McManchurian Candidate

Could John McCain's five year confine- ment in the Hanoi Hilton have really been a Manchurian Candidate indoc- trination?

I love a good conspiracy and seem to have found one over at Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain. From an article at Veterans Dispatch:

For years, the mainstream news media has refused to stop idolizing the so-called straight talking maverick John McCain long enough to question the mental health consequences of the years he spent as a "special" prisoner of the communists in North Vietnam.

McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for President, who could one day have his finger on the "red button," claims the communists subjected him to 5 ½ years of nonstop indoctrination sessions so intense that he attempted suicide.

Unfortunately for McCain, after his bomber was hit by anti-aircraft fire near Hanoi on October 26, 1967, he parachuted into the hands of an evil communist enemy who 7 years earlier had adopted Soviet methods of prisoner interrogation.

At that time, the Soviets were perfecting techniques designed "to put a man's mind into a fog so that he will mistake what is true for what is untrue, what is right for what is wrong, and come to believe what did not happen actually had happened."

Psychiatric Journals are flush with reports concluding that former POWs may remain entangled in "harsh psychological battles" with themselves for decades after returning home including difficulty in controlling intense emotions such as anger and stress.

In political circles, McCain, sometimes referred to as "insane McCain," is well known for having a "volcanic" temper which his colleagues say often erupts into vulgar language and personal insults.

Read the rest of the article and cruise around the VVAJM site and see what you think.

California Caucus

Today (Sunday April 13) is the day for all registered California Democrats to caucus for Clinton/Obama congressional-level delegates election. Show up at yur local caucus today at 2 PM (must be there before 3 PM) and pledge your presidential delegate. Locations are listed by district and candidate at The California Democratic Party website. You must be registered to vote in California--if not registered, show up, get registered and get active! I'll be there, will you?

Prayer for America

Kucinich style. I really love this guy. He says what I think and feel. This primary, I will be voting for Dennis Kucinich. I will not listen to the naysayers who say he is unelectable, too short, not rich enough. He is my candidate. I will not be party to the lesser-evil-vote. I will be voting for Dennis Kuchinich. He is electable if people vote their consciences instead for who the propaganda noise machine tells you to. Fuck that, I'm voting for Kucinich

Petraeus for President?

So reports the right-wing rag, the NY Sun. According to Petraeus himself, he plans on running for the presidency in 2012. C&L has it.

MySpace, Their Space; Race to the Presidency

The Guardian is reporting the Rupert Murdock owned MySapce site will be conducting the grandaddy of all straw polls in January.

The candidates' campaign teams have already set up profile pages, promoting policy statements, selling merchandise, and encouraging networking among supporters. Barack Obama is streets ahead of the pack, seemingly pulling in the same kind of young, web-savvy supporters as Howard Dean did in 2004. With more than 99,000 "friends", he leads John Edwards (18,000) and Hillary Clinton (10,000), while Republicans Mitt Romney and John McCain languish with fewer than 6,000; Rudy Giuliani's figures are kept private.

Read the rest...

Town Hall Meeting on Iraq

Listen. MoveOn.org has sponsored a town hall meeting of all the Democratic candidates for president speaking on the topic of the war in Iraq.

Teh Truth

And the hits just keep on comin' "Presidential Truth"

Lead by Example

Dennis Kucinich is a leader. Read a quick interview with him done by Bob Garfield od "On the Media" and see what you think. The presidential hopefuls field will sort itself out but I'm backing the darkhorse Kucinich because he speaks for me. I will back him until he wins or drops out of the race. If what he says moves you, think about doing the right thing and back him instead of who the corporate media tells us is the 'right candidate'. Listening to him speak is a welcome alternative to chimpy and his loser speech tonight. Hear the audio of this interview here.

BOB GARFIELD: Dennis Kucinich is a Democratic Presidential hopeful. He joins us now. Congressman, welcome to On the Media.

DENNIS KUCINICH: Thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD: Last time around, the major media scarcely covered your candidacy, and when they did, it was as an oddity. Did you think that you were a victim of the Media – with a capital M – or what was going through your head?

DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, I don't believe in victimization, but I do believe that, you know, there's a tendency on the part of the media in this country to try to pick whoever's going to be the nominee early on, and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think that it's important for people who run for public office to be ready to take a stand, whether the media wants to favor them or not.

BOB GARFIELD: Are you suggesting that, you know, a bunch of guys at, you know, major corporate-owned media were actively trying to squelch your campaign? You know, these guy's too dangerous. We can't let him succeed. Is that what you're charging?

DENNIS KUCINICH: I'm not saying that, you know, there's any kind of official policy. There doesn't have to be. But I'm also saying, as someone who has a bachelor's and master's degree in communications, that there is such a thing as a gatekeeper theory, and everyone understands that. The Internet's changed a lot of that, but corporate-owned media, in a society where there are fewer and fewer media companies, has an ability to be able to control the debate.

The Federal Communications Act of 1934 said that the electronic broadcast licensee should function in the public interest, convenience and necessity. Now, we've gone a great distance from that goal, and I do believe that this country is capable of a much more vigorous political debate than we're seeing.

BOB GARFIELD: Other candidates – Hillary Clinton comes to mind – spend years and millions of dollars gauging the electorate and measuring every word and every action. That's evidently not your strategy.

DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, you know, my poster is Ralph Waldo Emerson, who once wrote, in his essay on self-reliance, "Above all, to thine own self be true. Every heart vibrates to that iron string, to believe that what's true for you could be true for everyone."

I think we have to have a sense of our own humanity and how it merges with all of humanity. And my life experience has given me a great gift, and that is that I really understand what people go through, and it's given me the ability to connect with the hearts of people and to be able to not just represent their hearts but their voice.

So I don't need the focus groups, the poll groups, the coterie of advisors. While it's always good to get advice, I think there is something about listening in the quiet moments to the universal that is available to all of us.

BOB GARFIELD: Well, God bless Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he never backed a winner. In your first interview with The New York Times, the interview in which you actually announced your candidacy, the paper comes out and apparently nothing had changed. You know, notwithstanding the vast movement in the American popular opinion about the war, you were still treated as, you know, a joke.

DENNIS KUCINICH: Let me just say something. I think The New York Times is going through a learning curve itself. Everything that I said about the war was discounted by them because they were The New York Times and they knew better than anyone else. It's a real burden, by the way, to be, in effect, the final arbiter on public opinion in America. It must be very hard for them, because they've set themselves up as being the sine qua non and the arbiter of all that's right and holy. I mean and you have to get a nihil obstat or an imprimatur from The New York Times to be able to run. It's okay. I'm okay with that.

BOB GARFIELD: Do you reject the idea that if you actually want to win a race that there are certain things that you have to do to create a sort of mass appeal?

DENNIS KUCINICH: Yes. I think truth has its own mass appeal. And I've come back to run again, to show people that you can have someone who has the right judgment, who has clarity and foresight and a willingness to stand up and speak out when others will not, because that's not the popular thing to do.

It was popular to be for the war in 2002. It's popular now to be against the war. The question is, do you have the courage to be able to hang in there and continue to let people know what's going on, because sooner or later, if you write, it's going to be borne out. And that's exactly what's happened.

BOB GARFIELD: Congressman, thank you very much.

DENNIS KUCINICH: Nice talking to you. Kucinich dot US.

Money, Media and Misadventure

Dennis Kucinich is running for President. You may have heard that bit of information in the last couple weeks, or maybe not. Most likely not and if you did, it was in the passive way one hears an unremarkable weather report. Welcome to the campaign of long-shot candidate Dennis Kucinich.

Why doesn't it matter to the public, and especially the media, that Congressman Kuchinich has been right? He has been correct in his positions that were political 'hot potatoes' in 2004, yet are currently being called "conventional wisdom" on both sides of the aisle. Dennis Kucinich has gotten it right and recieved a raw deal from almost everyone. He has been scorned and derided by pundits and the public, political junkies and journalists and it can't all be about his ears. I can think of two Texans who are all ears, and they nonetheless made it through the media minefield. The virtual snubbing of Dennis Kucinich is about money and media misadventure.

Congressman Kucinich doesn't pander by implicitly promising favors to special interests nor beg for money at the corporate trough. He has joined the Howard Dean school of internet campaign finance reform and raised about 13 million dollars primarily from individuals over the internet for this, his second run at the White House. Thirteen million dollars is a paltry amount by standards of election spending today, and difficult to run a winning campaign on.

I began to notice, in the last twelve years or so, the mainstream media seemed to decide they were no longer the public's watchdogs, but cocktail weenie-munching insiders to the political process and powers-that-be. The media stopped trying to 'get the story' and started caring only about 'getting access' to the circuit of parties and power events that oil the social machine inside the beltway. Public information is the casualty. Reporters have begun to act like pundits, prognosticators of the future, purveyors of wisdom. They must know best what information and who we the public have access to because they are 'in the know.' They limit a candidates access to media because they have pre-determined 'the loser,' and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

The NPR program, "On The Media" talks to Rep. Kucinich and his communications director from his 2004 run for the presidency. The audio begins: "When Dennis Kucinich announced his candidacy off-handedly in an interview with the New York Times, the resulting article treated the announcement as an amusing oddity and led to something less than the publicity windfall enjoyed by Obama." From the Times article:

Never mind that he did not come close to winning any primaries or caucuses in 2004. Mr. Kucinich, who plans to announce his candidacy formally on Tuesday in Cleveland, said he liked his chances.
“Why not?” he said, adding a horse-racing metaphor, “I run very well on a sloppy track.”
He trotted out this line in 2004, too, for what it’s worth.

Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, and former communications director for Kucinich's 2004 run, when asked to characterize the media coverage during the 2004 campaign calls it, "dismissive, sneering...and (they) ignored the candidate alltogether."

I hear constantly how America needs a "real leader". One comes along, and he is virtually ignored, because he doesn't have the right bone structure, is deemed not tall enough, or does not whet the public fascination for a candidate that is a woman or person of color. Dennis Kuchinich reflects the opinions the voters said they wanted in the mid-term elections. The so-called "front-runners" for 2008 have demonstrated pandering or no opinion at all, yet remain at the head of the pack. If America doesn't get over its piquancy for "Dancing With The Stars," come 2008 another republican will be sitting in the Oval Office and they'll have no one left to blame but themselves.

Dennis Kucinich has just been made chair of a new subcommittee; one with the broadest oversight authority of any subcommittee in the federal government, with jurisdiction over all Domestic Policy in the United States. Regardless of the results of his presidential run, it is comforting to know that Dennis Kucinich has a personal stake in returning fairness and access to a government that has turned its back on the public regardless of the fact that same public that has turned its back on him. His eagerness to restore the balance and fair play we have been raised to consider 'American values' is what may save us from ourselves. Maybe his integrity and sense of duty will rub off on his colleagues and the American people.

The "Accidental" President

Gerald Ford and Alexander Haig took a walk in the Rosegarden of the White House in the summer of 1974. Haig told Ford that Nixon would be "willing to resign" if there was a full pardon for him on the other side. All this nonsense about "sparing the country" from the turmoil of an American President on trial for "high crimes and misdemeanors" and "ending the long national nightmare" is bullshit. This was yet another deal forged by the GOP to continue to decieve the American people and continue the Nixonian imperial power-grab for the executive branch.

After his 'installation' as president, Gerald Ford went on to not only pardon Nixon and keep the People from knowing the depth and breadth of crimes committed by the Administration, but he also covertly okayed the invasion of East Timor by the Suharto regime who then murdered up to a million Timorese. Ninety percent of the weapons and armaments used were provided by the US government. This information was supressed by the Ford administration and ignored by the mainstream media. This arming of the overtly authoritarian Suharto regime was also expressly against US law at the time. Weapons sold to others could not be used for aggressive purposes, which the hostile invasion of East Timor was and could be considered an "impeachable offense". It's also no accident that the warmongers of today's administration are the same smarmy bastards of Ford's day--Cheney and Rumsfeld.

If I have to listen to anothor white-wash of how "decent and full of integrity" Gerald Ford was, I'm gonna puke. He was just another tool in the long line of power-mad dictators-in-waiting and idiots who are undermining our Democracy. Jon Swift says this of Ford,"...what some see as Ford's decency may actually have been evidence of moral laxity."

How much of this did you know? I guessing not much because until 2002 the information was supressed under "national security" which has just become another way to say "cover your ass". I guess the people want to 'stay out of politics' because it is too painful to know the truth that our government is not a force for good but a tool for destruction and evil when in the hands of what is in most cases, the GOP. Nobody wants to know that the USA is not any different from the rest of the world and its history of tyrants. The truth hurts.