Are we the nation of Martin Luther King or Bull Connor?

While flipping through the pages of a photography book, I was stopped cold by this picture: a cop trying to wrestle an American flag away from a little black boy back during the Civil Rights struggle. I thought that summed up the era better than any other photo. It was like the cop telling him this wasn't his country, America didn't belong to him, even though his ancestors might have been here longer than the white cops.

As John McCain's election prospects dim, and his campaign relies on fear-mongering and name-calling bordering on inciting violence, and even voter suppression tactics borrowed from the Jim Crow era, it is clear we are back to the cultural crossroads we faced in the early 1960s: do we choose to be the nation of Bull Connor, who became the symbol of the stand against Civil Rights, or the object of his wrath, Martin Luther King?

Bull Connor's America was much like the right today. There was chest-thumping patriotism (or at least regional pride) and loud claims to be superior to every other races and culture while at the same time committing the most brutal acts of violence against those simply demanding that we live up to our own stated ideals. But to the Bull Connors, equality, due process, and democracy were the rights of only a certain tribe not all who were born or live here. Even the sanctity of one's own body and right to life belonged only to the tribe, and the people outside the tribe could be used for labor, sex, or even killed at the whim of the tribe.

That same hypocrisy at home led to even worse hypocrisy abroad--if our businesses needed something a country had, the government of that country damn well better give it to them on terms the business dictates, or we will take it by force and install a government that knows who's the boss. "They" are not part of "us," so they have no rights we need to worry about.

Bull Connor's America is how the world had worked for most of human history: those who had an edge in population, technology, or wealth used it to crush others and take what they pleased.

It is how the Bush administration worked as well. The rich and powerful took what they pleased, our jobs, our houses, our pensions, our tax dollars to bailout their cronies after their Wall Street scams collapsed, the lives of our children in a war to take from the Iraqis. All the while they claimed poverty when we asked for money for our schools, health care for everyone, or at least decent treatment for our injured troops.

Those who dissented too loudly weren't met with fire hoses and dogs (those were saved for Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib), but we were watched, wiretapped, infiltrated, placed on lists to be stopped at the airport, corralled in "free speech zones," and if we had a high enough profile that people would listen to what we said, retaliated against and fired from our jobs.

Most of us suddenly found that we were outside of the tribe. We had become black in Bull Connor's America.

On the other side of the divide back then was Martin Luther King's America that thought the ideals in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence should be applied to all, and that our tribe is mankind, and that those ideas could triumph not by force but by stepping forward and claiming what was promised, and trusting that enough people believed the ideals that they would see the hypocrisy when the Bull Connors tried to take it back by force.

And MLK's America won.

At least at home. When he tried to extend his dream to what we did in the rest of the world, he was shot.

Today we have descended back to that primal conflict: are we a nation of ideals or a nation where the strong take what they want from the weak, where we mouth platitudes about democracy then enforce conformity with rubber bullets and tasers?

The saddest thing about this divide is that many of those who have chosen the Bull Connor side think they are part of the privileged tribe.

They are not.

At best, they are like the slaves the master appoints as overseer of other slaves, maybe given a nicer cabin, better food, and a shot of whiskey, but once the master's gambling debts get too high (or these days their last Wall Street scam collapses), they will be sold down the river with the rest of the slaves.

In the same way, those who go to Palin rallies shouting that they ought to kill the blue-lipped socialist terrorist monkey, go home to read their credit card and medical bills they can't possibly pay, wonder how they are going to avoid foreclosure now that that balloon payment on their mortgage has kicked in, and how they will ever be able to get out from under all of it when the only job they can find is selling corn dogs at the mall food court. But they will never wonder why their POW action figure and Caribou Barbie won't fix it because those slaves think they belong to the masters family.

PHOTO: Is a right wing website fantasizing about killing McCain?

Is it just me or is there some other way of interpreting this combination of text and photo?

This is a real page, not a photoshop. You can see it HERE.

click pic to see full-sized

What is really sad about this is that as dyspeptic, volatile, and erratic as John McCain is lately, and as dangerous as he would be as president, I don't think any of us on the left are wishing the guy an unnatural death.

However, it looks like members of his own party are --and it's because he is not violent and ignorant enough for their tastes.

Maybe the Secret Service needs to help them work through their feelings.

UPDATE: Maybe they saw this post and felt guilty. By the next morning, the photo and caption had beeen changed to this:

click pic to see full-sized

LINK TO PAGE

UPDATE II: One of the comments pointed out that they rotate images with their fundraising ads. I took another look, and the Palin aiming a rifle is still in the mix.

Missing from the first debate: honesty about OIL & foreign policy

In the first presidential debate, this little nugget by John McCain caught my attention:

That wasn't just about a problem between Georgia and Russia. It had everything to do with energy.

There's a pipeline that runs from the Caspian through Georgia through Turkey. And, of course, we know that the Russians control other sources of energy into Europe, which they have used from time to time.

John McCain in presidential debate Sep. 26, 2008

You would think there would be nothing noteworthy about talking about how oil effects our foreign policy--except that was the ONLY specific reference to it in the debate apart from both McCain and Obama making very indirect references to "breaking our dependence on foreign oil."

That's a nice thought, but I'd rather hear some specifics like:

• Did the oil industry prevent us from punishing Saudi Arabia for 9/11? The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found that the Saudi government was responsible, but Bush classified that section of the report, and nothing else was ever said about it again.
  
  
• For McCain & Biden: did you vote for the Iraq War because someone quietly convinced you that controlling Iraq's oil would somehow benefit average Americans, or did you know it was only meant to help oil companies?
  
  
• Why haven't any of the candidates addressed the Hydrocarbon Law Bush tried to push on the Iraqis that would have given 88% of their oil profits to American big oil companies, and given those companies a seat on the committee that made decisions on their oil reserves? Don't you think that might have pissed off some Iraqis enough to take a shot at our troops?
  
  
• What do you expect to happen to the price of oil if we attack Iran?
  
  
• Do you plan to try to occupy Iran?
  
  
• Is it a wise foreign policy to kill so many people, making enemies that will last long after the last drop of oil is gone?
  
  
• Why do you talk to us like fucking children about terrorist boogeymen instead of the real geopolitical motives for what we are doing in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Basin: trying to gain control of the last spigots of the world's diminishing oil supplies?
  
  
• Speaking of which, exactly how did you expect Russia to react if we tried to take over their oil trade with Europe and the rest of the world?
• 
  
• How do you expect both Russia and China to react if we achieve our goal of controlling all of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea oil flow? If we were them, would take it quietly?
  
  
• The cliche about "breaking our dependence foreign oil" implies that our wars in the Middle East are to secure oil to run our economy. However, if that was our motive couldn't we simply do what China is doing in Canada, Venezuela, and the Sudan: buy it with long term contracts?
  
  
• Isn't war to secure oil only necessary if another world power has it and is withholding it, OR if an oil company wants to force terms on the natives that they wouldn't accept without a gun to their heads?

To the extent that those running for the highest elected office in America DON'T talk honestly about this, they are castrating our democracy by withholding what would allow us to make an informed decision about who to vote for, and showing loyalty to a constituency in a smoke-filled room at the country club and not to American citizens as a whole.

Sort of like what happened when they tried to give away $700 billion of our hard-earned tax dollars to the already wealthy.

McCain falsely blamed troops for torture during debate

During the first debate with Barack Obama, John McCain said this would solve the torture problem:

So we have a long way to go in our intelligence services. We have to do a better job in human intelligence. And we've got to -- to make sure that we have people who are trained interrogators so that we don't ever torture a prisoner ever again.

CNN TRANSCRIPT

Wow. So the problem is ignorant interrogators, not the people in the White House who gave the orders?

Didn't CIA interrogators refuse to use the methods they were ordered to use until they got the legal cover from the torture memos, written under the guidance of then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales who went on to become attorney general?

The resulting memo defined torture as only "death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function."

The few soldiers prosecuted at Abu Ghraib weren't trained in interrogation techniques, but they were following orders from the interrogators at the prison who told them to "soften the prisoners up" for them, and the methods they used were remarkably similar to a then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's torture memo said to be posted publicly at Abu Ghraib by prison commander Gen. Jane Karpinski.

Recently, it was discovered that the White House principals actually met to micromanage torture methods like sleep deprivation and waterboarding, and incredibly, Bush said he knew and approved, according to ABC News.

The Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Contrary to the Bush administration spin on this, the military is hardly ignorant on torture nor do they approve of it apart from Bush's handpicked generals.

The abuse at Abu Ghraib was first reported by an Army MP, Joseph Darby.

When Navy lawyers at the Pentagon, who work for JAG became aware of the torture policy, they contacted the New York City Bar Association’s Committee on International Human Rights and urged them to publicly and strenuously oppose it.

In November of 2006, then dean of West Point, US Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, flew to Southern California to ask the producers of the TV show 24 to stop glorifying torture since it was influencing the thinking of cadets more than the training they were getting at West Point.

Perhaps most daming evidence against the "blame the troops" position on torture is the Army's own interrogation manual. In addition to describing as torture virtually every technique approved by the Bush administration, it gives this simple test of whether something is torture:

If your contemplated actions were perpetrated by the enemy against US PWs [prisoners of war], you would believe such actions violate international or US law.

FM 34-52

Jesus said it more simply, "Do unto to others as you would have them do unto you" (Matthew 7:12, Luke 6:31).

All the Christians who have supported Bush have forgotten that in their lynch mob blood lust.

To his credit, John McCain bucked the Bush administration on torture for a while and even wrote a moving op-ed on why it was a bad idea.

Our commitment to basic humanitarian values affects--in part--the willingness of other nations to do the same. Mistreatment of enemy prisoners endangers our own troops who might someday be held captive. While some enemies, and Al Qaeda surely, will never be bound by the principle of reciprocity, we should have concern for those Americans captured by more traditional enemies, if not in this war then in the next.

(John McCain, Newsweek Nov. 21, 2005)

Unfortunately, McCain gave up this moral and pragmatic position to gain the support of the Bush administration and voted to give Bush the discretion to use torture.

After being involved in the torture debate since it broke out in 2004, McCain knows this is not an issue of poorly trained soldiers but of elected civilian leaders and their appointees who put their own personal agendas ahead of our military's traditional ethics, our laws, and the Geneva Convention, which we helped write. They put their own agendas and personal gains ahead of the safety of our troops with their torture policy, as McCain's own earlier words testify to.

Instead of defending the troops, McCain is siding with the worst president in our history and blaming them for the conduct of the White House, which has used the troops as human shields to deflect responsibility for their own war crimes.

That is beneath contempt.

At a future debate, I want McCain to be asked who bears primary responsibility for the torture that has occurred: the troops in the field or the civilians who gave the orders.

BUSH TORTURE RESOURCES

Declassified torture memos

NY Times guide to torture memos

Geneva Convention against torture

Overview of Abu Ghraib abuse: 60% or more innocent

The most famous torture victim's story

Detaining, abusing, & raping children

VIDEO: Torture Memo Author Asked if President Can Bury Someone Alive

McCain's wife vows to give her fortune away to Lehman & Merril Lynch victims

Cindy McCain gives away her fortune to bankrupted Merril Lynch clients

In a scene reminiscent of It's a Wonderful Life, John McCain and his wife Cindy appeared at a Merrill Lynch office and passed out cash to investors who had lost their life savings in the firm's crash.

As investors clamored at the teller's window, Cindy dumped out a suitcase of money, began to ask how much each one had lost, and gave each piles of freshly printed money.

"There's plenty for everyone!" Mrs. McCain said.

Later she told reporters that her husband was despondent when he saw the news of the Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch crashes. "Not just because they were his biggest donors and lent him their corporate jet, but because of what it would do to the little people who put their trust in their social betters, the wealthy."

She said presidential candidate and senator McCain felt guilty for supporting decades of deregulation and carrying water for Wall Street.

"John thought if Wall Street did well, it would trickle down on the little people, the voters. Instead of a trickle of pure, life-giving water, it was more like the trickle out of John's diaper when he forgets to take his incontinence medication."

Concerned that her husband's despondency could accelerate the deterioration of his health and mental faculties, or spark a temper tantrum that would take several of their household staff to contain, she struck upon the idea repaying bankrupted investors out of her own personal fortune.

"Daddy left me oh-so-much money when he died, and since John is a senator, we don't have to spend it on ANYTHING. People are always giving him meals and trips and airplane rides. People that visit politicians are ever-so-generous!"

McCain gave away $30 million before the Merril Lynch office closed, and said she will make it right with every investor, or give away every penny of her $200 million personal fortune trying.

Senator McCain smiled soporifically throughout the proceedings because of a heavy dosage of xanax.

"Karl Rove is taking the day off, and he said it would be best if John was drugged since that's what they did to President Bush to keep him out of trouble when Karl was busy."

Mrs. McCain said if an bankrupted investor needs money before she can get to them, they can go to a nearby McCain campaign headquarters and make a withdrawal.

"Or any Republican candidate," she added. "I'm sure they all feel just awful about how this whole deregulation thing turned out and want to make amends, not just with words, but in the one way that counts: money."

McCain ethics reform: Dept. of Lobbyists

John McCain gives a "thumbs up" to his proposed Department of Lobbyists

Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain introduced a sweeping ethics reform proposal today that included the creation of a new Department of Lobbyists in a speech before the Chamber of Commerce in Velva, North Dakota.

The text of his speech follows:

My friends, I have said many times that I am a maverick who is not afraid to take my colleagues in the Senate to task for their lack of ethics, whichever party they belong to. The problem of how those in Congress relate to big business and corporations is shameful.

Everyday, corporations or wealthy individuals will make contributions to our campaigns and our shell foundations and PACs , or even give high paying jobs to our wives or children, fully expecting tax or regulatory relief, government contracts, or even subsidies in return.

Too often though, elected officials fail to keep their end of the bargain. They make half-hearted attempts to service their donors, then abandon even that effort if some newspaper or website starts to ask questions. Worse, some don't even make the effort in the first place, pretending that the donation was given out of some idealistic agreement with a candidates ideology, not a fee for service.

My friends, there is a word for not doing what you are paid to do, and that word is FRAUD.

Those in Congress must be held accountable and must be forced to do their patriotic duty for those who supported them financially.

Therefore, I will create a new Department of Lobbyists that will exist solely to expedite service to political donors. They will keep a central database of donations and inform donors of the level of service their donation entitles them to, from a letter to a regulator telling them to back off, to five senators showing up at the regulators office to give him an attitude adjustment.

This will also make life easier for lobbyists. Currently, to seek favors, they have to visit each and every politician they will need on their side, wine and dine them, or provide escorts of their preferred gender. With the new Department of Lobbyists, they will only have to make ONE stop. The DOL will then give the marching orders to the relevant congressmen and senators.

The Department will also serve a valuable function for retiring legislators. We all look forward to working as consultants, lobbyists, CEO's, and board members for our past donors when we leave office, but actually negotiating for the job can be awkward and time consuming. There is nothing more embarassing than asking for a CEO job when a defense contractor thinks you only rate a couple of paychecks as a consultant. Just as there will be a set schedule of expected favors for past donations, there will be a set schedule of after-office jobs for favors done in office. If an elected official has his heart set on a certain position but hasn't done enough favors to qualify for it, the Department could tell him how to make up for his shortcomings.

The best person to run this new department would of course be a lobbyist. Any number of the members of my campaign staff would be qualified to be Secretary of Lobbyists, but for his outstanding service in inciting the Georgia-Russia conflict, Randy Scheunemann, a lobbyist for Georgia, has shown himself to be head and shoulders above his peers.

My own story with the Keating Five should be a tragic reminder of why this new department is needed. Savings & Loan owner Charles Keating made good faith donations to myself and four other senators, fully expecting that we could end a regulatory fishing expedition into his business practices. Because there was no streamlined process, we failed to intervene soon enough or thoroughly enough to protect Mr. Keating from eventual criminal charges.

If we had the Department of Lobbyists to help us help Mr. Keating, he might have retired to Bermuda to live off of kickbacks from loans he gave his friends, who had no intention of repaying, which left depositors holding the bag. Instead, he ended up in prison.

My friends, if I am elected, the Department of Lobbyists will be just the beginning of my ethics reform. If I have to, I will go to the gates of Hell to serve my donors, whether they are trying to outsource jobs, loot their employees pensions, pollute the air and water with coal or nuclear plants, or secure oil reserves in some God-forsaken Middle Eastern backwater.

That is the way America is supposed to work, and under a McCain presidency, that is how it WILL work, so help me God.

McCain prepares concession speech for Republican convention tonight

John McCain is putting the finishing touches on the concession speech he will give at the Republican National Convention tonight.

Normally, such speeches are given after the election when enough votes have been counted to convince a candidate he has lost.

The McCain campaign says they already see that they have lost months before a single vote has been cast.

"We hoped that adding Sarah Palin to the ticket would shore up our religious right base and rope in some women swing voters," said a top campaign official speaking off the record.

"We got the religious right back on the bus with Palin, but our polling and focus groups show we lost the few conservative Democrats we had, lost swing voters, and even lost some Reagan Republicans like Peggy Noonan. We shot ourselves in the face."

Another long time confidante of McCain said he is conceding not so much because he is certain he will lose but because he is afraid he may win. "The party has all kinds of tricks to pull the rabbit from the hat from ginning up military conflicts like Georgia to terror alerts to rumor emails about Obama to purging Democrat voters in states where the Secretary of State is GOP," said the confidante.

"But John's basic views have not changed since 2000. He still believes the religious right are 'agents of intolerance' as he said back then, and when party insiders forced him to take one of them as his VP, and one who has all the worst qualities of the Bush administration, the religious hypocrisy, corruption, profound ignorance about foreign policy and the Constitution, and using political power for personal vendettas, John said enough."

McCain will throw his support behind Barack at the end of the speech, and wish his presidency well.

The move is not without precedence since McCain twice approached the Democrats about switching parties during the Bush years.

The McCain confidante said, "John really believes in our fight against fundamentalist fanatics in the Middle East. He doesn't want to see the same thing happen here if he dies in office and the presidency falls to someone just a few steps to the left of the Taliban."

The confidante concluded, "John hopes tonight will be the GOP's greatest moment since Lincoln freed the slaves." The confidante seemed unaware of the irony since the Republican Party platform includes the repeal of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

Cindy McCain: tear up pre-nup to show us how to trust John

Cindy McCain had John McCain sign a prenuptial agreement when they got married, presumably because she's worth hundreds of millions, and as an admiral's son at the time, he would have been upper middle class at best.

Nothing says how little trust you have in someone like a prenup, and it also shows who is very much the junior partner in the relationship.

If Cindy McCain really wanted to help her husband's presidential campaign, she should be asked to make a big public display of tearing up that prenuptial to show that if she's willing to trust Grandpa Asshole with her hundreds of millions, we should trust him with our trillion dollar budget.

If she doesn't, why should we trust him with not just our money, but our country and security?

Is Battlestar Galactica's Col. Tigh modeled on McCain?

Others have noticed that John McCain bears an uncanny resemblance to Col. Tigh on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA.

Click pic to see full-sized

McCain is the one on the--ah hell, I'm not sure. But one of them is him.

However, the resemblance is more than just skin-deep.

Consider:

Both are cranky old men, still working long after many of their peers have retired or died.

McCain was a POW who was tortured during the Vietnam War. Col. Tigh was a POW tortured by the Cylons and had his eye plucked out.

When McCain was released from Vietnam, he divorced his loyal first wife for a statuesque, blond hottie and has children with her. When Col. Tigh was released by the Cylons, he killed his loyal wife for betraying the resistance to secure his freedom. Later, Tigh hooks up with a statuesque, blond Cylon hottie and impregnates her.

John McCain verbally abused his hottie wife, calling her a "cunt" in public and saying she plasters on her make up like a trollop after she joked about his thinning hair. Col. Tigh verbally and physically abused his Cylon hottie because of his own conflicted feeling about being a Cylon himself.

John McCain thought he was in line for the presidency in 2000, only to be upstaged by the largely untested son of a former president. Col. Tigh took temporary command of Galactica only to be upstaged by Apollo, the largely untested son of the Admiral.

Most importantly, Col. Tigh thought he was a loyal colonial officer only to find out in his old age that he was one of his lifelong nemesis, the Cylons. If others knew his identity, his heroic record would be forgotten. John McCain thought he was a maverick, but finds himself a tool of the worst, most anti-democratic, corrupt, and dangerous president in American history, a man who insulted McCain's wife, his child, and his heroic military service. If the public realizes the degree to which he is a puppet of the same moneyed interests as Bush, his heroic record would be forgotten.

Col. Tigh has a drinking problem, and if I was John McCain, I would too.

I don't think McCain should be president, but since there are multiple copies of each human-looking Cylon, maybe McCain has a future as a guest star on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, playing Col. Tigh's Cylon brother.