Even after we elect our Democratic President and Overwhelimg Democratic Majority in both Houses of Congress, we still need to stay plugged in.  Why?  Because the special interest groups will.

WE NEED TO KEEP UP WITH CURRENT LEGISLATION!  Democracy is not a spectator sport.  We should be aware of the legislation that is before our Congress every single day that they are in session.   We should know what this legislation would mean to our quality of life should it be passed and we should have an opinion “aye” or “nay” regarding its passage.  And more!  We should call all three of our elected officials in DC to let them know how we feel about this legislation BEFORE it is passed.  I also call them after it is passed to either tell them how pleased I am with their vote, or how displeased I am with their vote.  Follow-up is always important.

Act Now!
1.  If you don't have them, get the phone numbers for all three of your elected  DC officials.  Write them down and keep them handy. 

2. Sign up to be automatically notified via your email regarding legislation that is before Congress AND how your elected officials voted.  Free!

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/megavote/

I bought a great issue of Time Magazine on a whim at the grocery store tonight and I’m so glad I did.  While reading one of the articles, I had a small epiphany (tiny actually hardly worth mentioning, but I will, you know me. . .) regarding the ongoing battle between the super Hillary supporters and the super Obama supporters.

As far as the posts on this blog are concerned, I’m somewhat in the middle—going back and forth between a part of me thinking that things should settle down and we should unite and then crossing over to the other side that says “what the hell, in the grander scheme of things, is it really that important either way?” [Note: I’m not in the middle regarding whom I support.  I support Obama, the presumed nominee.]

But back to that magazine:  It is really a great issue.  It is titled “Annual Making of America” issue and there is a photo of Mark Twain on the cover.  (It has several articles in it and I’ll report now on the first one that I read.  It is by Richard Lacayo and is titled:  the Seriously Funny Man.)

As Lacayo points out, Mark Twain was our first great political wit and a dogged defender of racial equality.  Jon Stewart, Barack Obama and the rest of America are in his debt.

Following is a hilarious story from that piece.  I will tell it and then you draw your own conclusions.   

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he's doing this.  I mean, afterall, the Bush presidency, for the past 8 years, has been full of "create-it-as-we-go" government antics.  This presidency has foolishly deceived the American people in ways I once thought only capable of the corrupt governments in the emerging African nations! I think I'd be more surprised if Former White House Advisor Karl Rove HAD shown up this morning!  Talk about audacity!

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25622771

As a nation, we have begun to make headway to reach across partisan lines and build something for which we can be proud.  Unfortunately, there are these little people like Rove with whom we must contend.  Just what should WE do with them?  Should we gamble and let the cards fall as they may?

It's amusing, one must laugh to avoid the anger, that the case may not be resolved before Bush's term ends in January. How convenient! Executive privilege, my butt! Frankly, I'm quite tired of government saying/arguing that internal administration communications are confidential and that Congress cannot compel officials to testify. Says who? This is OUR government! We are the PEOPLE! WE pay the TAXES! We vote the laws! WE run this ship!

We have got to take the helm from those who would otherwise turn us into a form of totalitarian government. We may have invaded Iraq to bring in democracy and bring down a totalitarian regime, but in the process our own system may be moving closer to the latter and further weakening the former.We are often referred to as a "superpower" which accurately symbolizes the projection of American power abroad, but it obscures internal consequences. Just imagine how odd it would be if we were to refer to the "Constitution of the American Democracy superpower." We know that "constitution" refers to the limitations of power, while "democracy" addresses the active involvement of citizens in government and how the government responds to its people. To even consider ourselves a "superpower," we'd be recognizing the surpassing of constitutional limitations and actual dwarfing of our citizenry. Is that what we've allowed Bush's presidency to do to our nation?

Consider this...The increasing power of the state and the declining power of institutions intended to control it has been in the making for some time. The party system is a notorious example. The Republicans have emerged as a unique phenomenon in American history of a fervently doctrinal party, zealous, ruthless, antidemocratic and boasting a near majority--till now (and Democrats haven't been able to really flex their majority muscles as we'd hoped). As Republicans have become more ideologically intolerant, the Democrats have shrugged off the liberal label and their critical reform-minded constituencies to embrace centrism and footnote the end of ideology. In ceasing to be a genuine opposition party the Democrats have smoothed the road to power of a party more than eager to use it to promote empire abroad and corporate power at home. Bear in mind that a ruthless, ideologically driven party with a mass base was a crucial element in all of the twentieth-century regimes seeking total power.

Representative institutions no longer represent voters. Instead, they have been short-circuited, steadily corrupted by an institutionalized system of bribery that renders them responsive to powerful interest groups whose constituencies are the major corporations and wealthiest Americans. The courts, in turn, when they are not increasingly handmaidens of corporate power, are consistently deferential to the claims of national security. Elections have become heavily subsidized non-events that typically attract at best merely half of an electorate whose information about foreign and domestic politics is filtered through corporate-dominated media. Citizens are manipulated into a nervous state by the media's reports of rampant crime and terrorist networks, by thinly veiled threats of the Attorney General and by their own fears about unemployment. What is crucially important here is not only the expansion of governmental power but the inevitable discrediting of constitutional limitations and institutional processes that discourages the citizenry and leaves them politically apathetic.

In the United States it is with the people where democracy is most alive--while the real danger lies with an increasingly unbridled government. The basic elements are in place: a weak legislative body, a legal system that is both compliant and repressive, a party system in which one party, whether in opposition or in the majority, is bent upon reconstituting the existing system so as to permanently favor a ruling class of the wealthy, the well-connected and the corporate, while leaving the poorer citizens with a sense of helplessness and political despair, and, at the same time, keeping the middle classes dangling between fear of unemployment and expectations of fantastic rewards once the new economy recovers.

What's more, the whole scheme is fueled by an increasingly concentrated media and a well-funded, conservative propaganda machine. If we're not careful, our current tolerably free society will transform to something reminiscent of the extreme regimes of the past century. Are we ready for that? Are we going to hold Karl Rove's feet to the fire? Bush's? Our own? Are we going to take our government back? Or, are we simply going to fold our cards and cash in our chips already!

Bill Moyers spoke to an audience of more than 3,500 journalists in Minneapolis on Friday. He called the media reform movement "the most significant citizens' movement in this new century."

Go here to watch it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0r71L7cojE

What is Fair? 

This question has been ponder in the literal sense for ages.

What is fair to one is not to another

What we really are debateing are rules.

Not solutions

but rules

There is Something Happening Here

Why are you all Scared?

Must be Senator Clinton has a large closing surge in the nomination. For the ones who think it is over, then Why, bother with posting negative articles and implying innuendoes?

Have I missed something here?

Are counting the votes scaring you or just the results? To those of you who have decreed over the past two months for Senator Clinton to get out, I say you are scared of losing the nomination and not the General Election.

To those who continue party divisiveness, I say 17 Million plus voters are at stake.

FYI It is not over.

It is Not Over We still do not have a nominee.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton 08 The Inclusive Choice 

Paranoid strikes deep, into your life it will creep

Everybody look what's going down ...

The highest glass ceiling in this country is neither a woman running for president, nor a black man running for president, nor a 72 year old man running for president.

The highest glass ceiling that has been shattered is class and the political financial powerlessness of the poor.  Throughout the history of our country, our politics have been commanded by the rich.  Whatever they wanted, whatever legislation that benefited them is what was passed.  This election has finally wrenched that power from their hands.

There is no way that they can compete with the powerful financial machine that Obama has built. Obama has taken what is the only power that the poor have--numbers--and maximized it.  The wealth of few cannot compete with the wealth and energy of the many.  Obama’s financial system has a data bank of over 1,500,000 donors.  None of them are even close to being tapped out.  All Obama needs to do is ask at least 1,200,000 would donate $20 and within 24 hours he would and could raise $24,000,000.  That is power that no other candidate in the history of our country has ever achieved—the power of the people.

D Tree's recent great post setting the record straight recording Murdoch's contributions brought to mind how much the rich and the upper 5% of this country have influenced politics in the USA  and how this primary campaign, thanks to Obama, has changed that landscape forever.  Now for the first time in the history of this country, we might have a democracy that indeed reflects the will of the people and not just the will of the rich people.

http://www.democrats.org/page/community/post/dtree/CnV7

Why are you all Scared?

Must be Senator Clinton has a large closing surge in the nomination. For the ones who think it is over, then Why, bother with posting negative articles and implying innuendoes? Have I missed something here? Are counting the votes scaring you or just the results? To those of you who have decreed over the past two months for Senator Clinton to get out, I say you are scared of losing the nomination and not the General Election. To those who continue party divisiveness, I say 17 Million plus voters are at stake. FYI It is not over.

It is Not Over

We still do not have a nominee.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton 08

The Inclusive Choice

Electable in the General Election

Experienced

Beloved by the International Community

The People's Choice

Paranoid strikes deep,

into your life it will creep

Everybody look what's going down ...

Talk about stealing democracy!  Hillary doesn’t even bat an eye while she claims that it is just fine to count the votes from an election where her opponent’s name was not even on the ballot. Shades of a banana republic! 

After that one, I thought that Hillary could not possibly demonstrate a more complete disregard for the democratic process in order to try to wrange the nomination, but she out-did herself yesterday.  I heard that her campaign is now circulating a letter to super delegates suggesting that we let corporate owned pollsters be the new deciders. In other words, she is suggesting that we disregard the voters and instead follow the predictions of corporate pollsters. 

I hope that the super delegates are all intelligent enough to realize who own and control these polls.  It is the same people who control mainstream media—Republican neocons. 

So what Hillary is actually asking us to do is to let Republican neocons choose our Democratic candidate.  If the people in my Democratic Party prove themselves to be such fools as to follow the advice of Republicans, I will be very sad over it.  These polls are not “independent”.  They are run by people just like Mark Penn.  Do you want someone like Mark Penn choosing the Democratic candidate instead of the people?  I don’t.   

Democracy has two fundamental requirements:  a well-fed populace and an educated populace.  There is a reason that it took 196 years to establish a democracy in the USA.  You may remember the dates:  1604 the pilgrims landed and then 1776 we become a new democratic nation.  When people are so busy to just trying to survive and not starve to death, there is not much time left over to think about much of anything else—education, government, the arts, etc.

The first wrong thing they did after pulling down Saddam’s statue was to create economic instability by dismissing the Iraqi army.  Instead of incorporating them into the new government (minus a few generals of course), the leadership of the Bush administration “fired” the army—thus creating an instant situation of 400,000 jobless men who are trained as professional soldiers.  So the very first thing they did was to increase the jobless rate in Iraq by almost half a million. Now if these men who have known nothing but soldiering all their lives are out of work and the “good guys” won’t hire them—where do you think they will go?