Politics

For such a supposedly dry topic, SiCKO sure caused a lot of wet eyes and enthusiastic claps during the opening night viewing I attended. Maybe Single-Payer Health Care should be the number one domestic topic for our Democratic candidates, considering the very critical consequences our current immoral, for-profit scam is inflicting on human beings. Right after the number one international topic: ending the immoral, for-profit scam we’ve inflicted on Iraq, which is sucking all our dollars into foreign death instead of national health.

While the president is on a permanent vacation from reality, Vacaville mother Cindy Sheehan has setup Camp Casey outside his Crawford, Texas ranch to protest against an illegal war and occupation that took the life of her son, Casey Sheehan, along with the lives of over 1,850 more American soldiers and probably well over 25,000 Iraqi civilians.

Today the San Francisco Chronicle had an interesting opinion piece, Celebrating independence from ignorance, which starts off: “John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died July 4, 1826.

Today, in the basement of the Capitol, Representative John Conyers held an unofficial hearing on the Downing Street Memo. The ball is rolling.

The grassroots activism surrounding the Downing Street Memo has recently begun to percolate up through the corporate media into newspapers and television. Although the story isn’t garnering front page or top-of-the-hour coverage, I am beginning to feel an imminent tidal change in the zeitgeist: finally, America is getting a clue. Perhaps the constant barrage of infotainment isn’t numbing the masses like it used to.

The following is an email I wrote to my colleagues last week. The corporate media has yet to address the memo in a manner befitting its importance.

Dear Friends,

You are receiving this email because I respect you and want to let you know about a very important matter. Several weeks ago a British memo was leaked to the London Times. This document, now widely known as the “Downing Street Memo”, was comprised of the minutes of a meeting between Britain’s Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and his advisors in the summer of 2002. I have attached this document in PDF format for your perusal. The text details the coordination between the US and UK for a war in Iraq that had not at that point been approved by our Congress. The following is a paragraph from the memo, with an interesting part bolded:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Today the Governor of the State of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, visited my place of work amidst a protest consisting of teachers, nurses, and other union activists who are upset about his proposals. I made a video clip of the protest with my digital camera and have attached it to this entry.

The disconnect between print, television and internet news has grown increasingly evident lately. For years, only profit-engendering news was deemed worthy of space on the paper that once grew as trees in our forests or the airwaves that belong to us all.

I just had an idea…what if you threatened all your friends that if they didn’t vote, and didn’t threaten all their friends similarly, you wouldn’t associate with them anymore? Based on the six degrees of separation principle, wouldn’t this get most everybody out to the polls? Or is this an overly hostile action that could backfire and make a bunch of non-voting enemies, or worse, Republicans?