I think of the question Thomson described in his 1968 piece. Once, Henry Stimson, secretary of war for William Taft, Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, was asked: How can we bring peace to the world?

Stimson answered: "You begin by bringing to Washington a small handful of able men who believe that the achievement of peace is possible. You work them to the bone until they no longer believe that it is possible. And then you throw them out -- and bring in a new bunch who believe that it is possible."

• Register to vote in your State;
• Report a change of name to your voter registration office;
• Report a change of address to your voter registration office; or
• Register with a political party.

This on-line registration service is provided by the Democratic National Committee, though you need not register as a Democrat to avail yourself of it. I've used it myself (to alter my party affiliation), and it's quite easy.

The dismal fifth-place showing by Senator Joseph Lieberman in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday serves as both reminder and motivator to the other Democratic presidential candidates on what it will take to win in November. For so long now, everyone has assumed that recapturing the presidency depends on who triumphs in the battle between liberals and moderates within the party. Such thinking, though, is inherently flawed. The real fight is between those who want only to win back the White House and those who also want to build a new political movement ? one that rivals the conservative movement that has given Republicans their dominant position in American politics.

You see, I am a Movement Liberal, and I am tired of getting my head stomped on for the last 20 years by the radical ideologues of the Movement Conservatives. The Presidency is not enough for me. They've wanted my head, and now I want theirs.

But isn't Anybody But Bush better than Bush, you ask? Think about it. What chance will a non-Movement Democrat have with a Congress and Supreme Court stacked with Movement Conservatives? If you thought what they did to Clinton was bad, remember, they have further consolidated their power since then, and they are going to be mad as hell if Bush gets beaten. (It couldn't after all be Bush's fault, could it?)

But that's only the start. Greenspan is going to extraordinary lengths to hold together the jobless recovery until after the election. After that, all bets are off. And where Bush has positioned the country, you can almost bet on a severe crash. If a Democrat is in, that Democrat will get blamed, and the Movement Conservatives will further entrench themselves. The worst of all possible worlds.

So no, it is not sufficient to simply win the Presidency; we must also bring along our "Movement" if we do. If the Democrats want to simply put up a "safe" candidate, then I just can't go along. Better to vote for Bush and have the chance that way of sweeping out the Movement Conservatives as they finish wrecking the economy and launch war after war. And if worse comes to worse, we can all just have four more years of fun trying to impeach the bastard.

[Permanent link to this article.]

I don't know if any of you saw it, but ABC news (Peter Jennings) tonight replayed the Dean scream without the effect of the sound-blocking microphone (so the crowd could be heard) and the scream was not audible over the sounds of the crowd. It was stunning. You might want to watch for a story on this.

Diane Sawyer did the story and said they noticed that Dean was using a microphone like they use in the ABC GMA studios, which blocks background sound. So they found videotapes of the event and realized the scream was completely inaudible. Also, all the news organizations admitted they had replayed it too much with one exception -- NBC. Even Fox and CNN backed down, but not NBC.

Of course, you already are aware of what "The Scream" looked like in context if you watched the QuickTime movie I linked to below.

Howard Dean has joined the list of victims of U.S. corporate media consolidation. Dean shares this distinction with Dennis Kucinich and the people of the formerly sovereign state of Iraq, among many others. Dean was stripped of half his popular support in the space of two weeks in January while John Kerry – tied in the polls with Carol Moseley-Braun at seven percent just two months earlier – rose like a genie from a bottle to become the overnight presidential frontrunner. Both candidates were shocked and disoriented by the dizzying turns of fortune, and for good reason. Neither Dean nor Kerry had done anything on their own that could have so dramatically altered the race. Corporate America decided that Dean must be savaged, and its media sector made it happen.

This commentary, however, is not about the merits of Howard Dean. If a mildly progressive, Internet-driven, young white middle class-centered, movement-like campaign such as Dean’s – flush with money derived from unconventional sources, backed by significant sections of labor, reinforced by big name endorsements and surging with upward momentum – can be derailed in a matter of weeks at the whim of corporate media, then all of us are in deep trouble.

• There are numerous vulnerabilities through which these systems could be hacked.

• Some of these can be addressed prior to the March primaries.

• Some additional vulnerabilities can be address prior to the November general election.

• Ultimately, Diebold election software has to be rewritten to meet industry security standards.

"We were genuinely surprised at the basic level of the exploits" that allowed tampering, said Michael Wertheimer, the Red Team leader and a former security expert for the National Security Agency. Referring to the inconsistent application of security, he added, "It's like washing your face and drying it with a dirty towel."

William A. Arbaugh, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and a member of the Red Team exercise, said, "I can say with confidence that nobody looked at the system with an eye to security who understands security." He added, "It seemed everywhere we scratched, there was something that's pretty troubling."

[Additional coverage from the Washington Post. Other article supposedly appear on NPR and Wired News, but I haven't found them yet.]

George Bush promised to bring honor and integrity back to the White House. Instead, he got rid of accountability. ...

So where are the apologies? Where are the resignations? Where is the investigation of this intelligence debacle? All we have is bluster from Dick Cheney, evasive W.M.D.-related-program-activity language from Mr. Bush — and a determined effort to prevent an independent inquiry. ...

In any case, the point is that a grave mistake was made, and America's credibility has been badly damaged — and nobody is being held accountable. But that's standard operating procedure. As far as I can tell, nobody in the Bush administration has ever paid a price for being wrong. Instead, people are severely punished for telling inconvenient truths. ...

Still, the big story isn't about Mr. Bush; it's about what's happening to America. Other presidents would have liked to bully the C.I.A., stonewall investigations and give huge contracts to their friends without oversight. They knew, however, that they couldn't. What has gone wrong with our country that allows this president to get away with such things?

A man in Lawrence, Kansas walks into a day-care center. He has a gun in his pocket but nobody sees it. He goes up to the second floor, where the preschool kids are having their afternoon snack of cookies and juice.

...

The room is filled with smoke and the sharp tang of freshly gutted meat. The man takes a desultory look around, shrugs his shoulders, then sits down on the snack table. When the police come and ask him why he did it, he answers forthrightly, without a shred of guilt or unease, as if it were the most natural thing in the world:

"Somebody said the guy who runs this place might attack me someday. I had questions that needed to be answered: Did he have a gun or a knife -- or nothing? We must be prepared to face our responsibilities and be willing to use force if necessary."

The cops roll their eyes -- another nutball. "So," says an officer, humoring him, "did he have any weapons?"

The killer shakes his head. "Nah, don't look like it. But he could have had some. What's the difference? ...

The 30-year-old Buddhist nun, who grew up in a Tibetan village near the foot of Mount Everest, fled to the United States last August after family members had been tortured and friends jailed for their faith, she said. But when she arrived at Dulles International Airport and requested asylum, federal immigration officials detained her and placed her in the local jail in this small city outside Richmond.

Sonam, who is known by that one name, has been here ever since except for a brief visit last November to a court room in Arlington where a federal immigration judge granted her asylum. But even as she was hugging her attorney in celebration, the lawyer from the Department of Homeland Security announced that she was appealing the case.

December 13, 2003

40 year veteren CIA asset is handed over to US occupation forces in Iraq by an unknown Iraqi group.

Ladies and gentlemen,

   . . . We've ALWAYS had him.

Via Avedon from and an original post at The Great Divide.

In that post, I linked to a Telegraph/UK article where David Kay essentially reversed himself when he claimed that he doubted Iraq had any WMDs for years before the war, this time saying that "some components of Saddam's WMD programme" had been moved to Syria. Now why Saddam (or any dictator) would want to simply give anything like this away, especially to a neighbor, is beyond me and perhaps beyond rationality itself. Be that as it may, consider Kay's statement itself. If it is true, then it also most certainly is classified. If it is classified, then Kay could not say it to the Telegraph/UK without the permission for someone in that beehive of Neoconism, the Department of Defense. And even if it were disinformation, he'd still need DoD approval to say it.

From StageLeft now comes a statement by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts that there is "some concern Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had gone to Syria." One more finger pointing at Syria.

Now, on Syria's part comes the denial by Syrian Minister Ahmad al-Hassan: "This (allegation) is meant to mislead (the public opinion). So long as there were no weapons of mass destruction (found) in Iraq itself how can they be in Syria?" Of course, he's right on both points here. But then al-Hassan continues, "They are seeking to cover their failure," but here he is at least partly wrong. Sure, it would be nice to have a cover story for the failure, but in light of Kay's new allegation (reversal), clearly, there is a greater purpose: Syria is being set up.

O.K., I made that allegation in the earlier post, but wait. Just a while back, National Security Advisor, Condi Rice was denying the Syrian allegation: "... I want to be clear: So far we do not have indicators that can be considered authentic and serious that this had taken place." And just Saturday, Secretary of State Colin Powell was dancing around Kay's earlier statements saying that Iraq hadn't had WMDs in years; dancing, but certainly neither denying them nor updating them with Kay's latest allegation. What? Didn't he get the memo about Syria?

Of course, Powell didn't get any memo about Syria, because there was no memo about Syria. What's going on here is that we're back to the same old games where DoD is trying to whoop up the fever for (another) war by making end runs around State and the NSC. Forget the fact that DoD has amply demonstrated that it doesn't know how to run one of these wars, being a Neocon is never having to say you're sorry.

Children Must Play.

Which gets to the real point here. Bush is clearly trying to run for re-election as some sort of skilled Commander-in-Chief, and yet he can't even manage his own immediate staff. No doubt he is not even aware that his children are once again fighting, and one might easily suspect that he still doesn't even know about the first time. This is a skilled Commander-in-Chief?

No. This is the man Paul O'Neill descibed; disengaged and uninvolved. A "blind man in a roomful of deaf people". And he is also the man with his finger on the trigger of the most powerful arsenal in the history of the world.

As Cook equally points out, the current system of candidate selection is hardly the only one we have ever used, and indeed, earlier systems clearly had better voter turnouts. Neither Cook nor I feel that returning to some earlier system is some panacea for low voter turnout rates, but there is an idea here worth considering: The party that develops the candidate selection system most effective in activating their membership will likely fare far better on election day.

This article first appeared on Black Box Notes.

Virginia isn't the only state with a Republican legislature that has raised questions about the federal funding of the No Child Left Behind law. Ohio recently commissioned a study that found the No Child Left Behind law would cost Ohio $1.5 billion annually. Washington's contribution last year to Ohio totaled $44 million.

At least four other states, Utah, Vermont, North Dakota, and Indiana, have commissioned studies to determine how much it costs to comply with the law. This is viewed as a step towards considering rejection of federal funding in order to avoid what they perceive to be harsh penalties for failing to meet the standards of the law.

President Bush promised to increase funding in this year's budget by an additional $1 billion , a figure that is still approximately 27% below full funding for the program.

Whatever the outcome of the Hutton inquiry and the vote on top-up fees, the central charge this paper has consistently made against Tony Blair is that he took this country to war in Iraq on a false pretext. Raymond Whitaker and Glen Rangwala list 50 statements on which history will judge him and his US partners.

Arthur Silver, The Light of Reason: Well, leave it to the most hawkish of the hawks to prove my point ... that nothing -- not the facts, not the disintegration of all their arguments for war with Iraq in the cold light of day, not the fact that our military is close to the breaking point now -- nothing will slow the hawks down in their plans to "remake" the Middle East.

Not content to leave bad enough alone, David Kay has some news for us, beyond the fact that with regard to Iraq's "large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq": "I don't think they existed." No, Mr. Kay has this additional tidbit to impart:

David Kay: We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons. But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved.

No, no, no. This doesn't even begin to make sense. This is too transparent. This is the Neocons trying to set Syria up. And they don't give a damn if Syria has WMDS or not. Just like they didn't give a damn if Iraq did or not.

I'm just guessing, mind you, but I'd bet that a lot of those Reservists we sent over to Iraq were making some good overtime before they got called up.

Well, you know those overtime rule changes that the Chimp said "Screw you" to Congress and the American public and put in anyways? One of the rule changes in there widens the definition of "professional" so that it denies overtime pay not just to those with four-year degrees -- but also those who have accumulated work experience "equivalent" to college. And guess what qualifies as one of those "equivalents". You got it. Military service.

Something nice for the guys to come home to: Sorry, bud, you no longer qualify for overtime pay.

Way to "support the troops", Chimpster.