patrickmurfin

Democratic voters in northern Illinois will have a rare opportunity to see the major candidates for Governor and U.S. Senator in the February primary.  The Northern Illinois Coordinated Campaign Committee (NICCC) will present debates by candidates in both races in Rockford on Sunday, November 15. 

Governor Pat Quinn and challenger Comptroller Dan Hynes will face off at 3:45 PM at the Radisson Hotel, 200 S. Bell School Road, Rockford.  After a buffet dinner at 5 PM, Senatorial candidates Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, David Hoffman, and Cheryle Jackson will take the stage.

The NICCC is made up of the Democratic Parties of McHenry, Boon, DeKalb, Ogle, and Winnebago Counties.

Tickets for the debates and dinner are $25 or $200 for a table for eight.  Individual tickets will be available at the door.  Tickets and tables can also be reserved with a check made out to the NICCC, P.O. Box 785, DeKalb, IL 60115.   Call 815 756-9103 for further information.
 

 
The Rev. William Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalsit Association 

This past week has been rife with the petitions for action that often clog my e-mail.  The Senate has repeatedly gone to the well to vote on various schemes to reign in the imperial ambitions of the Mal-Administration on Habeas corpus and on the war itself.  Each time I have been urged to communicate my support, and each time the tenacious rear-guard action of dutiful Republican minions has blocked any effective action.  Meanwhile the same body that could not curb the war found tome, with the assistance of some particularly craven Democrats, to condemn MoveOn for daring to exercise free speech.  It is all unimaginably discouraging.

Yet hope, faint hope, remains.  The House of Representatives is unconstrained by the Senate’s minority empowering cloture rules.  A simple majority is all that is required to act.  With a clear majority Democrats, joined by un-brainwashed Republicans in the House have the power to remove funding for continuing operations in Iraq, except as they involve safely extricating our forces.  In the face of a unified House majority, no bellicose Senate minority can compel funding.  An impasse on Defense appropriations may occur, but no money to fund the war would be forthcoming. It is not a perfect solution—it is messy and fraught with the well advertised dangers of a “Constitutional crisis.”  But we already have a Constitutional crisis with the attempted neo-con consolidation of total power in the White House.

Seventy members of the House have already pledged not to vote for any more war funding.  It is a good staret.  But more need to sign on to achieve the majority that can end the war.

When I received the following e-mail from Rev. William Sinkford of the Unitarian Universalist Association, I was stirred by the commitment of my faith community to bear witness for peace in a meaningful manner.  I urge my fellow UUs to read Rev. Sinkford’s appeal below and to sign the petition.

Friends: 

On September 6, I faxed a message to every member of Congress telling them, “Not another dollar.  Not another life.”  To make sure they heard me, I am headed to Capitol Hill with my colleague Rev. John H. Thomas, the United Church of Christ’s General Minister and President.  On October 10 we will be walking into your representatives’ offices to tell them to end the war and I want to bring you with me.

I Invite you to sign the petition linked below, calling for an end to our reliance on violence as the first, rather than the last resort and an end to the arrogant unilateralism of preemptive war.  Join me in speaking truth to those who have run from it.  Please sign this petition and add your voice to 25,000 other Unitarian Universalists who say that security is found in building beloved community, not by dominating others. 

Sincerely,

Rev. William G. Sinkford,

President, Unitarian Universalist Association

Read Rev. Sinkford’s September 6 letter to Congress:

http://www.uua.org/news/newssubmissions/44811.shtml

Sign the following petition to be among the 25,000 Unitarian Universalists joining Rev. William Sinkford as he speaks truth to power at the following link:  http://tinyurl.com/29ttcd

Along with thousands of Unitarian Universalists, I call for an end to the war in Iraq, an end to our reliance on violence as the first, rather than the last resort, an end to the arrogant unilateralism of preemptive war.

I call for the humility and courage to acknowledge failure and error, to accept the futility of our current path, and I cry out for the creativity to seek new paths of peacemaking in the Middle East, through regional engagement and true multinational policing.

I call for acknowledgment of our responsibility for the destruction caused by sanctions and war and a beginning to rebuild trust in the Middle East and around the world.

I call for truth-telling in our nation and for the recognition in our congregations that security is found in building beloved community, not by dominating others.

 
I will join protest to prayer, support ministries of compassion for victims here and in the Middle East and cast off the fear that has made many of us accept the way of violence and return again to the way of love. Thus may bloodshed end and cries be transformed to the harmonies of justice and the melodies of peace. For this I yearn, for this I petition, and toward this end I rededicate myself as a member of our human family.

One of scores of MOVEON anti-filibuster rallies around the country.

Well, it’s over now.  A bleary-eyed SENATE has voted not to end the filibuster against the LEVIN-REED AMENDMENT to the DEFENSE DEPARTMENT budget allocation.  The final vote was 52-47.  Four REPUBLICANS—GORDON SMITH (Oregon,) CHUCK HAGEL (Nebraska,) OLYMPIA SNOW (Maine,) and SUSAN COLLINS (ditto) voted to end the debate and proceed to a majority vote on the amendment. JOE LIEBERMAN (Turd, Connecticut) of course voted with the Repugnitans.  But so did HARRY REID himself—a parliamentary maneuver that allows him to resurrect the amendment for yet another vote.  TIM JOHNSON, still recovering from a stroke, was absent for the vote.

            The DEMOCRATS thus picked up one GOP vote.  But Collins, in a tough re-election race, said that she only voted to allow an up or down vote on the amendment but would have voted against the amendment itself. This is desperate, meaningless hair splitting since the amendment was doomed any way.  And if it had come to a vote, it would have passed, even with her opposition.

            Republicans whined that it was all just theater.  That it was.  But it is important theater.  It required the parade of Bush loyalists to stand up and defend the indefensible.  It also showed them up as obstructionists at a time when the overwhelming majority of American voters want Congress to take action to end this unpopular war. 

            Reid knows from bitter experience that the public does not appreciate the nuances of Senate tradition and have little patience for the hallowed tradition of the FILIBUSTER as a means of thwarting the majority of the body.  The GOP was able to use that repugnance to wipe up the floor with Democrats in the hotly contested judicial confirmations of the last Congress.  Even though most voters disapproved of the kind of reactionary judges Shrub had sent to the Senate, they hated the obstruction more.  Now it was Reid’s turn to rub the new minority’s nose in its own shit.

            In recent years the filibuster has not much resembled JEFFERSON SMITH’S lonely crusade—or even the epic rear-guard actions of the segregationist Democrats against the Civil Rights acts of the 1960’s.  Instead it has been a carefully orchestrated dance in which the mere threat of a filibuster, when the votes are sure to sustain it, is enough to kill legislation or an appointment.  That way no one actually has to put any effort into one.

            But Reid has told the Minority that they must actually hold their “extended debate.”  What is more he has threatened to bring the issue of ending the War back again and again with this amendment or with others—perhaps with ROBERT BYRD’S and HILLARY CLINTON’S amendment to withdraw the Resident’s authority to wage the war under the original 2002 measure obtained under false pretences.  There is also a pile-up of progressive legislation already passed by the HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES that could be subject to the same strategy.  How bad with the GOP look filibustering, say, children’s health insurance?

            As for the Levin-Reed Amendment itself, it is far from the “bring-‘em-home-now” demands of much of the anti-war movement.  It is centrist in every respect echoing many of the recommendations of the IRAQ STUDY GROUP.  It calls for a draw down of American troops beginning 120 days after passage, limiting remaining troops to missions against AL-QAEDA—a provision repeatedly mocked by JOHN McCAIN as requiring that they “wear t-shirts” identifying themselves—and training Iraqi forces.  It also call for a diplomatic initiative with Iraq’s neighbors and mediation effort led by the UNITED NATIONS.

            Yet even action this limited represents a strong rebuke to the CHENEY/BUSH/NEO-CON war machine.  It would not stop the war, but it would put the breaks on and undoubtedly be followed by stronger measures.  Reid’s aggressive tactics represent a break with Democratic timidity that can not be underestimated.

            Like it or not, this war will not be ended in one fell swoop.  Some sort of steady, controlled departure is the best that we can expect from Congress.

            MOVEON recognized this, which is why it mobilized anti-filibuster actions around the country. They undoubtedly will be ripped as Democratic Party lackeys again.  Ignore the criticism.  Congretional Democrats are finally getting it right. 

Senators BARACK OBAMA and DICK DURBIN of Illinois at earlier event on vetran's issues.

CAROLYN QUINN has done it again!  This is the letter she sent to Senators DICK DURBIN and BARACK OBAMA in support of the all night session to discuss the LEVIN-REED AMENDMENT forcing Senate REPUBLICANS to defend the indefensible.

Dear Senators:

You are making me immensely proud today. Hang in there! We cannot allow the Republican Caucus to morph into The Incredible Pit of an obstacle course, because if we do, the rest of the Senate, and indeed the rest of the country, will be mired in the muck right along with them.

I am a teacher in McHenry County who has participated in school sponsored "lock-downs" where we have great groups of students stay overnight in the gymnasium to have Reading Marathons. Sometimes we organize for them to do 24-hour runs outside on the track. These are always huge events,and I know well how that kind of work can be both grueling and rewarding.

I am also the mom of a Navy Man recently returned from "Operation Enduring Freedom." We want our troops home now - not because we are tired of fighting, although we are. Our sense of desperation comes because it is not possible to EVER have a sense of having won this war. That could only happen in the situation where we were doing an honorable deed, which in this case we certainly are not. What we have is this: honorable warriors are fighting as honorably as they can while the commander in chief wages this war in a tapestry of dishonor. The original warp was established on lies, deceptions and a perverted sense of profit. Woven across that was established a pattern of further dishonor that blankets the very soul of our country. It casts a shadow on the sacrifices made by all our boots on the ground AND our boats in the depths of the ocean.

Never did I imagine the day would come when the Red Cross would identify my country as the perpetrators of torture. I'm sorry, but there is no honor in the torture chamber. This has festered far too long, and we have got to put a stop to the entire fiasco.

Slam on the brakes!

Don't give up! Don't lose heart! Don't miss your families and feel lonely in the Senate Chambers tonight! We are with you, we are behind you, we are proud of you. We are honored to be represented by you tonight.

Carolyn Quinn

Crystal Lake, IL

                               
              Chris Hedges                                           James Luther Adams

CHRIS HEDGES is an award winning foreign correspondent with impeccable credentials.  But he may be best known for the headlines he made in May of 2003 when he was commencement speaker at conservative ROCKFORD COLLEGE in Illinois. Recently returned from Iraq, the speech was a blistering denunciation of the war and astonishingly prescient in its projections for a dismal result.  Hedges was booed and jeered in what some observers reported was a near riot.  He persevered and delivered the speech anyway.  A national examination of freedom of speech and academic freedom followed the well publicized address.

 He followed up this experience with publishing WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING, drawing on his decades of experience as a war coorespondent. 

But Hedges also was drawn to examine the rise of the religious right in America.  The son of a Presbyterian minister, he was a young student at HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL, where he studied under JAMES LUTHER ADAMS.  Adams gave him the intelectual tools, compounded by real world experience to analize the growing threat.

Although largely unknown to the public JAMES LUTHER ADAMS is commonaly regarded as the greatest Unitarian theologian of the 20th Century.  Studying in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, he advocated a rigourous, grounded religious humanism that could rise above empty platitudes and individual self-absorbtion to be a postitive force for good in the world.  He secretly filmed members of the anti-nazi underground CONFESSING CHURCH including KARL BARTH and ALBERT SCHWEITZERr, as well as Nazi apologists in the state sanctioned church.  Escaping the Gestapo by guile with the films, he returned to the states to sound a warning to both the nation and to complacent religious liberals.  Later also translated and intorduced to the American public the important German liberal theologians, including PAUL TILLICH.

In January Hedges published his new examination of the religious right, AMERICAN FACSISTS: THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE WAR ON AMERICA.  

In an essay first published in TRUTHDIG and which I read in TRUTHOUT.ORG, Hedges explains the importance of Adams in the development of his critique. The article is so important, I have elected to reproduce it in its entreaty below.

Christianists on the March
    By Chris Hedges
    Truthdig

 Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, told his students that when we were his age - he was then close to 80 - we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and television evangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts toward taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global Christian empire. This call for fundamentalists and evangelicals to take political power was a radical and ominous mutation of traditional Christianity. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of THE BIBLE.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He had been in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as the Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler placed over the contents of his suitcases to hide the rolls of home-movie film he had taken of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied the Nazis, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the tops of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Führer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black-and-white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge. 

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him.

The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on AMERICAN FASCISTS: THE CHRISTIAN RIGHT AND THE WAR ON AMERICA were stories of this failure - personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers - those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding. The Christian right has lured tens of millions of Americans, who rightly feel abandoned and betrayed by the political system, from the reality-based world to one of magic - to fantastic visions of angels and miracles, to a childlike belief that God has a plan for them and Jesus will guide and protect them. This mythological worldview, one that has no use for science or dispassionate, honest intellectual inquiry, one that promises that the loss of jobs and health insurance does not matter, as long as you are right with Jesus, offers a lying world of consistency that addresses the emotional yearnings of desperate followers at the expense of reality. It creates a world where facts become interchangeable with opinions, where lies become true - the very essence of the totalitarian state. It includes a dark license to kill, to obliterate all those who do not conform to this vision, from Muslims in the Middle East to those at home who refuse to submit to the movement.

And it conveniently empowers a rapacious oligarchy whose god is maximum profit at the expense of citizens. We now live in a nation where the top 1 percent control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined, where we have legalized torture and can lock up citizens without trial. Arthur Schlesinger, in THE CYCLES OF AMERICAN HISTORY, wrote that "the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense - not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide."

 Adams saw in the Christian right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists rise under the guise of religion to dismantle the open society. He despaired of U.S. liberals, who, he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil or the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand-wringing by Democrats, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me, I suspect half in jest, that if the Nazis took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute." But this too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg, including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.

 Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the House before the last elections earned approval ratings of 80 to100 percent from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups - the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council.

President Bush has handed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid to these groups and dismantled federal programs in science, reproductive rights and AIDS research to pay homage to the pseudo-science and quackery of the Christian right. Bush will, I suspect, turn out to be no more than a weak transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck - who also used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19th century and launched "Kulturkampf," the word from which we get culture wars, against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck's attacks, which split Germany and made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse, paved the way for the Nazis' more virulent racism and repression.

The radical Christian right, calling for a "Christian state" - where whole segments of American society, from gays and lesbians to liberals to immigrants to artists to intellectuals, will have no legitimacy and be reduced, at best, to second-class citizens - awaits a crisis, an economic meltdown, another catastrophic terrorist strike or a series of environmental disasters. A period of instability will permit them to push through their radical agenda, one that will be sold to a frightened American public as a return to security and law and order, as well as moral purity and prosperity. This movement - the most dangerous mass movement in American history - will not be blunted until the growing social and economic inequities that blight this nation are addressed, until tens of millions of Americans, now locked in hermetic systems of indoctrination through Christian television and radio, as well as Christian schools, are reincorporated into American society and given a future, one with hope, adequate wages, job security and generous federal and state assistance. The unchecked rape of America, which continues with the blessing of both political parties, heralds not only the empowerment of this American oligarchy but the eventual death of the democratic state and birth of American fascism.

I urge all of the faithful readers of this little blog to support getting the minimum wage through the Senate unsullied  by “Poison Pill” Republican Amendments.  Senator Edward Kennedy has been a lion on the floor on this issue.  Below is his appeal.

I need your help.

For ten years, the Republican leadership has refused to let us raise the minimum wage. Even now, the bill will barely lift 13 million working Americans out of poverty -- but it's progress.

Now the Senate has invoked cloture, which means that our opponents in the Senate have 30 hours to hammer away at the bill before we can vote on it.

Armed with scores of amendments, Republicans have proposed one poison pill after another to weaken and obstruct what should be a simple raise.

What are these amendments? Republicans have proposed $240 billion in tax breaks for corporations, $36 billion in tax breaks for small businesses, and many, many more -- most of which have nothing to do with giving hard-working Americans a well-earned and long-delayed raise.

We have to ask hard questions of Republicans in the Senate: What is your price for giving hard-working men and women the raise they deserve? After lavishing billions on the wealthiest Americans and largest corporations, can't we give these workers $2.10 more an hour?

When does the greed stop?

That’s the question. That’s the issue. Make no mistake. They have piles of amendments -- we have none.

It is absolutely essential that all who care about this clear issue of conscience step up and make their voices heard now.

Show your support for a clean Fair Minimum Wage Act.                     

http://www.tedkennedy.com/raisethewage

What is it about the minimum wage that drives Republicans crazy?

Don't let them disguise their disdain for their fellow Americans by hiding it behind a pile of hostile amendments.

In the past week of debate each Senator has made $3,800 -- more than a third of what a minimum wage worker makes in a year! What is it about these hard-working men and women that they find so offensive? Why would they poison legislation on something as basic as the minimum wage?

It's time for some answers.

--Senator Edward M. Kennedy

            Yesterday, January 16th, Senator Barak Obama announced he was going to run for the Democratic Party nomination for the Presidency—almost.  In the elaborate dance made necessary by custom, the arcane labyrinth of Federal election law and the urgency of fund raising, the Senator from Illinois firmly put his right foot on the ballroom floor. 

In an e-mail to supporters and in a web site posting  the Senator announced the formation of an exploratory committee, the necessary first step which allows serious fund raising.  He promises to follow up with a formal announcement of his eagerly awaited candidacy on February 10th.

The announcement came a day after another acclaimed Obama speech to the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at the Push/Rainbow Coalition in Chicago.  With modesty, humor, and dignity Obama laid out how he stood on the shoulders of Dr. King and other civil rights pioneers and martyrs.  He extolled their achievement, but left no doubt that the fulfillment of their vision remains the challenge of the rising generation.  It was a great speech.  But then we have come to expect great speeches from this man.

Obama is unique among all of the political figures I have known or observed in my life time.  Years before he rose to national prominence following his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, people who met the skinny young politician even for a few minutes went away muttering to themselves that they had shaken hands with a future president.  He had that kind of effect on people.

I know he did on me.  In a chance encounter in the dust outside the dispersing Democrat Day Rally at the Illinois State Fair in 2003 Diane Oltman-Ayers introduced me to an acquaintance, a young state senator from Chicago.  He was known to be joining the crowded field running for the upcoming Senate nomination in 2004.  He was quite alone and entourageless.  At the time I was the lowly vice-chair of the then puny McHenry County Democratic Party, a figure of next to zero political influence.  Yet he engaged us in conversation for about twenty minutes displaying a keen recognition of the political challenges and realities ahead of him and a close and carefully reasoned grasp of complex issues all wrapped up in a warm and witty personality.

I came away quite frankly dazzled by the experience.  But with that power of shrewd political prognostication, for which I am so well noted, was saddened that such an outstanding candidate had no chance for election because of his unfortunate name. 

In the primary election that followed, I signed on early in support of radio host and liberal activist Nancy Skinner’s doomed candidacy.  I recognized I had placed the wrong bet by mid-campaign.  I felt compelled to honor my original commitment to Skinner, but on Election Day was elated by Obama’s victory.

His unprecedented sweep to victory in the November election by an historic margin laid to rest any doubts.  The Convention speech came as no surprise to us in Illinois, it only served to introduce him to a larger stage.

The Freshman Senator’s rise was meteoric.  He was mentioned as a possible Presidential contender before his bags were fairly un-packed in Washington.  He was the object of sometimes idolizing press coverage.  Meanwhile he tried to keep his head down, lower expectations, and get on with the job of learning to be an effective senator.

But as the disastrous Residency of George W. Bush unraveled, Democrats from across the country turned increasingly to Obama.  As did many ordinary Americans of all races and regions, with whom he struck a responsive cord.  Talk of the Presidency could no longer be gainsaid.

Of course the higher Obama soared, he invited a chorus of skeptics.  Many painted him as a matinee idol, unproven in the Senate or in crisis, a mere cipher whose true opinions and positions remained veiled. 

But those who came to know him recognized that the senator was indeed the real deal.  He has a piercing intelligence coupled with a strong work ethic.  Colleges in the State Senate and the U.S. Senate both soon came to recognize that he was thoroughly prepared on every subject and willing to work hard, including reaching across the isle to ideological opponents, to work out practical solutions for thorny problems. 

His noted oratorical skills, in an age when the political speech has largely been replaced as an art form by the 30 second sound bite, rest not only on the strength of his magnetic personality, but on the depth of capacity as a writer.  No American politician since Lincoln has been so literarily gifted.  It shows not just in his speeches, but in his two best selling memoirs.

The right-wing posse of radio ranters, cable talking heads, and scriveners planted by important sounding think tanks, fear Obama as they fear no other Democrat.  They dream of running against the hated Hillary, but he sends shivers up their spines.  Yet they are reduced to drawing attention to his name and hinting that his father’s Islam makes him an un-trustworthy jihadist mole in American politics.  Or that a minor, but strait forward, real estate transaction with an Illinois political bag man tied to the Blagojevich administration, might tarnish his image as an honest strait shooter.  But it is futile.  In the end they have to fall back on the unspoken hope that in their heart of hears once inside the voting booth most white voters will be unable to pull a vote for a black man as President—the Harold Ford effect. But this time, they are wrong.

Which is why for the first time HERETIC, REBEL, A THING TO FLOUT is proud to put all of its mighty influence and resources at the disposal of Senator Obama.  We want to be among the first media outlets to unreservedly endorse Obama for President of the United States.

Across the nation, Democratic operatives for lesser candidates (especially Hillary Clinton) quake in their boots as they realize the awesome implications of this endorsement.

But then again so will some of Obama’s staff people when they realize that their boy has been endorsed in a blog named HERITIC, REBEL, A THING TO FLOUT, obviously the creation of some wild-eyed misfit somewhere.

Yet we press boldly forward and invite all of our dozens of faithful readers to join in our support of the Next President of the United States.

He’s the last of the Southern Bourbon Democrats in the Senate, a living anachronism.  At 88 years of age he is said to make his way through the echoing marble halls of the Capital leaning heavily on two canes.  Astonishingly, he is running for re-election.  And he just became the longest serving United State’s Senator in American History, passing the mark set by segregationist Democrat-cum-Dixiecrat-cum-Republican Strom Thurman. He’s ROBERT C. BYRD—Byrd of West Virginia.

Many assume that he is connected to the ancient and aristocratic Byrd family of neighboring Virginia.  Certainly the distinguished silver hair, the polished oratory of a by-gone era, his legendary reverence for Senate history and tradition, his imposing Constitutional scholarship would seem to reflect Tidewater gentility.  But despite the name, Robert Byrd was the adopted son of coal miner.

Ambitious young Byrd became a butcher and set his sights on a political career.  To advance that career he joined, in the early 1940’s the Ku Klux Klan, an in-auspicious beginning which has haunted him over his long career.  He also became an accomplished fiddle player.  It was as much on the strength of his lively reels as is ill-chosen association that he first was elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates.

His political rise was steady, almost relentless to the state senate and then the U.S. House of Representatives.  Finally, in 1958, during the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Byrd was elected to the Senate.

He took to that august body like a duck to water.  He mastered both its sometimes arcane rules and its mossy custom.  Reading voraciously, he mastered the history of the body and the biographies of the great—and not so great—statesmen who had served.  He developed a reputation as a man who could do the hard and delicate tasks of shepherding legislation and hammering out compromises without becoming an out front star and was rewarded with junior leadership posts and prime committee assignments.

Like his Bourbon contemporaries he could be a New Deal populist on economic issues and an internationalist in foreign affairs while reverting to rigid segregationism to keep the folks back home happy.  He joined the filibusters against Johnson era Civil Rights legislation and used his mastery of Senate procedure to throw up every obstacle.  He says that like his youthful Klan membership, he has grown to regret that opposition.  He now courts Black votes and gets them.  But he has never given up his attachment to the filibuster and procedure as the bulwark of minority rights against a tyrannical majority.

By 1977 Byrd was elevated to the pinnacle.  He was elected Majority Leader, a post he held under Carter and Regan.  In 1989 he walked away from the Senate leadership to take what might be an even more powerful position—Chair of the Appropriations Committee.  He used that clout to bring home the bacon to West Virginia.  Did he ever.  He built highways, federal buildings, post offices, bridges, dams.  He lured major federal facilities like an FBI finger printing lab employing more than 2000.  And he was not shy about allowing his name to be slapped on many of the projects.  It is hard in West Virginia to turn around without coming face to face with the Robert C. Byrd this-or-that.  He is unapologetic.  West Virginia is a poor, hard scrabble kind of place, he says, and deserves the Federal attention.

The ascension of Republicans to the Senate majority stripped him of his chairmanship.  Ideologically driven Republicans strained the genteel traditions and clubby atmosphere of the Senate.  The new partisan leadership soon locked Democrats out of even cursory consultation on issue after issue.  The my-way-or-the-highway attitude extended even to generally conservative Democrats like Byrd who were often muscled not to gently to the side.

Despite it all, Byrd soldiered on.  These years of desert exile have unexpectedly presented him with the opportunity to achieve true greatness—to join the lions of Senate history he has so long admired.  Greatness is only recognized under adversity.

Byrd, who first looked kindly on George W. Bush as a “modest fellow,” was soon appalled by the audacity of his assertion to unchallenged authority in every area.  It came to a head over the Iraq War.  Byrd recognized it as a disaster.  When in the panicky post 9/11 days Congress fell all over its self ceding its privileges to the President, Byrd objected.  When the war was launched on flimsy evidence and a transparent tissue of lies, Byrd rose in thunderous opposition.

Almost alone he took to the Senate floor in speech after meticulously crafted speech.  He denounced the war.  He pleaded with his colleagues to assert their constitutional responsibilities in regard to war powers and taunted them at their cowardice.  Republicans smeared him.  The media ignored him or dismissed him as senile crank.  Timid and cowardly Democrats turned their back on him.  Undaunted he pressed on.

Now that the tide has turned against the war, Byrd naturally feels some justification.  But he rejects mere pats on the back, insisting that his fellow Senators begin the arduous task of re-asserting their privilege and authority.  He thunders against usurpations like the “singing statements” which the President uses to attempt to nullify the very laws he has just approved.  He stands against warrantless wire taps and the full host of other administration horribles.

For this he has been lionized on the left.  Move.On and others have endorsed his re-election and raised money on his behalf.

Byrd is no creature of the left, any more than he turned out to be a captive of the right.  He still casts very conservative votes on a host of issues and failed to join in calls for filibustering judicial nominees because he shares the President’s avowed disdain of “activist, legislating” judges.  With Robert C. Byrd you get that sometimes infuriating contradiction.

But by God, when his country needed him the most, Byrd stood like a giant.  If the tide is finally turned and the drive to one party dictatorship is stemmed, we will owe it in no small measure to the Senator from West Virginia.

Congratulations on your milestone, Senator.  May you serve us many more years.

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Finally, someone said it.  I was beginning to think I was alone in my reservations.  Last week TRUTHOUT.ORG, ran a special perspective piece by David Bacon, “No Immigration Bill is Better”. In the piece Bacon quotes some immigration activists who have concluded that the supposedly “liberal” Senate bill is nearly as damaging at the House version—death by a thousand cuts rather than decapitation.

If the Senate bill had been up for consideration two years ago, immigration reform activists and the immigrant communities themselves would have been up in arms.  Many of its provisions add onerous burdens on individuals and families.  Others seem to strengthen and institutionalize the exploitation of their labor for virtually no reward at all.

Instead, the Sensenbrenner bill caught the attention of millions of undocumented workers and drove them spontaneously into the streets.  From the beginning of the remarkable marching season, many supported the Senate version as a reasonable alternative to the draconian criminalization of millions.  That was understandable.           

The Senate bill, with the backing of the President, at least offered what was seen as a “path to citizenship.”  But the path is so narrow most will never be able to negotiate it.  On top of that ever more restrictive amendments were added to the package to entice the House to bite the bullet in conference.

But now groups such as the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the San Francisco Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition, the AFL-CIO, and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund have recognized the flaws in the Senate plan and are beginning to withdraw support.

At any rate the ideologically driven House of Representatives seems ready to stand by its demands for a harsh measures and rejection of  “legalization.”  Congressman Sensenbrenner, principle architect of the House plan, rejected any compromise with the Senate on the talking heads shows last Sunday.  He is getting fifth column support from Senate Majority Leader Frist, who is still scrambling to prove his fascist credentials to the right wing in the ramp up of his presidential aspirations. 

Any compromise that could be reached would be much closer to the House version, anyway.

It looks more and more likely that there may be a stand-off between that two houses and no final bill may emerge.  Some bewail this as a disaster.  I believe it is likely a blessed gift to struggling immigrant workers.  Certainly no bill is preferable to anything that stands a chance of passage, even if the status of millions is in no way clarified.

In the late 1960’s the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan surveyed the failure of many Great Society Programs to alleviate poverty in urban Black communities.  Indeed, he believed that many programs had made matters much worse.  He recommended that, instead of continuing to commit social experimentation, a period and policy of “benign neglect,”—leaving the situation alone—might be called for.  Moynihan was roundly criticized by many liberals for bailing out of the War on Poverty.  What ever the merits of that might have been then.  Certainly today some “benign neglect” of immigration policy might save much heart ache and tragedy.

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So….Russ Feingold stood up on the Senate floor the other day and proclaimed that not only does the Emperor have no clothes, but that he ought to be handed a ticket for public nudity.  He called for censure of the President for his “…unlawful authorization of wiretaps of Americans within the United States without obtaining court orders required.”

Fear and panic gripped his Democratic colleagues who could be observed diving behind every shrub, rock and woodpile they could find.  Not a single senator came to Feingold’s side.  All scrambled away when Majority Leader Frist tried to call an immediate vote on the resolution and pin them down.

Even the bravest opponents of wire tapping shuffled their feet and mumbled excuses.  Our own Senator Durbin demurred that he understood Feingold’s motivation, but he thought he intended the censure resolution just to be “a catalyst” for detailed hearings and investigations.  Robert Byrd--who stood alone like a lion against the war, who has recently been centering his re-election campaign around his denunciation of domestic spying, and who is revered as the guardian of Senate prerogatives—even he was silent.

After all hadn’t Senator Frist gone on the Sunday Morning Temples of Talking Heads and clucked his tongue with disapproval and disdain?  Hadn’t the Vice President, grubbing for campaign bucks in the Chicago suburbs thundered, “Some Democrats in Congress have decided the president is the enemy…This outrageous proposition that we ought to protect our enemy’s ability to communicate as it plots against America poses a key test of our Democratic leaders…The American people already made their decision.  They agree with the president.”

No, Mr. Cheney.  The American people do not agree with the president.  His polling numbers are collapsing upon themselves and now dwell in the territory usually reserved for the fringe lunatics of politics.  The American people are sick of the president, sick of his lies, sick of the war, cronyism, corruption, and sick of his aspirations to despotic rule.  The American people would like to slap the president silly.

Only Russ Feingold is speaking for them now.

The anointed Pundocracy is united in saying that Feingold is only positioning himself for a presidential bid of his own and in congratulating the rest of the Democrats for “laying low and not taking the bait.”  These professional cynics automatically discount the possibility that Feingold might be operating from principle and genuine concern for continued democracy in America.

Alright, assume that is the case.  Feingold is speaking now the fondest dreams of the most committed voters in the Democratic Primaries.  The early action is in Iowa and New Hampshire where progressives are strong and well organized.  On the basis of this action alone he could blow the timid out of the  water and emerge as the early front runner for the nomination—the worst nightmare of the DNC and the “New Democrats.”  The waffling Hillary, the colorless Biden, the whole rest of the lack-luster pack could be left standing in the dust.

If I was one of those ambitious Senate Democrats, I might reconsider my position.  I might plant my flag by Russ Feingold’s and stand boldly against the Dark Side.  I suspect there are more votes in that than looking timid and spineless.

Anyway, all of the above was a prelude to my message for my senators, Durbin and Obama.  It went like this:

“The plain facts as outlined by Senator Feingold are irrefutable.  The President of the United States has broken the law.  Openly. Repeatedly. Remorselessly.  There is ample evidence for actual impeachment in the House of Representatives and conviction in the Senate.  If the political reality that a craven Republican majority in each house acts  as actual accomplices to the President’s assaults on the rights of the American people precludes that as an actual possibility at this time, the least the Congress can do is censure the audacious attack on Constitutional Government.

“This is not a time for caution or even political calculation.  It is a time to step up and act before our very power to act is stripped away with the rest of our rights.”

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