Heartbreak and Duty

by Hank Edson

(This Post was published by The Free Press on May 30, 2007: http://freepress.org/departments/display/10/2007/2616)

I had another post prepared today, but yesterday I read Cindy Sheehan’s letter of resignation as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. I tried to read it aloud to my wife, but I couldn’t do it with composure. Even now alone at my desk, it has the effect of real heartbreak, not heartbreak that just hurts, but heartbreak that cannot maintain its composure — mine, that is, not hers.

Cindy’s letter stands, as she has always stood, on a clear and honest principle. Her principle used to be “that the issue of peace and people dying for no reason is not a matter of ‘right or left,’ but ‘right and wrong.’” In resigning, her principle has become the principle of all families who have ever watched a loved one’s self-destructive addiction and come to the conclusion that a line must be drawn.

Cindy writes, “Good-bye America…you are not the country that I love and I finally realize no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it. It’s up to you now.”

One thing is clear to me: There is one truly principled person in our nation, a mother — a mother who lost a son, and who put everything in her life aside to stop the pointless killing being committed by the United States of America in Iraq. She lost her husband for it. She neglected her children and her health for it. She put all her personal resources on the line for it.

Florida 2000 and Al Gore’s New Book

By Hank Edson

posted May 23, 2007

The release of Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Reason, provides an appropriate occasion for a brief revisit to Florida, November 7, 2000, to once again consider the debacle in which the Republican party stole democracy from the America people and then proceeded to claim exclusive right to the American Flag for the next seven years. What better landmark can we find for the commencement of the “assault on reason” than Florida 2000? Going back to that time, I find we still haven’t done all the math necessary to understand as a people key aspects of the assault on democracy we suffered again in 2004, and are vulnerable to experience yet again in 2008.

To put the math in context, we must first realize that there were several independent strategies the Republican Party used to steal the 2000 election. Here are a few:

• Disobeying two explicit court orders, Jeb Bush instructed election officials to remove from the registered voter list all convicted felons who had had their right to vote restored before moving to Florida, costing Al Gore a conservative estimate of 30,000 votes;
• Voting machines were set to swallow and not count ballots filled out improperly in counties with large black populations but elsewhere were set to return the improperly filled out ballots to the voter for correction so each could be counted;
• Bush’s cousin, John Ellis, who headed the team at Fox News deciding when to call the winner of each state for Fox News on election night, after speaking with Jeb by telephone, called Bush the winner of Florida at Jeb’s urging and the rest of the networks followed suit, not wanting to left out of the story;
• Diebold machines in two precincts were found to have inexplicably subtracted votes from Al Gore’s vote total, raising suspicions that other “Gore subtractions” occurred unnoticed and uncorrected;
• Flaunting court order, Kathleen Harris “used her discretion” to refuse to extend the deadline state law imposed on Canvassing Boards without justification, even though there was ample good cause to do so, including widespread complaints about police intimidation, an absence of translators, confusing “butterfly” and “caterpillar” ballots, and ballot instructions that if followed correctly resulted in an overvote;
• Bush Pioneer, soon-to-be-disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff fronted the money and Bush Pioneer, soon-to-be-disgraced Enron CEO Ken Ley provided the jets to fly scores of Republican congressional staffers to pose as outraged Florida voters, who entered the Miami-Dade polling headquarters, screaming “Stop the fraud” and “let us in,” and pounding on the doors and windows—an effort that successfully stopped American votes from being counted; and
• Five Supreme Court justices, three of them with blatant conflicts of interest, abandoned their allegiance to legal principle and stopped the recount in order to give the presidency to George Bush.

The Hypocrisy of Accountability

in the "No Child Left Behind" Act

by Hank Edson
May 17, 2006

This week a report issued by Senator Edward Kennedy, who serves as chairman of the U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, revealed that although the NCLB Act makes a big deal about holding students and teachers accountable, it does not go far enough in imposing appropriate standards on the adults who hold political offices administering compliance with the law. Apparently four directors of the Reading First Technical Assistance Centers who advised state governments in the selection of reading programs that would meet the NCLB's regulatory guidelines were simultaneously reeping sizeable incomes working for education publishers. Joseph Rhee of ABC News reports:

Dr. Edward Kame'enui, the director of the Western Technical Assistance Center, was found to have received more than $400,000 from publisher Scott Foresman after authoring a reading program that was widely adopted by schools under Reading First. ... Today's report follows six investigations by the Department of Education's inspector general that found bias, mismanagement and conflicts of interest in the implementation of Reading First.

The Religious Right’s Buffet Line,
a.ka. President Bush’s Faith Based Initiative

by Hank Edson

One of the key tools used by the Republican Alliance to pursue its essentially anti-democratic agenda is what I call the secretive executive platform. These platforms depend upon being able to fly under the radar of political oversight and they employ a variety of approaches to maintain their secrecy. These different platforms include task forces, advisory boards, alternative intelligence gathering departments, and policy arguments designed to expand the power of the executive branch to the point where it is almost unlimited. Among the various secret executive branch platforms used by the Republican Alliance to pursue the authoritarian, wealth-concentrationist ends are the Defense Policy Board, the Office of Special Plans, and the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force, to name a few. In this segment, I will focus on the platform engineered to payback supporters in the Religious Right and to institutionalize the psychological manipulation of false religion within the government in a manner directly contrary to the constitutional doctrine of separation of church and state. We are talking about President Bush’s “faith-based initiative.”