Going with the flow

And then you have the cowards on the other side of the aisle, the "loyal" opposition party, urging against a filibuster.

Forgive the source, but the pickings are slim on links. ('Gotta love how the copy editor at the local Fox station spelled "A-B-C " and then made sure to phonetically represent Barack Obama's name--as if the morons who get their news there need as much help as they can).

For a guy knighted by progressives as a possible hope in 2008, Obama is turning out to be not much more than a silent fart in church.

While Kennedy and Kerry are fighting a losing battle, I'd at least have a bit more respect for Democrats if a few more went down swinging, rather than planting another Judas kiss on the backside of their base.

Republican swims upstream

I don't know much about Senator Lincoln Chafee, other than he's a Republican and he's from Rhode Island. I suppose I know in a roundabout way, from following politics closely that he's a moderate--something increasingly rare on the Republican side of the aisle.

In a surprising decision, he appears ready to buck his party and vote against the Alito nomination, lending some possibility to a filibuster.

Speaking of moderate Republicans (they used to be called, "Rockefeller Republicans," btw), my own Senator, Olympia Snowe, is also firmly in the camp of moderation. I always chuckle about how the conservative hard-ons in my own state get apoplectic about Snowe, calling her a RINO (Republican In Name Only) and that she ought to leave the party, ala Jim Jeffords (I-Vt). Then, she goes out every election and wins 70 percent of the vote. I guess these knuckle-draggers don't know the voters as well as they think they do.

Well, you know the drill. If you are a Mainer, call her office (202-224-1946) and urge that she vote against confirmation of Alito and seeing the Court hijacked by idealogues. Oh, and be nice--her staff are surely being bombarded today.

If you are in a state with a Senator who might be termed a moderate, a call to their staff wouldn't be a bad idea.

Since Maine has two of the four (in addition to Snowe, Maine's Susan Collins is also termed a moderate), your job is easy. Collins office can be reached at 202-224-2523.

Of the remaining two, I've mentioned Rhode Island's Chafee. That leaves only solitary John McCain (R-Az).

Commence dialing, loyal denizens of Maine and Arizona.

U.S. supports repressive U.N. policies

Repressive and totalitarian regimes have traditions of excluding sexual minorities from equal protections and access to the same rights offered others. That’s why this article, showing the administration linked to an Iranian initiative that denies United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people comes as no surprise.

Throughout history, fascist regimes have done their best to eliminate groups and minorities that didn’t fit the criteria of the totalitarian leader at the time. In Nazi Germany, Hitler was behind the killing of over six million Jews. Also singled out for elimination—homosexuals, habitual criminals, resistance fighters, German opponents of Nazism, gypsies, the mentally retarded, and the “anti-social”; beggars, vagrants, etc. Basically, any group deemed by the Nazis as not serving their vision of national political life.

While Hitler didn’t assume total power overnight—it took a series of gradual, but orchestrated steps—he eventually assumed his totalitarian role, with the majority support of the German people.

When I listen to callers on national news programs like C-Span’s Washington Journal, I’m reminded that there are many Americans who would have been right at home, goose-stepping under Hitler. These types of citizens accept authority and the national governement’s policies without question. Even more frightening to me, is their anger at anyone who dares to disagree and dissent from their narrow vision of what their country should be.

When people make statements such as, “either you’re with us, or against us” and assuming that only those who have “something to hide” should be concerned about our government’s domestic surveillance program, it indicates an element in our own country that are very open to a despot taking control of our government. In my opinion, the number of these people (the Kool-Aid drinkers) hovers around 50 percent.

I continue to watch with interest to see how much of our liberty we are willing to cede to Bushco. I think that we are no safer today, than we were September 12, 2001. I continue to posit that the issue isn’t with terrorists attacking America. The real issue with safety and terrorism is related to our imperialistic foreign policy and need to dominate the world.

A presidency of lawlessness

We’ve seen the Bush administration, time and time again, thumb its nose at the rule of law and the civil liberties of the American people. Additionally, in its behavior towards prisoners, so-called terrorists and other randomly selected foes, this is a group that holds itself above the law.

This week, the president and other administration hacks, have been traveling across the country, in a full-scale PR blitz, designed to justify spying and data mining aimed at American citizens. Brazenly, as the president has done since September 11, 2001, he uses the fog of fear and the guise of his war on terror to justify suspension of constitutionally guaranteed protections.

While half of the U.S. population is perfectly content with totalitarian-creep, voices of dissent are too few and curiously quiet. Fortunately, pockets of dissent exist and occasionally let the emperor know that he and his minions are standing naked as a jaybird. On Tuesday, Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, appeared at Georgetown Law School to deliver an address defending the NSA domestic spy programs. During the course of his speech, nearly 30 students stood up, donned black hoods one-by-one and turned their backs on Gonzales in protest. They also held aloft a white banner with black lettering that had the following quote from Ben Franklin; “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Afterwards, a panel of professors, including David Cole, who has written extensively on the subject civil liberties and the war on terror, stated that the NSA spying program is clearly illegal and that Gonzales was incorrect in defending it, both legally and constitutionally.

According to Cole, under FISA, Section 1811, entitled “Authorization During Time of War,” this very issue was specifically addressed by Congress. "They (Congress) said that when we’ve declared war, the President can conduct warrant-less wiretapping, but only for 15 days. And they said in the legislative history, this is so if the President needs further authority, he can come to us and ask for that authority. The President didn't do that here. He simply went ahead and did it without asking for their authority."

This isn’t surprising, as Bush is just continuing a lifelong pattern of thumbing his nose at rules and laws he has no use for. Whether it was at Harvard, driving drunk in Kennebunkport, failing to show up for military service, and now, as commander-in-chief, the most powerful position in the land and arguably, the world, this man knows no boundaries and no one appears capable of stopping him.

I continue to watch with interest just how far Congress, the media and ultimately, the American people will allow him to go in his crusade and ascension toward totalitarianism. Clearly, half of the country, including the kooky religious right, stands squarely behind this reign of hubris and lawlessness.

Machuca-filmmaking at its most powerful

Maine is fortunate to have a handful of movie theaters that dare to book films that push the envelope on cinema and more often than not, make you think. Even better is when they show a movie that captures the power to transform and stretch your understanding—something that great filmmaking is intended to do.

The Railroad Square Cinema, in Waterville, is a theater that courageously provides a regular dose of cutting-edge and sometimes controversial movies, for movie-goers who want something more than the standard Hollywood pap and pabulum.

Since 1998, Waterville and the Railroad Square have been home to the Maine Independent Film Festival (MIFF). Each July, for 10 days, Maine is transformed into a backwoods Cannes, showing upwards of 90 to 100 movies over that span.

Again this winter, MIFF is teaming up with the Railroad Square Cinema and running MIFF in the Morning, with 10 A. M. movies every other Saturday and Sunday, from January, until mid-March. Thus far, my wife, Mary, and I, have trekked an hour north to Waterville and have viewed two very powerful movies. The first week, we saw Sir! No Sir! David Zeiger’s documentary chronicling the real frontline dissent of soldiers during the Vietnam war.

Sunday, we were back in Waterville, for a treat of a film, and a rarity for those of us who live outside of the major metropolitan centers of the country.

Machuca, released in 2004, is a coming-of-age film about two young Chilean boys, set against the political upheaval in the country during the days leading up to September 11, 1973, when a military junta toppled Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government (with the CIA firmly supporting the military operation that toppled his democratically-elected administration). The film offers the juxtaposition of the two disparate worlds occupied by these 11-year-old boys. Gonzalo is from a well-to-do family living in an upscale section of Santiago. Gonzalo attends a private, Catholic school, run by Father McEnroe, a man set on toppling the social caste system in his school. With a plan to allow local boys from poor families to attend, Gonzalo is brought face-to-face with Pedro Machuca, a young man who lives in the city’s shantytown. These poor students are the children of servants and laborers, many of whom provide services and cheap labor for the parents of the wealthier families of most students.

The film captures the very real class divisions existing in 1970s Chilean society, in a way that most Hollywood films rarely or ever attempt to recognize. Both boys, as they develop a friendship, are constantly brought up against the reality of the two different worlds that they inhabit. Despite their best intentions, the story unfolds and the underlying political upheaval brings their friendship to the breaking point. The film pulses with a heartbeat and vitality that draws you into the story and captures your heart, as well as your mind.

Seeing both this film, and reading Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, has heightened my own awareness of just how little I know about other cultures, such as Afghanistan, and the geopolitical details of events in Chile and other areas of the world, often orchestrated by the U.S. government and agencies such as the CIA. This lack of knowledge isn’t so much about a willful ignorance of facts and geography. I, like most other Americans, are victims of the U.S. education system. We all were fed a steady diet of lies and half truths since we began school at the age of five or six. Unfortunately, the lies don’t stop when you leave school.

One of the points that this movie drives home, and similarly, Hosseini’s book, is that our public school years are less about learning and knowledge and much more about indoctrination and patriotic window dressing. That’s why it’s so difficult to break through the fog of many Americans, who seem intent on waving the flag and irrationally championing U.S. superiority in the world. Their positions aren’t grounded in fact or reality, but rather, are wholly products of a fiction populated by jingoistic propaganda.