The people of this country, not special interest big money, should be
the source of all political power. - Paul Wellstone

~~I confess. A winger told me about DU. He accused me of getting my
ideas here, and I'd never heard of DU before. But I came and checked
it out, registered, and read what you have to say. What a great place
to come when the outside gets nasty and you're at your wits end for
comebacks.

Thanks DU, and all the posters who came and stuck it out when it was
getting started. It must have been a wild ride.

~~~DU unto others as you would have them DU unto you.~~~We don't
check our stats very often because while we do have software that
records the stats accurately it doesn't present them in a very user-
friendly fashion, and it takes several hours to crunch the numbers.
But the last time we looked, it was around 10 million page views per
week. At any given time there are thousands of people browsing the
site.

~~~More than ready Alan - I'm not sure we can hold off much longer.
I listen to the namby-pamby questioning of the SCOTUS candidates, I
see the approvals of the "internet annoyance law", the removal of
habeus corpus - someone, somewhere is going to lose it and it will be
a spark of civil disobedience that bery well may have violent results.
Those who are struggling just to get by may actually start paying
attention soon.

What then? I honestly believe we are in the midst of a onstitutional
Crisis and people need to pay attentioN!

~~~~Ubiquitous Corruption My beat is healthcare and I see the slimy
grip of scandal and the damage done for the love of money in every
national institution, agency, and policy. The plans have been seeded
many years ago and we are just seeing them come to bear. The next
thing I expect is to open a fortune cookie and have it say "Wise man
say- every man for himself" or perhaps "Greed is good."

~~~~~Take another swipe at the spider's web.Citizens for a Sound
Economy is an older strand in the great neocon spider's web. The are
directly connected to Americans for Progress, the Independent Women's
Forum, and other. They all point to Koch Industries, and each
branches out in other directions.It's a sticky web, and one
connection leads to another. Soon enough, with enough swipes, one by
one, sticky thread by sticky thread, we can pull the whole thing down.

http://www.epluribusmedia.org/
thats why i miss the BBC.

/there are no rules except discovery /the only tradition is
invention. -rachel pollack

by joseph rainmound

CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS WATERS RISING FAST

by karendc Sat Jan 14, 2006

(NOTE: The following was co-written by Karen and Dick Bell, of the
Democracy Cell Project, after a morning discussion about people and
groups floundering between despair and hope over the past week. Karen
and Dick co-founded The Democracy Cell Project, along with a group of
remarkable citizen-activists, in 2004. They live in Washington DC.
The essay was originally posted here:
http://www.democracycellproject.net/...)

The understanding that Bush has provoked a "constitutional crisis" is
taking root and spreading. Al Gore is expected to deliver a speech on
Monday that is going to focus on this. (We will be there and hope to
do a little live blogging, if possible.)

We believe we are entering a period of extreme fluidity; Bush's
ability to control the many dark forces that he has unleashed is
diminshing by the day. But, this is a time of both great danger and
great opportunity. Watching Americans slowly coming to grips after
years of indifference is not a pretty picture, but it is movement in
the right direction. In American history, we know that there are
periodic convulsions in which the forces of evil sometimes get the
upper hand. (i.e. The Alien Sedition Acts of 1798, the red scare of
the early 1920's, the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII,
McCarthy, decades of J. Edgar Hoover's illegal actions, COINTELPRO,
and now Bush, the NSA, and the Patriot Act.)

In each of these dark times, the ideals on which the country was
founded appeared to be headed for the junk heap of history. But time
and again, the American people have ultimately returned to the arms
of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of
Rights. The ability of the American people, again and again, to find
ways to transcend these efforts to subvert freedom and liberty is the
true exceptionalism that has made America a beacon of hope for lo
these two centuries.

History shows that we can do what we need to do; the biggest obstacle
is persuading enough people that all is not lost, and that by working
together, as our ancestors have done repeatedly, we can win this
fight.

As one of the spirituals would have it, "Freedom Is A Constant
Struggle."

In practice, we need first to keep on keeping on with what we have
been doing; second we have to be ready to act boldly and seize the
opportunities that we know are coming as Bush's criminal enterprise
unravels. History being the elusive prognosticator that it is cannot
tell us where the openings will be. What revelations are still to
come that could light such a fire for impeachment that even the
Republican House would at least have to hold hearings? Jack Abramoff
may implicate enough Republican members to switch the House of
Representatives all by himself! And then, of course, there is Iraq,
as well as the deepening crisis over Iran's nuclear weapons
intentions.

No matter how bad things get, however, Bush will never voluntarily
surrender an iota of the power he has grabbed. Our energy has to go
into organizations, be they existing organizations, or brand-new ones
that we found, to push Bush and his congressional support out of
power as soon as possible. These are opportunities and they abound.

Code Pink, the World Can't Wait, United for Peace and Justice,
Progressive Dems of America, MoveOn and many many other groups
sponsor town meetings, rallies, petitions, mobilize, march, and
conduct nonviolent civil disobedience and street theatre, or run
serious vigils and gatherings; PACS raise money to support
candidates, blogs report new findings faster than the mainstream
media--all of this is worthy because we simply do not know the
threshold or when critical mass will be achieved.

Neither of us is suggesting there is a need to choose BETWEEN actions
or that any of these groups have THE answer. The solution is in our
daily actions, saying "yes, and..." to all the opportunities. We
each need to contribute, in the largest sense of that word. It could
be a simple as forwarding an email that you know has truth. It could
be as complicated as building an online community for a cause or a
candidate. It probably needs to be "all of the above."

In business, managers and consultants are always talking
about "capacity building"--growing the organization to the right size
so that more growth can happen, building on the infrastructure set in
place. We each must build our own capacity for taking action, making
sure the infrastructure is in place, contributing to the hands
reaching out for us, and joining them.

We don't have to say yes to everything asked, but saying no brings
the effort to a halt. Offer something back--a suggestion, a small
check, a networking moment, a hug of encouragement.

Think of it as being a good citizen.

~Who was around back then?

Whenever I despair the most about BushCo, I just remember that things
have been quite bad before, and the pendulum swings.

Any dKos'ers here that were around during McCarthy or other bad eras?
One of my most politically-active friends (I wrote a diary about her
recent arrests, and how the NSA was spying on her group for the past
several years) has been active for quite awhile. I ask her if she was
this despondent during the Reagen years, for instance, and she's
consistently said she's never seen things get as bad as they are now.
Maybe it's because she has more life experience, maybe she's in a
different phase of life now (she's a grandmother now), or maybe the
whatever conflict is going on in the present is the one that seems
the worst.

Anybody else out there agree or disagree?

What would our founding fathers say about trading their civil
liberties for safety from terror attacks?

~I was born in 1936.

Is this the worst I've ever seen? I dont know. I think it's worse
than the McCarthy period because now every part of the government is
controlled by the would be fascists. During McCarthy we had
Eisenhower as president who was a very decent man who eventually
turned aginst McCarthy. But I remember clearly that between the ages
of fifteen and thirty I lived in constant fear of an atomic war
between Russia and America. During the Cuban missle crisis I thought
it was all over. We have no real foreign enemy right now. Al Queda is
a small group of thugs who got lucky. Our biggest enemy today is
ourselves and our fear which this administration so excellently plays
on. Get rid of the fear and we'll be free as is always the case.

"... Let us stop, look and listen. Let us not give this president or
any president unchecked power. Remember the Constitution." Sen Rob't.
Byrd 10/11/02

==Scalito's Way

The worst thing about McCarthyism was the US vs them labels.

It got to where you were expected to prove your love for the US by
denouncing your friends and if you refused to do so you were
blacklisted. Bush says the same thing. If you aren't for US you are
against US.

That's just gang colors.

Think about what you have been watching on TV and at the movies for
the last sixty years. Did John Wayne make the the commies seem as bad
in the fifties as he did the japs in the forties and the indians in
the thirties? How did Clint Eastwood teach us we should deal with the
bad guys? Death Wish? Black Hawk Down?

Was teaching you who to hate pure propaganda or just preaching to the
choir.

The attitude and value that its not only fair and reasonable but
expected normal behavior to kidnap, murder, torture, spy on and seize
the property of anybody wearing the other sides colors on your turf
and that its the true natural leader that is tough enough for the job
has been reinforced and perpetuated by Hollywood and the media your
whole life.

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/...