“”If you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy.”

So goes a line from the latest Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith, giving the public reason to suspect parallels between modern politics and the the movie. Lucas… rejects them. Kind of.

“In ancient Rome, “why did the senate after killing Caesar turn around and give the government to his nephew?” Lucas said. “Why did France after they got rid of the king and that whole system turn around and give it to Napoleon? It’s the same thing with Germany and Hitler.”

“You sort of see these recurring themes where a democracy turns itself into a dictatorship, and it always seems to happen kind of in the same way, with the same kinds of issues, and threats from the outside, needing more control. A democratic body, a senate, not being able to function properly because everybody’s squabbling, there’s corruption.”

But the Bush supporters protesteth too much. I don’t know. Imagine a nation where the Senate votes its deliberative powers away, opting instead to become a rubber-stamp for the presidency. Hard to imagine.

My first thought on hearing the news about Newsweek today was, “Oftentimes, the first draft is the most true, because this comes before the powers that be clamp down on it.”

More than likely, the detail from Newsweek — that the Quran has been flushed into the toilet before before the souls locked up in Guantanamo Bay — is true. Not the part that they were reporting — that the government was about to admit it in an official report — a story that strikes me as incredulous — but the part that had been reported and reverberated through the past few years from detainees and (I think, though I may be wrong) interrogators. (Some google searching brings me to this list.

That being said, and maybe this is just a sort of anti-religious bias on my part, but the idea that Interrogators trashed the Quaran into the toilet doesn’t terribly disturb me. Yes, I know we need to avoid the General Boykin worldview, and perceptions of how it plays in what too many want to be a True Religious War. But, you don’t have to get very far to find more disturbing acts Just go to the Newsweek article in question.

But what impresses me about this case is what is coming out of the Bush Administration. We have a flip-flop here!

The Bush Administration had earlier said that this article (more specifically, sentence) had nothing to do with fanning the flames for riots that occurred in Afghanistan and Pakistan, downplaying it in favour of — what, I was never exactly sure, though there is a measure to which they were probably correct. No fuel to the fire, despite the signs that were being waved, such as these signs. It went like this:

“It is the judgment of our commander in Afghanistan, General Eichenberry, that in fact the violence that we saw in Jalalabad was not necessarily the result of the allegations about disrespect for the Koran, but more tied up in the political process and the reconciliation process that President Karzai and his cabinet are conducting in Afghanistan. He thought it was not at all tied to the article in the magazine.” — General Myers

Now they’re all over Newsweek, saying they incited the violence with such a false story… Donald Rumsfeld even chiming in with a “People need to watch what they say and watch what they do.”

Make of it what you must.

In consideration of the Downing Street Memo:

We already have Jack Straw on public record in his “I’m quitting” speech before the House of Commons saying that “it’s amazing how thin the evidence really is.”

I’m tempted to say that everyone knows this already, but really… seemingly only I do. And everyone like I. Perhaps it tore into Blair a bit; the American media ignores it and meanders onward.

It’s sort of like the open secret with the John Bolton nomination. What other purpose could John Bolton serve at the UN besides to demean the institution and provoke a crisis?

Fox News has aired a special called something to the effect of “The Threat from Iran”. I’m thinking that somebody needs to create a whole series of these programs, one for each nation state on Earth. “The Threat from New Zealand” would be a pretty spiffy program, methinks.

21 Red States: Alaska, Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wyoming.

16 Blue States: Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachussetts, Maryland, Michigan, North Dakota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, West Virginia.

13 Purple States: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Indiana, Lousiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Rode Island, South Dakota.

As per the most recent electoral map: 30 Red states. 20 Blue states.

Boldened are the states thate voted for one candidate or the other but have a delegation of two Senators from the other party.

On Neal Horsley’s Triumphant Return to the Air Waves.

……………….

Howard Dean: It’s hard to know what to make. None of us outside the administration have access to the intelligence, which led to this determination.

I am concerned that every time something happens that’s not good for President Bush he plays this trump card, which is terrorism. His whole campaign is based on the notion that “I can keep you safe, therefore at times of difficulty for America stick with me,” and then out comes Tom Ridge.

It’s just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there’s some of both in it.

Joseph Lieberman: I don’t think anybody who has any fairness or is in their right mind would think that the president or the secretary of Homeland Security would raise an alert level and scare people for political reasons.

(Note: If I wanted to, I could throw up John Kerry largely concurring with Lieberman, though not as forthrightly.)

The recent statements by Tom Ridge pretty well prove Dean correct in this old war of words. Lieberman’s a douche-bag, but we already knew that.

With that, we can look back into some feel-good rhetoric from Matthew Yglesias, along the lines of (I can’t find the quote immediately), “The ‘moveon.org’ crowd and the DLC crowd disagree vehemently on the War in Iraq and… that’s about it.”

For his part, Yglesias’s mea culpa with the War in Iraq went like this: I was bamboozled because I didn’t want to think of myself as reflexively anti-Bush; I wanted to be smarter and more thoughtful than the anti-war crowd. It was a telling commentary to be sur… politisc as self-image.

I will point out that Howard Dean was a DLC poster child at one time — a fact that maybe doesn’t matter anymore since the DLC clearly distanced itself from him in 2004. The point beyond that being that the difference between Dean and Lieberman in the matter of the color codes — and that weird doo-hingle with Iraq that ensnared Kerry — is pretty stark and more telling than any supposed similarity with respect to — say — Social Security. One opinion shows a deference to power and a key role-making in narrowing acceptable discourse to suit said ambiguosly floating power. The other is willing to go out on a limb and — I might add — not afraid to be correct for the sake of being correct against a backdrop of Universal Deceit.

This works its way into other matters. Take Lieberman’s duplicity on the Bankruptcy Reform Bill. Dare I say: he voted for the bill before he voted against it.

The word on the street these days is that the DLC is a dead institution. Nakedly exposed, a point of reference to which Centrist Democrats are running away from to find their way to a different banner (say, for instance, the “New Democratic Network”)– one not propped up by the same Charles Koch money that props up various right-wing, libertarian, and generally corporatist Political Institutions.

The latest issue of the New Republic includes an article defending “Clintonism”. I skimmed through it, and have not read it. I assume it has some good points to make — few New Republic articles of the last half dozen years are completely devoid of value. Something needed to defeat the Democratic Party of the 1970s and something needed to win in the early 1990s. BUT…

I started jotting down items for a blog entry… a rambling and list of supposed proposed “Democratic Party Platform” Initiatives. Something beyond a A Party of No or the more egregious “Party of Me Too”, addressing the great problem of the Democratic Party: a lack of definition. Items inspired by various actions and initiatives of various Democratic politicos, others by the excesses of the RNC at the moment. Nothing strikes me as radical in the least, or utopian, or sectarian / special interesty in its grasp, or outside the mainstream of average American opinion. Odd props to Jay Inslee, Peter DeFazio, Warren Buffett, Eliot Spitzer, and Brian Schweitzer.

But then I squint my eye. It needles various corporate coffers just enough to keep them honest. Which is why they tend to float around the ether, bounced around by Democratic officials and never framed into a cohesive storyline. The National Democratic Party platforms from 1988 onward shall remain as bland and blurry as can be.

What are you going to do about it?

I saw a bumper sticker in a car window today.

It was one with the American flag and the words “These Colors Don’t Run”. The sticker was so old that the colors were faded to white.

The revelations of the minutes of Dick Cheney’s Energy Meetings would have been an anti-climax. I say this on the heels of the court decision to proffer up Closed Government. To figure out who he met with, it’s pretty much a matter of looking at who the Energy Bill, and any Bush-Administration legislation dealing with Energy matters, benefits and who pumped money into Bush-Cheney. The corporate coffers write the laws. We all know that. (We also know, thanks to documents uncovered by the Principaled Conservative Outfit Judicial Watch, that they were looking at maps of Iraqi Oil Fields.)

But, to make lemonade out of our Closed Government, I say everyone oughta speculate to the nth degree on the most outrageous of scandal mongering. Who did Dick Cheney meet with? Forget Enron officials and Saudi Princes. Dick Cheney met with Osama Bin Laden to flesh out the final stages of 9/11. Also at the meeting was Saddam Hussein, to go over the plans of the American Invasion and Saddam’s theatrical disappearance, and uncovering in a hole 9 months later (part one of the real goal: Iran.) Also meeting with Dick Cheney was Dick Clarke, for reasons that elude me but will likely be uncovered as time goes by.

There you go. Closed Governments must serve some purpose.

Zell Miller heralds from rural Georgia. It’s a big part of his political identity. His 1992 Democratic Convention keynote speech speaks to his Appalachian upbringing. His book A National Party No More is full of lombasts against “liberal elitists” who look down their nose at the rural South. He has attacked various items of popular culture: the Snuffy Sniff comic strip and the reality tv version of “The Beverly HillBillies”.

Comments made by Neal Horsley recently:

AC: “You had sex with animals?”

NH: It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from the reality… Welcome to domestic life on the farm…”

Would someone please get me a response from Mr. Miller?

Just a thought:

The real danger with the new chairman of Kenneth Tomlinson (and subsequent hiring of a Republican Party hack to weed out “liberal bias”), the old Reader’s Digest president, isn’t so much his affect on the news content — Frontline, NOW with that guy who replaced Bill Moyers — but with Masterpiece Theater.

Can you imagine all these adaptation of Reader’s Digest “Abridged Versions” of classic literature that will be floated around? Yeeesh.

Yes. The East Waynesville Baptist Church in North Carolina needs to lose their tax-exempt status RIGHT NOW.

Statement of Incredulity found here:

Chandler could not be reached for comment today, but says his actions weren’t politically motivated.

A former church treasurer says she’s at church to worship God and not the preacher.

UPDATE: Sometimes message boards and Internet blogs get the story out first and in a more relevant fashion. This is the case with this story. Tales from the bog found here. (Relevant video: here.