Republicans didn’t trust Kerry

Doesn’t Kerry’s prompt concession kinda make him look like a SHILL? He and the Democratic party hijacked the grassroots progressive movement and sold us down the river.

Holding off a concession might have lead to questions about the vote suppression and the legitimacy of our election methods. Why was anyone forced to wait for ten hours for example?! Instead Kerry concedes and tells us how much he’s been touched by all our support.

There is no Democratic party. We all owe Ralph Nader profuse apologies and we need another party, if not a military coup. If we could not unseat an idiot-chimp with only blunders to his credit, with a record turnout of new voters, there is something wrong with our electoral system.

This was a media coup d’etat, a rigged election, a fascist putsch featuring a straw man to pretend to lead our cause. Bush is a despotic moron. Kerry is despicable.

I had as much hope as anyone that Kerry might have lead our nation into brighter times. He seemed earnestly anti-war when he testified before congress in 1971. He seemed to champion the best causes in his many years in the Senate. I excused his centrism as necessary to getting elected. And I figured that his wife, a billionaress, would not have married Kerry if he was only a common profiteer. What would they need with more money? Indeed I thought they both wanted to change the world.

I was wrong. Nader was right. In the early debates Kucinich, Sharpton, even Dean, were the only chances we had.

Swiftboating Vietnam

Patriotism the last refuge of the liar   VO: Thirty three years ago, a Republican war president Richard Milhouse Nixon, hired this man, John O’Neal to discredit a young John Kerry, who was leading a nascent effort to stop the war in Vietnam.
 
John O’Neal lost that round. Now he’s at it again.

 
This time around, O’Neal has assembled veterans who are angry because their service in Vietnam was tarnished by accusations of US war crimes.

No one said that THESE men were war criminals but war crimes were committed, of that there is no doubt. Was it John Kerry’s fault for making them known? In 1971 John Kerry and the Veterans Against the War wanted to stop the crimes and stop the Vietnam War.

Are the Swiftboat Vets really arguing today that the Vietnam War should not have been stopped?

If John Kerry and the anti-war effort had not been successful, maybe today we’d see three times as many angry veterans, minus of course some of the men standing here
who might not have survived the war.
 
The Vietnam War was wrong. Until Bush came along, we were all agreed that we never wanted it to happen again.
  Vietnam survivors in spite of themselves

 
Was Iraq perpetrated by people who thought it wasn’t wrong the first time?

Reprinted from ArmchairCommando.com

A season of French hurricanes

Hurricane Pepe

Who is naming these hurricanes? Hurricane Gaston? Hurricane Frances? Hurricane Ivan?

Sounds like a republican in the National Weather Service is naming this season’s major storm systems, recalling the countries who most opposed the war in Iraq. Is that idea too far-fetched?

GASTON? That’s a common name for a boy, in France! FRANCES? Well I suppose that’s something a little less subtle for Americans who don’t recognize any french. And IVAN? Let’s see, who else opposed us about the war?

What’s next? Hurricane Fritz? Gunther? Maybe just GERRY! The fourth signatory against us was Belgium. What’s a Belgian name? Hurricane JACQUES BREL!

It shouldn’t come as a suprise that the NWS might be politicized. After all, even The National Science Foundation is being made to refute the cataclism that is global warming, against all international consensus. Which leads me to another worry:

Absentee ballots. Everyone is hyping absentee ballots as a means to pre-empt republican operatives from stealing the elections. But those ballots have to be mailed in. We have to be able to trust the US Postal Service to deliver our ballots. Do we know there aren’t republican directors planning to re-direct non-republican votes into a circular file?

This just in. The next storm system after Ivan… brewing in the Atlantic… threatening the Dominican Republic… It’s… Hurricane JEANNE! JEANNE D’ARC?

It occured to me that weather systems are usually named in alphabetical order. They’re named early on, and the ones to hit shore are the ones we hear about. It looks like there were two other minor storms they thought might make the news: DANIELLE and HERMINE!

Kerry’s French some people say.

The Colorado Springs 2005 bid committe

The Colorado Springs 2005 hosting bid to host the upcoming U.S. war crimes trials has been officially accepted by INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIME TRIALS .US! We now approach phase II. We must continue to raise awareness for the trials and widen the circle of Colorado Springs citizens who support the calls for reconcilliation to international law.

1.
How can we bring the International War Crimes Trials to Colorado Springs? The advent of hosting war crime trials will be a reality if John Kerry wins the US elections in November 2004.

Kerry has already expressed his intention to make the United States a signatory to the International Criminal Court, at which point the indictments can begin.
President Bush has stated that his objections to ratifying the ICC were to protect American soldiers from facing charges in international courts. But this reason is disingeneous because the prosecution of common soldiers is not the purpose of the ICC.
It is not the intent of the ICC to prosecute regular crimes of war in those cases which already fall under the jurisdiction of military tribunals or domestic courts. As we can see from the ABU GHRAIB cases, the US government has every intention to prosecute the common soldiers it holds responsible for those abuses.

The unique capability of the International Criminal Court is to indict heads of state and otherwise unassailable diplomats, functionaries, administrators and conspirators.
Preparations have already begun with the IWCT to document the charges, gather the evidence, and prepare the briefs. Efforts are well underway in Japan, Greece, Turkey and Belgium to organize the extra-judicial tribunals to supplement the ICC staffs.

Colorado Springs must act as early as possible to offer our city as a potential US host to the trials!

2.
The first objective of the COS2005 bid project is to make the concept of international law more tangible in American minds. Today when someone hears a protester denounce President Bush as a war criminal, it sounds like so much rhetoric.

But the charge is more than an opinion or an academic argument. The war of aggression which the U. S. pursued against Iraq is a war crime by any number of international laws. As a result there is an inevitable legal action coming against the U. S. for waging an illegal war. International law is not hyperbole.
Criticisms between presidential candidates might be political, but charges of war crimes are out of everyone’s hands. No one is exempt from prosecution for war crimes, and there are no statutes of limitation.

The concept of impending war crime trials thus become an election issue. Can we consider re-electing leaders who are guilty of war crimes, chiefly, the war crime of “crimes against the peace?”
An American voter might hesitate to endorse someone who they can imagine will go down in history as having been the bad guy in the black hat. We believe most people aspire to be law-abiding god-fearing citizens, of America, and of the world community as well.

Reprinted from ColoradoSprings2005.com

Mara Liasson, Washington gossip

NPR correspondent Mara Liasson spoke at Colorado College last night. What we thought would be an insider’s glimpse of the primaries turned out to be just that. Ms. Liasson spoke only of Kerry, Edwards and Dean. When asked about the other prospects, she countered that she expected we only wanted to hear about the candidates who would prove to matter.

How is a candidate like Kucinich, who is trying to bring issues such as health care, fair labor, environment, an end to war, and a return to human rights, to the fore, how is such a candidate to get covered by reporters who only want to report dispassionately about a candidate’s odds of winning? I mean, you tell us that “a candidate who wins in W state, but fails to win X and Y has never won Z,” that’s reporting? That’s more like Sports Talk.

Why not have reported about who won the debates? Edwards and Kerry, your favorite subjects, came off very stiff in the debates. Kucinich and friends ran circles around them, wouldn’t that have been worthy of reporting?

Isn’t the only thing standing between Kucinich and a viable candidacy, a media that’s refusing to consider him viable? Can you separate Kucinich’s chances from the tough chance he has with networks bent on keeping his issues invisible? What about your own sense of responsibility to report on every candidate, especially if you know their platform will resonate with the American public, if only given some visibility?

You dismiss the Bush AWOL charges as having been reported in 2000. For the record they were ignored in 2000, and you’re doing it again by suggesting they’re old news. They’re 30 years old news! Members of the National Guard today who have gone AWOL from Iraq are sitting in the brig, they’re not out snorting cocaine, even dealing cocaine, and then serving community service for having been caught. But Bush’s records have not only gone missing, they’ve been erased or sealed in the name of National Security. Wouldn’t that merit reporting? But that’s not your beat? Crime? Issues? The environment?

My question? Shouldn’t NPR consider covering the presidential election with correspondents who want to report more than just political gossip and primary statistics like it’s a horse race?

No, my real question: How much does FOX and MSNBC’s framing of the news, like the New York Time’s “all the news that’s fit to print,” determine what NPR can report? Is NPR too anxious about looking into the margins for fear it will marginalize itself? I guess that’s rhetorical. More constructively: How can the mainstream framing, that focus, be increased to include the interests of the American middle class, progressives, and peace-loving peoples around the world?