I wrote that, “At least 85% of election results are
tallied by computers called central tabulators.”

It has gotten worse since I stopped voting. It is now
97%. They’ve just about saturated the market.

Here’s the link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYbu_14sdyY

That video was produced by the Election Defense
Alliance. A lot of them, like those featured in the
video, are computer professionals, attorneys, and
academics, and they don’t exaggerate. They don’t have
to.

The only problem with the video is that after
explaining that there is no way to ensure that your
vote is counted at all, no less counted the same way
that you cast it, they end by encouraging people to
vote. That’s like encouraging people to gamble in a
game you know is rigged. It isn’t an honest or
responsible thing to do.

I agree totally with the blog entry up until the kitchen table analogy, which I don’t totally dispute, but for one implication: that discussing anything less than war, peace, life and death, at this kitchen table of the media, is unacceptable, ignores individual people’s needs to sometimes, at the kitchen table, just sit and sip a cup of coffee, zone out, take a break.  This is true of my own actual kitchen table, and the one of the media:  if we don’t spend a certain amount of time talking about inanities, just for the sheer recreation value, we won’t even be able to function as a society, much less do it any dis-service.

I agree that the discussion of this topic is unjustly under served, but the answer is not to talk of it and nothing else.  Stating this as a polemic point alienates the people who need to change their mind on the issue (the non-choir being preached to, if any might have read this piece).

It also alienates me, as a card carrying member of this choir, for indicting me for discussing anything else, ever.  Is it OK to talk of the fact I’m out of milk (local, organic, much better than yours, I’m sure) now?  No?  How about now?  Let me know when it’s OK;  once you do, I’ll start listening to you every day, otherwise, it’s too much.  My imperfect brain can only take so much serious bad news, sorry.

That link I posted didn’t come out right. It should
end in .php and the last “p” got disconnect.

Trying again:

http://www.opensecrets.org/action/countdownwidgets.ph
p

If it breaks again, copy and paste instead of
clicking.

The counter is up to over $3.947 billion spent on
this election so far, but this is Saturday and the
election isn’t until Tuesday, so although many people
have already voted by mail, the total is likely to
top four billion.

But you’re right, Anarcissie. Rico thinks that’s so
unbelievable and absurd that simply stating the fact
makes me a nutcase not worth paying any attention to.

Once again, just in case anyone with a brain does
happen to be reading this, the quick, simple, and
easy way to defeat Citizens United is to let the
corporations spend a few billion dollars trying to
terrorize people into voting, and then just stay
home. So maybe they’ll figure it’s a quirk and spend
two or three times as much on the Presidential
election in 2012—maybe they’ll spend a full trillion
since there’s no limit on how much they can spend.
But if the turnout keeps getting lower instead of
increasing, and the more they spend, the fewer people
vote, they’ll get the point. If there’s one thing
that corporations are good at, it’s calculating
return on investment. No returns, no investment.

The Democrats, Republicans, Tea Party, Greens,
Libertarians, and all the other political parties are
desperate to get out the vote for the corporate
funded elections to show that American consumers
still consent to corporate rule. If people were able
to think, they’d understand that the way to put an
end to corporate money in elections is to stop voting
until corporations stop buying elections.

Asking the political parties and candidates who
benefit from all that money to forfeit those
corporate billions is really stupid. Why should they?
If they leave things as they are, they get all that
money. If they amend the Constitution, they wouldn’t
get all that money. What’s their incentive? Voters
are going to vote anyway—voters not only can’t
think, they’re so apathetic that they wouldn’t care
if they could. They’re doing their civic duty,
showing how obedient they are to the corporations
that run our government. So maybe a few more
trillions in their tax money is spent so that a few
more million innocent people get tortured and killed
in their name in wars of aggression based on lies,
and maybe the Democrats and Republicans give a few
more trillion to the wealthy elites who bankroll
their elections—why should voters care?

When corporations spend millions of dollars
advertising new products and then nobody buys them,
they take them off the market. They’re in business to
make money, not to throw money away. If they spend
billions on elections and nobody votes, they’ll stop
doing it.

Don’t be troubling people with the facts.  They don’t need ‘em.  Perfectly able to make up their own.

Funny, I came across an article today entitled, “A
new study shows that Americans are Idiots.”

http://brilliantatbreakfast.blogspot.com/2010/10/new-
study-shows-that-americans-are.html

It is based on a Washington Post article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/10/09/AR2010100903308.html
about a survey revealing that Americans are not
capable of basing their opinions on their own thought
processes.

Rico appears to be an excellent example of this. He
has his opinions and isn’t going to read the facts
because they might contradict his beliefs.

As soon as I say something factual, taking care to
include the links to the documentation and source,
Rico stops reading.

I suspect he may be typical of your average voter.

Here ya go, rico:

Cost of campaign ‘10 and who’s paying for it:

http://www.opensecrets.org/action/countdownwidgets.ph
p

$3.95 billion right now, but increasing.

You seem to have some sort of aversion to reading
anything that smacks of facts or truth.

Mark:

There you go again?

“Billions” for the midterm elections?

Stopped reading right there.

In a decent and just world, a person like Julian Assange would receive the Nobel Peace Prize but, instead, in this sick would turned upside-down and inside-out, it’s given to serial-slaughterers like Obama.

Earth to Samson, can I have some of what you’re
smoking?

You can’t “compete against money” unless you have
more money. Most of Obama’s donations came from the
big corporations and that was BEFORE Citizens United.
The corporations are spending a couple of BILLION on
this midterm election, how much do you think you can
raise from people who don’t have high-paying defense
jobs?

But even if you have the money, and even if you can
get the media coverage, the smear and scare campaigns
will outspend you fifty to one anywhere that the race
looks like it might be close. They have TRILLIONS of
dollars in defense contracts at stake, so they can
afford to spend a few billion to ensure that their
candidates win.

Of course if the central tabulators’ programming
failed and the peace candidates did win, their pro-
war opponents could appeal to Congress or to the
Supreme Court and get the votes thrown out. When pro-
war candidates tried it, they wouldn’t even get a
hearing. The Supreme Court itself decides which cases
it will or won’t hear, and Congress itself decides
whether or not to investigate Federal Elections
Appeals. Are you imagining that the Supreme Court has
suddenly become nonpartisan and impartial? Or that
the millionaires in Congress would let peace
candidates devalue the defense stocks in their
investment portfolios?

The Constitution also gave Congress a few tricks that
it hasn’t had to use yet, but can at any time. Under
Article I, Section 5, Congress is the sole judge of
the elections, returns, and qualifications of
candidates for Congress. So they can judge that an
election was fraudulent when it wasn’t, or that it
wasn’t fraudulent when it was, if it is to their
benefit to do so, they can judge that the returns
should be disqualified because they don’t like how
the election results turned out, or they can judge
that a candidate isn’t qualified because they don’t
like people who aren’t team players and won’t go
along to get along. The Framers gave Congress that
power to ensure that the people had only a sham vote
that could easily be overturned rather than a real
voice.

And if peace candidates do manage to get in, they
either shill for the corporate parties, talking peace
between elections like Kucinich did, but throwing
their support to their party’s pro-war nominee at
election time, or they get JFK-ed, RFK-ed, or
Wellstoned—people who won’t go along to get along
are easily anthraxed, assassinated or suicided.

You’re living in a fascist tyranny and you still
think it is the democracy or republic that it never
was. Even if you got a pro-peace majority in Congress
and they voted to end the wars, the Supreme Court
could strike it down because the Constitution, rather
than vesting supreme power over government in the
hands of the people, which is the dictionary
definition of a democratic form of government, vested
supreme power in an unelected body they brazenly
called a supreme court, as it has the Divine Right of
Kings to make decisions that cannot be appealed.

Although the Founders who wrote the Declaration of
Independence envisioned a democratic form of
government, they were betrayed by the Framers who
wrote a Constitution that ensured that the rich,
those who owned the country, would always rule it.

You’re living in a dream world, Samson. If you ran
peace candidates in districts where they had a chance
of winning, those districts would find themselves
without any voting machines or the voting machines
would break down or have “glitches” that flipped the
votes. Remember the “glitch” where over 14,000 votes
“disappeared” and the elections officials said that
it didn’t change the results of an election that was
won by fewer than 500 votes? The Framers knew the
poor might try to vote out the rich someday, so they
made sure it couldn’t happen.

She is right, the war of course should be an election issue. 

The question is, do we make that happen by whining and begging from the sidelines?  Do we sit back and tell the corporate candidates and the corporate media that we think the war should be an election issue?  Doesn’t seem likely to do much good.

The way to make the war an election issue is to have anti-war candidates in every race across the county.  To have grassroots campaigns mobilizing the 60% or so who tell pollsters that we need to come home from both Iraq and Afghanistan.

If the war isn’t an election issue, its because the left in this country has been timid and silly in approaching these elections.  We aren’t running candidates in most races. Where there are candidates, we haven’t organized the grassroots base that would let our candidate compete against money.

We are the ones who should have been doing the work to make the war an election issue. Begging pro-war candidates to make it an issue won’t work.  Begging pro-war media to make it an issue won’t work. We have to do the work to put candidates in every race, and to do the organizing work to build a strong base of citizens supporting such campaigns to make it an issue. The left in this country has largely failed to do either.

Since grassroots campaigns take time to build and organize, now is the time to be thinking about 2012.  Do we on the left want the war to be an issue in 2012?  Then lets start doing the work to make that happen right now.

Let us set a goal that every federal race in 2012, from Rep to Senator to President, will have one opposition anti-war candidate in the general election.  Lets go find the people to stand for those offices. Lets go start organizing to build the grassroots base for these campaigns that can make them so strong that their very presence in the race makes the war an issue.

The war should be an issue. But, the lesson to be learned is that its our own dang fault that it isn’t.  We aren’t running the candidates. And where we are, we aren’t backing them with the grassroots strength they need. Its our fault that the war isn’t an issue.

Dear Amy,

Can we talk semantics?  You know what an expletive is, a meaningless word or phrase, usually profanity, that can be deleted from a sentence without changing the meaning. 

And yet, as a writer, journalist and human being I’m sure you understand the power of words.  It’s why Richard Pryor could drop the F-bomb in a thousand different ways and have us laughing at the world’s atrocity, his inflections, his perceptions, his profanity summed up ineffable emotions that more civilized diction simply could not convey.

It’s why some of the rescue workers at ground zero exclaimed the F-word when they saw bodies dropping around them.  It was the only word that could capture their shock, horror, and terrified consternation.

In this vein, may I with affinity suggest to you that, though your civil discussion above is pointed and eloquent, your abuse at being a journalist, the constant censorship you have had beaten into you, the weight of having to write for children, the heft of having furniture stores being your censor, the wheel of having Puritans always threatening to call your editor to get you locked in the pillory if you utter even the slightest vulgarity is preventing you from choosing the precise word to convey the appropriate repugnance to buttress your analysis. 

The word, Amy, is shitheads. More precisely, your fellow American television journalists are being fucking shitheads for not covering the war as an election issue.

Now I know in your abused state—for all journalists are like abused children who have been forced to write haiku with their hands tied behind their backs, cotton in their ears, blindfolded with a pencil stuck in their mouths and an axe over their heads—and this abuse has made you all think it is improper and uncivil and so Internet-ish to call someone a fucking shithead.  You are mistaken.  The bodies are slamming on the ground all around us, Richard Pryor is rolling in his grave, your fellow American television journalists need to look in the mirror each day this election cycle and say:  “Yes. I am a fucking shithead. I’m doing this for the money. I’m doing this because I have been abused. I’m prostituting my skills for insurance, a paycheck and to live in a good neighborhood where I can send my kids to a good school. I don’t give a shit about democracy. I just want to keep my job and move up the corporate ladder.” And the only way to make them have this epiphany is to break from denotative analysis into the ineffable world of connotative derision. 
 
There you have it, Amy.  Sometimes being a journalist means being a journalist, writing down your perceptions as you see them and as they will convey the most, not just to morons who buy advertisements for newspapers and TV, but also to your co-workers who have been born and raised in a perpetual state of war without even realizing it, who, like the rest of us, have sold their souls to pay their bills, who are being fucking shitheads once again, as they are in every election cycle. 

As a final bit of inspiration for freeing you from the bit of lifelong censorship, here’s a Richard Pryor quote as best I can remember:

“We are gathered here to celebrate two hundred years of white folks kicking ass.  The question is how long—how long!—how long will this bullshit go on!”

Wikileaks is the product of a terrible defeated media. Only a corrupted media could fail to report news this badly. And word-to-the-wise (cover your ears Amy you are not allowed to mention this in your column, it is off-bounds) wikileaks is like 80/20 % ratio of more of the same “news”. Tension released lets get back to reporting this “news” shall we?

Amy you have absolutely no creditability
You could have stopped all of this a long time ago with about 20 words. Instead you write this article now.
If someday my children want to become journalists I will tell them not to be like you. Instead to speak when the world is begging for the truth rather than to shift blame a decade later.

I should add:

1) This was the programme that David Leigh referred to on Amy’s programme.

2) The programme will only be viewable online for a limited time - normally 28 days from the time it went out.

3) If the link doesn’t work/fails. Google: “4oD Dispatches Iraq’s Secret War Files” and select ‘Watch Now.’

The Wikileaks release didn’t receive that much coverage in the UK. I thought David Leigh of the Guardian gave a slighly misleading impression on your (Amy’s) programme the other day. Most of the TV news reports only gave the story a couple of minutes, one minute on the claims the leak endangered service lives; one minute on the content of the leaks. They call it balanced reporting. Even the serious early evening half-hour news report (BBC Radio4) only allocated about five minutes.

Channel 4 in UK (Dispatches) aired a fifty minute programme Monday evening though. Anyone wishing to view it can do so on the link below. (First minute will be adverts)

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/4od#3134558

Not that the Daily Show is a fountain of revelations and truth, but not one reference to the WARS was made during the interview with Obama last night ....or maybe I missed it?

Ballot fraud isn’t necessary.

Only Republicans and Democrats have any chance of
winning. Even if a third party candidate was elected,
they would have no seniority and could’t muster
enough votes to pass gas.

The corporations determine who the candidates will be
by funding them. You can tell who will win by looking
at which one gets the biggest corporate donations.
The moment I saw that Obama had gotten more corporate
money than McCain, I knew he would win.

Move On is trying to terrify people into voting with
fear tactics about what will happen if the
Republicans win. Well the Republicans won in 2000 and
2004, and bad things did happen. So then the
Democrats won in 2006 and 2008 and worse things
happened.

Look up the word democracy in the dictionary. It
doesn’t mean supreme power vested in the hands of a
supreme court or unaccountable government officials,
it means supreme power vested in the hands of the
people.

We never had a democracy or a republic. We’ve always
had a genocidal corporate-run tyranny. General
Smedley Butler explained it in 1933—war is a racket
and our government taxes us to wage wars for the
benefit of private corporate stockholders. Obama and
Bush both take their orders from the corporate-owned
policy making bodies, because if they didn’t, the
corporations wouldn’t fund their political parties.

And the billionaires will keep right on partying as
long as people keep voting. The day that people stop
voting, is the day the oligarchs will jump on their
private jets and fly off to join their offshore
assets in a foreign tax haven with all the other
ousted oligarchs.

@faith, My faith has eroded over the years..I used to
tell the cynics that ‘Well, it’s just a small segment
of society that thinks this way’

These days, a Bush sort of resurgence is perhaps simply
just a reflection of the constituency by & large.

That small segment appears, to me, to be the larger
segment now…I think we can honestly say that America
has ‘lost the plot’

Ok Mark. Let’s assume 85% of ballots cast are unverifiable.

Then I’ll go ahead and assume that Obama and the Democrats stole the 2008 election through ballot fraud.

Now where do we go from there?

@rico suave. At least 85% of election results are
tallied by computers called central tabulators. If
you have a way to verify that those “counts” are
accurate, you shouldn’t be keeping such an important
secret to yourself.

Every election we get strange results, such as 14,000
or 16,000 votes inexplicably vanishing, or a district
with 300 registered voters tallying 3,000 votes. This
is always put down to “glitches” that the elections
officials claim didn’t change the results of the
election, even when more than 10,000 votes disappear
in an election decided by fewer than 500 votes.

No matter how inexplicable the results, it is usually
impossible to get an actual recount, and elections
officials have been caught manipulating the ballots
to make a hand recount match a faked machine count.

I don’t claim credibility. That’s what those in
authority do—the insiders rigging the elections who
insist that people trust them.

New York used to have mechanical lever voting
machines. When they started talking about switching
to electronic voting machines, Attorney Andi Novick
warned them about the problems for years. Her
warnings were dismissed, her credibility was
attacked, and New York went ahead and switched to the
unverifiable electronics.

Here’s the result:

NYC Elections Board Fires Executive Director

http://www.11alive.com/news/national/story.aspx?
storyid=160006&catid=166

Those were some of the very last remaining verifiable
voting machines in the entire country, and now
they’re gone.

But even if the votes were counted, and were counted
accurately, the predetermined outcome of our
corporate owned and funded elections is more war
because the war parties have an unbreakable majority
in Congress. When the results of elections, i.e.,
continuing wars, are known long before a single
ballot has been cast, it isn’t an election, it’s a
sham.

Many people are angry about Citizens United. In the
part of my comment you didn’t read, I explained how
Citizens United can be defeated in a single election,
by simply not voting. No litigation, legislation, or
Constitutional Amendment necessary, just wait until
the corporations spend billions on the election and
then don’t vote. They won’t do it a second time.

Boycotts work. You can’t get honest elections by
saying, “We demand honest elections and if we don’t
get them we’ll continue to vote anyway.” The only way
to get honest elections is to say, “If we can’t
verify that our votes are counted accurately, we’re
not going to vote until we can.”

Things can always get worse, whether or not people
vote. But voting won’t provent things from getting
worse, it simply consents to allowing the oligarchy
to make things worse. Without a real voice in
government, either a direct vote on the issues or a
way to hold representatives directly and immediately
accountable if they betray their constituents instead
of representing them, votes have no value. It’s like
parents letting kids vote on what they want to watch
on TV, but the parents have the final say, so the
kids can vote all they want, but if the parents don’t
want them to watch something, they won’t be able to
watch it.

I actually had a peace activist tell me in ‘08 that
the only way to bring about peace was to vote for one
of the pro-war candidates and then try to get him to
change his mind. People stupid enough to think that
you can bring about peace by voting for war, don’t
really deserve honest elections.

But if you want somebody with credibility who you can
trust, do a google search for former elections
official Tony “Trust Me” Anchundo. We live in one of
the most corrupt countries in the world and our
elections are no exception to the way things are
here.

U.S. (Predator) Airstrikes in Pakistan Kill 14 in 24 Hours

Candidate Obama, trying to curry favor with anti-war fervor, railed against “Neo-Con’s” for renditions and enhanced interrogations.  “Un-American, he said.  Dangerous, he said.  It only makes people mad, he said.

After taking office Mr. Obama moved directly to the roll of judge, jury and summary executioner. - One can only Hope this Changes.

Mark Smith:

” unverifiable elections in more than 85% of the
country”

So much for your credibility. I stopped readng your post right there.

People can discuss it all they wish, but Americans
don’t have a vote on war.

You can vote for who you’d prefer to be taxing you to
support the wars, but since we have totally faith-
based unverifiable elections in more than 85% of the
country, you can never be sure that your vote was
counted.

If you prefer fascism and tyranny to democracy, as so
many commenters here appear to do, then you really do
want to vote your support for the wars.

If not, and you insist on voting anyway, you have to
ignore the fact that the predetermined outcome of our
elections is more war, and talk about other things,
like reproductive rights, marriage equality, health
care, legal pot, or anything but war, since nothing
that happens in our elections can stop the wars.

As for the evil Republicans, if the “less evil”
Democrats hadn’t voted for and supported everything
the Republicans wanted, taken impeachment off the
table, taken investigation and prosecution off the
table, and proceeded to appoint Republicans and to
expand upon the “Republican” agenda in ways that not
even Republicans had dared to do, there might be a
reason to vote. But voting for Democrats who are
committed to carrying out and expanding upon the
Republican agenda while protecting Republicans from
prosecution, doesn’t seem very useful or likely to
bring about change.

If you’re not a fascist and you’re anti-war, then
don’t worry about which bad guys will win, as only
bad guys get the corporate funding it takes to win,
so the bad guys always win. Just stop voting in
faith-based unverifiable elections for candidates you
can’t hold accountable and send a message to the
corporations who are spending billions of dollars on
BOTH parties, as they always do, that you will not
acquiesce to tyranny no matter how much money they
spend.

Imagine if the corporations spend billions of dollars
funding the election and then only the 10% of die-
hard fascists voted. You think they’d be willing to
do it again? That’s an easy way to defeat Citizens
United without resorting to litigation, legislation,
or a Constitutional Amendment. Just let them spend
their billions and then don’t vote.

And how would the U.S. government claim to be a
democracy with the consent of the governed if only
10% of the electorate voted?

Governments derive their just powers from the consent
of the governed and they demonstrate that consent by
holding elections. Your vote is your consent. If you
don’t consent to assassination hit lists, wars of
aggression based on lies, torture, and rule by and
for the rich, don’t consent to it by voting.

How you vote and who you vote for is irrelevant. The
wars won’t stop. The Democratic and Republican war
parties have enough of a majority in Congress to
ensure that the wars will continue no matter which of
them is in power. Peace advocates in Congress can’t
get enough votes to pass a fart, no less get any
useful legislation passed.

When the predetermined and inevitable outcome of an
election is more war, it isn’t a real election
because there isn’t a real choice. If you are in the
genocide-for-profit (war) industry, then you want to
vote. If you’re not, then you should withhold your
consent and spend your time doing useful things like
simplifying your life, developing a sustainable off-
the-grid lifestyle, and helping others understand and
distance themselves from the war for oil for war for
oil for war insanity.

Don’t just talk about war. If you’re really opposed
to war, please stop voting to grant it your consent.

The lie of liberalism is that the self has intrinsic
value, when the fact of the matter is that alone, we
are nothing.  Only when we join with others do we have
any impact.

This summer, Americans were dying in combat in Afghanistan at rates not seen since the summer of 2007 in Iraq. In congressional hearings that year, furious legislators grilled Gen. David Petraeus and cited the high number of monthly combat deaths to prematurely declare his surge a failure. Moveon.org ran ads calling Petraeus a traitor (“General Betray Us”) for continuing the war amid such losses.

No such furor surrounds Afghanistan. Yet more Americans have been killed so far this year in Afghanistan than during the entire six years of fighting there from 2001 through 2006. U.S. combat fatalities in Afghanistan in just the first 19 months of the Obama administration exceeded U.S. combat fatalities in Afghanistan in eight years under George W. Bush.

This depressing news warrants little commentary in the mainstream media but surely raises vital questions of national security. Why has the so-called “good war” suddenly heated up at precisely the same time American combat operations in the “bad war” in Iraq are largely over?

Are casualties spiking because of the surge of American troops, as once happened in 2007 in Iraq? Or has the enemy stepped up the offensive in hopes that announced American troop withdrawals mean victory is on the horizon?

Does President Obama plan to win, or is he willing to concede the war with the Taliban? Does the media fear that depressing coverage of Afghanistan will damage this administration in the way daily headlines of violence from Iraq nearly destroyed the prior one?

Meanwhile, almost imperceptibly, the United States has been waging a full-scale Predator drone war again suspected al-Qaeda terrorists inside Pakistan. This year alone, we have conducted more than twice as many air strikes inside Pakistan as in the eight years from 2001 through 2008. Indeed, in just the first two years of the Obama administration, we have killed more than 1,000 suspected terrorists, along with some civilians, inside Pakistan — or more than double the number taken out by airstrikes during the entire Bush administration.

But again, why the quiet in the news? Are we not relieved that the Obama administration is taking the war to the enemy? Or should we be worried that our drones are now operating on a massive scale inside the borders of a sometimes-hostile and nuclear Pakistan? Are Predators an effective way to counter al-Qaeda terrorism? Or as judge, jury and executioner of non-uniformed terrorist suspects, do they raise the same civil-liberties issues that once raged (but strangely have subsided) around Guantanamo Bay and renditions?

There is a third stealthy conflict to our immediate south. Mexico is convulsed in a drug war far more violent than anything going on in Iraq. Nearly 30,000 people have been murdered in Mexico in the last three years since the Calderón government attempted to wrestle back control of large swaths of the country from vicious organized drug cartels.

Some 200 Americans have been killed in Mexico since 2004. In some Mexican towns, mayors and entire city councils have either been murdered or fled, and the violence often spills over into U.S. border towns.

Why the relative silence in our media? The carnage affects dozens of issues — from the now-suspended U.S. border fence and the Arizona anti-illegal immigration law to current U.S. drug statutes and the upcoming California referendum on the legalization of marijuana.

Mexico is quickly devolving into a failed state. Yet few in the media seem willing to apprise Americans of what that means for the United States. Will Mexico become a Somalia, a Venezuela or an Afghanistan right on our 1,969-mile-long border?

Americans know more about Lady Gaga than they do about the Afghan war, the Predator war inside Pakistan or the vicious drug war in Mexico. Apparently our news media has decided that we do not, or should not, care about any of the three.

Like it or not, that is about to change — and very soon.

War should be an election issue, yes, especially when we are told why we are in Afghanistan, that it is because they killed 3,000 of our citizens. This week a video was posted on the net. For anyone who still doubts whether airplanes brought those buildings, this will lay them to rest. Game, Set, Match.
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread623743/pg1
Click on the YouTube video link.

Yeah, it should be an election issue, since the economy is in the toilet and un/underemployment is at 17%.

FCBarca, please reconsider and vote.  I know it is an abysmal situation.  But, we
really must vote.  I just cannot imagine a resurgence of the Bush administration
controlling all three branches of our government.  Your vote is not lost.  It is an
issue of integrity and conscience.  My hearty encouragement to you.

I’m sooo discouraged about politics in
America…First time I will be consciously skirting
the election and not voting

I don’t envision a u-turn in our political landscape
when grave matters like these are obfuscated
nevermind that honest discussions about the issues
that matter never enter into the
consciousness…Instead, the abyss still lies beneath
us but we’re rapidly making haste to reach it in
record time

Canada is starting to look good…Switzerland anyone?

As to war becoming an election issue—traditionally it is up to the President, which is way too much power for one man, even though he is also entitled to stop wars once he starts them. But that proves difficult—until too late.

Making it an election issue might work if the electorate is to be well educated and well informed.
Otherwise there is nothing to prevent an entire nation from going crazy for revenge or a voluntary bloodbath—as has been all too clear already.

Any way you slice it, there’s only one answer:
Analysis of true causes, access to accurate information and resistance to patriotic propaganda, a profound belief that war is evil and counterproductive, a fair sharing of the earth’s resources, and a faith that peace is possible.
  Tall order, but it’s time to begin. Amy does her part. How about us?

It might be a good idea for us on TD to start thinking and talking about what we are going to do to defend whistleblowers and truthtellers.

Remember way back at the time of Abu Ghraib.  The lowly little nobodies and the dogs were turned into villains.  Those who ordered them and/or knew what was going on and said nothing, kept their jobs.
  From now on it is likely to be a number of people all the way along the line, from low to high, as the war caves in on us all and the rent comes due, so to speak.

Do we want to defend the people who do whatever they can to “speak truth to power” or cower in the shadows and play dead?

Amy, I listen to every one of your shows via podcast and am always heartened by the information you provide and by your sense of priorities.

Also, I have been encouraged lately by my own work in journalism. I’ve been interviewing people in one of our small decayed American cities, and I am impressed, as always, by the perceptiveness of underemployed and unemployed people,in this country. They understand the nature of the financial and political structures of the town because they meet people in power face to face. And they manage to avoid being discouraged against what seem overwhelming odds. They go to meetings, they don’t hesitate to speak up to the mayor or challenge the police chief, and are simply not afraid.

The challenge is somehow to tap that fundamental intelligence and courage of American working people when it comes to the huge national and international issues,which remain invisible to them because of the priorities set for the mass media - which they also absorb a huge amount of.

Well, Amy, you are doing your part. Keep up the fight!

I disagree with the concept that troops are ‘sent’ to
fight. They sign up for this. They sign up to go and
kill on behalf of corporate America. They sign up to
go and kill other people in their own countries
(sometimes in their own homes) because they aren’t
American, they aren’t Christian and they don’t want
western Capitalism. But the media is the biggest
catapult for this.

The media has the power to turn the mob for or
against a war. And in the US, the mainstream media is
FOR war because it is also part of the pro corporate,
pro Christian America, that does believe in tolerance
and the right for other cultures to be self-
determining.

The culprits are the Pentagon, the Media and
Corporate America who work together to indoctrinate
the people with dishonesty and baloney.

How unutterably sad that we learned nothing from Viet Nam.  (Our military did,
however, learn to avoid the ludicrous charade of “body counts,” prevent news
media from seeing—and counting—the caskets of our returning dead soldiers,
and eliminate a draft which would invite MIDDLE AMERICAN parents and
spouses to question the “wars”.)  58,000 Americans and 2 million+ other
human beings killed and multiples more destroyed for life, FOR WHAT? 

Today, everyone knows that our “wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan will end with
our taking our military toys and going home while muttering about ‘mission
accomplished,’ the war being lost because of liberal defeatists, and how we
could have “won” had we the patriotism and courage to drop nuclear weapons. 
Yet, though we know that our involvement (including being kicked out of our
“green zone” sanctuaries) will end soon, we continue to send U.S. soldiers to
their deaths and maimings, and we destroy humans with impunity.

What can I possibly do to help stop this carnage?  Vote?  “Change we can
believe in” is meaningless, soundbite hucksterism.  The cheney/palin disciples
want back in to pick up where they left off—more death and destruction for
“national security” (i.e corporate health).  Help me!  Please help us!

Since war emboldens and increases the number of people who fight America, war is treason.  The soldiers who fight in such wars are traitors, not heroes.  What American, after reading Sy Hersh’s ‘My Lai’ would lower themselves to even joining the military?  When Kofi Annan, in September of 2004, called the Iraq invasion an illegal act of agression, violating the UN charter, who heard this?  Certainly no US politician and no one who subsequently signed or resigned to the US military.

I don’t think war should even be on the table.  You can reduce our military budget by 75% and we still would be the largest military spender on earth - and what for - to kill innocents, to line pockets of the miscreats in the MIC, and to keep these traitors, our elected officials, in office.

War as an issue will never be brought up as both paties are complicit in the crimes committed in it’s waging and too much money is involved both for the industries and corporations that make the weapons and exploit the rest of the world and the free flowing graft enjoyed by our political leaders. This whole election nonsense has nothing to do with the commonweal, but rather which faction of our wonderful two party dictatorship will wield power thus in line to receive the corrupting largesse of those behind the scenes who actually are in control. This country is on the verge of catastrophe. Seeing the ignorant and intolerant masses populating the T-Party reminds me of those glassy eyed fools that cheered madly each time a certain Austrian lunatic rode by in uncounted motorcades. And before we declare our “brave” military as lily-white heros take a moment to see where most come from and who they are led by. The mentality of so many of our troops and the mind warping “training” they receive should surprise no one when considering the root causes of the atrocities committed and policies in effect!

drbhelthi:
“It is difficult to classify our soldier losses as “heroes,” when they commit genocide on indigenous folk in countries - where we have no right to be in the first place.”

Difficult it may be, but Progressives are fully up that heinous task.

“The reports….[document] not only the scale and regularity of the violence, but, ultimately, a new total for civilian deaths in Iraq”

They do no such thing of course although Progressives seem to be allied with the right to lie about this.  Iraqi Body Count does not attempt or claim to issue an estimate of the war dead.  Nor do wikileaks obviously.  You don’t suddenly get an estimate by adding together to numbers neither of which are estimates.  You get drivel.

There’s only been one estimate so far and that’s the Lancet published study that covered only a few years and assumed a background rate of deaths already considered “genocidal” as its base.

Projecting the numbers over other years and adding in the genocide death toll you get two to four million dead Iraqis.  Now THAT is an actual estimate not some made up low balled bullshit.

War should be an election issue but it’s never been one. Violent foreign policy, in
its many shapes and with all its repercussions, has never been a serious issue for
most voters and election candidates.

Onward Christian Soldiers!

War in general, and the current instances of it, are not and cannot be an election issue.  War is the essence of the state; elections are an internal self-regulating function of the state.  Elections cannot turn the state off.  Thus, elections are not about whether to have wars or not, but how to wage them.  As we observe.

Hear, hear !
Very accurate.
Our soldiers are not giving their lives. “Our” national leadership is sacrificing them for the benefit of the “chiefs” of politics and industry.

It is difficult to classify our soldier losses as “heroes,” when they commit genocide on indigenous folk in countries - where we have no right to be in the first place. Even if they are carrying out orders of alleged “officer leadership.”  Which officers vowed to “support the U.S. Constitution,” and not the U.S. President, as CIA agents are required to do. Where are the patriotic generals?

The concept of “commander in chief” has turned into garbage that is destroying the U.S.A.,the western world, the Mid-East and the concept of democracy. Or vice-versa.

Also, too many of “our soldiers,” similar to Pat Tillman, are murdered with a carefully-placed 3-round burst to the head or heart, by their alleged “compatriots,” who are supposedly “Americans.”  So much for the NAZI Bush family, and all other NAZIs and offspring of the 2,000 secreted into the US via Operation Paper Clip and reiterations, 1945-1948. One may conclude that the NAZI HQ was transferred from Berlin to D.C. and other locations in the U.S.

Wikileaks proves that the national- leadership- level fraud displayed 1945-1948, has accelerated and enlarged to the entire western world, victimizing the “Mid East.”

The last bodyguard of Adolf Hitler, LTC Otto Skorzeny, prior to his death in 1999, provided the key to the NAZI/U.S. leadership fraud:
http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20070405.htm