and Amen.”
- Virginia Gazette on July 18th, 1777

July 4th, 1776
In the congress of the thirteen colonies
The Declaration of Independence is signed

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

To many, July 4th is the day when families get together to grill out and shoot fireworks. Most of these people consider themselves good, patriotic, Americans, sporting their SUV with a “SUPPORT OUR TROOPS” ribbon right next to a “FREEDOM ISN’T FREE : GOD BLESS AMERICA” sticker.

However, a majority of them have little knowledge of what actually happened on July 4th, 1776, or little knowledge of what exactly the “Declaration of Independence” is or did.

July 4th is celebrated as the day America officially split from Britain, and the beginning of the American Revolution. However, Richard Henry Lee ( Virginia ) first introduced the resolution on June 7, 1776, calling for congress to declare the U.S. free from British rule. On June 11, 1776, congress met in Philadelphia to form a committee with the intention of drafting a document that would formally declare their independence from Britain. This document would, on July 4th, 1776, be officially adopted by congress, and become known as “The Declaration of Independence.”

The next day, copies of the declaration were distributed, and on July 6, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, was the first newspaper to feature the document. And finally, in 1941, July 4th was declared a Federal holiday by Congress.

Now it is our duty as Americans, to do that which is outlined in the Declaration of Independence
“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
- The Declaration of Independence

We must save America from what it is becoming and bring it back to the country we once knew and loved as the “land of the free.”

Declaration Animation

The president of Gold Star Families for Peace, a mother who lost a son in Iraq, criticized the United States’ “illegal and unjust war” yesterday during an interfaith rally in Lexington, according to the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Cindy Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., accused President Bush of lying to the nation about a war which has consumed tens of billions of dollars and claimed more than 1,700 American lives – including the life of Army Specialist Casey Austin Sheehan.
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