Keith Olbermann comes through

Check out Keith Olbermann comes through on Dark1

Memetics for Democrats

Check out Memetics for Democrats

Democrats, feeling hopeless?

Please see Krugman's piece, "No Surrender," in the New York Times today.

Bush strikes a divisive note right off

Bush hit a pretty decent note in his acceptance speech or whatever you call it, but that remark yesterday; "Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it," bodes very ill for any change at all in the amazingly arrogant and divisive attitude of this administration. The right doesn’t hear it as those who supported Kerry do... what we hear is "I intend to make sure the tax code has preferential treatment for rich individuals and corporations built into it forever, and I intend to destroy Social Security as a safety net."

I predict lots of fighting and little accomplishment of any kind in Congress, and attempt by the Republicans (probably unsuccessful) to change the cloture rule in the Senate. Instead of reaching out to the almost 50% of the electorate that didn't vote for him (which means proposing policies that take their views into account), this President proposes to try to ram through the most Right Wing agenda in 100 years. I hope there is gridlock, because these ideas are pure disaster for the American people.

There's a very interesting article in the New Republic. It's about how the Bush administration's intentions towards the Supreme Court will really work. It has nothing at all to do with Roe v. Wade. Supreme Courts don't work in a vacuum; these justices, except maybe Scalia and Thomas, do know and care that the majority of Americans favor the right to at least early-term abortion. But the majority of people neither know nor care about the more sinister Right Wing agenda for the constitution, which involves undoing the regulatory power of the Federal Government under the Interstate Commerce clause. When these people get together without the "liberal media" (ha!) present, they actually admit that they want to turn the clock back to before that dangerous liberal Roosevelt (Teddy Roosevelt, that is), took office.

Word for the Day

eschatology · "es-k&-'tä-l&-ji · noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -gies

1 : a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of mankind;
2 : a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of mankind; --sometimes specifically : any of various Christian doctrines concerning the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, or the Last Judgment

Etymology: Greek eschatos last, farthest

Supreme Mistake by Jerry Rosen/TNR

This article from the New Republic appeared before the
election.

Supreme Mistake by Jeffrey Rosen

Activists say this election will determine the future of the Supreme Court. And it will. But not in the way they think.

Whether or not the Supreme Court decides the presidential election, the election will decide the future of the Supreme Court. And the first vacancy, which could come sooner rather than later, as Chief Justice William Rehnquist's surgery last week reminds us, is likely to provoke a partisan explosion that will make the battle over Robert Bork look like child's play. As Election Day approaches, liberal and conservative interest groups are trying to rally their bases with the same alarmist slogans they have been using for the past 30 years. If George W. Bush wins, "a 'perfect storm' of likely Supreme Court vacancies and potential cases heading toward the High Court could well lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade," warns naral Pro-Choice America. If John Kerry wins, "Catholics should be aware that a Kerry-appointed U.S. Supreme Court could threaten the core values of their faith," counters George Marlin, author of The American Catholic Voter.

In fact, what is at stake in the election is not the future of Roe v. Wade, school prayer, or any of the culture-war issues that have inflamed the country since the 1970s. The left may be hesitant to acknowledge it, but the Rehnquist Court has largely sided with liberals rather than conservatives in these cultural battles. It has done so because liberals have won in the court of public opinion. And the chance of either Bush or Kerry getting through the Senate justices who want to revisit those well-settled precedents is low.

Instead, the election will determine the future of the Supreme Court in unexpected areas that remain, for the moment, less visible than abortion, but no less important. If Bush wins, his aides seem determined to select justices who would resurrect what they call "the Constitution in Exile," reimposing meaningful limits on federal power that could strike at the core of the regulatory state for the first time since the New Deal. These justices could change the shape of laws governing the environment, workplace health and safety, anti-discrimination, and civil rights, making it difficult for the federal government to address problems for which the public demands a national response. And, if Kerry wins, the justices he appoints are more likely to turn to international law to define the meaning of U.S. constitutional guarantees, such as due process, cruel and unusual punishment, and equal protection. If taken too far, the new internationalism could ignite an entirely new culture war for the twenty-first century. In other words, there are dangers for the Court regardless of who wins the election, just not the ones that both sides are predicting.

In every election since 1980, Roe v. Wade has dominated questions about the Supreme Court. But, on the Court today, there are six justices who support the core of Roe (Justice Anthony Kennedy dissented from the Court's 5-4 decision in 2000 to strike down bans on late-term abortions but still supports the right to earlier-term abortions). And, in order for Roe to be overturned, two of these justices would have to retire and be replaced by committed opponents. Even in the unlikely event that two such justices could be confirmed, the public overwhelmingly supports protections for early-term abortions. And conventional wisdom among political scientists, beginning with Robert Dahl in the 1950s and continuing until today, is that the Court does indeed follow the election returns and rarely challenges deeply felt currents in public opinion. This is why the Court, under the leadership of the swing justices, Sandra Day O'Connor and Kennedy, has extended the most popular liberal activist decisions of the Warren era while also endorsing conservative judicial activism as public support for the welfare state wanes.

The Bush White House is well aware of this, which is part of the reason overturning Roe is no longer at the top of the GOP agenda. Bush administration officials who have participated in conversations about judicial nominations during the past four years say that overruling Roe v. Wade no longer comes up as a priority in discussions about candidates. This de-emphasis of Roe also reflects the widespread understanding that Senate Democrats would filibuster any openly anti-Roe candidates, making it politically impossible, under the current ground rules, for Bush to get them confirmed.

Of course, if Bush is reelected and the Senate remains Republican, it is conceivable that GOP lawmakers might try to change the Senate rules so that filibusters could be ended by a simple majority of 51 votes, rather than the 60 votes currently required. For the past year, Senate Republicans, frustrated with Democratic filibusters of controversial Bush nominees, have discussed this so-called "nuclear option." The rules could be changed either through a formal vote of the Rules Committee, which would also require 67 votes in the full Senate, or by a parliamentary maneuver involving a ruling from the vice president, sitting as head of the Senate, which would only require a simple majority. But, while some conservatives might support this tactic to push through a hard-right Supreme Court nominee, moderate Republicans like John McCain have opposed it on the grounds that it would make the Senate more like the House. And Democrats could retaliate by going nuclear themselves, demanding roll-call votes for every minute procedural issue and bringing the Senate to a halt. Since neither party has a strong political incentive to see Roe overturned (agitation for doing so comes from interest groups on the extreme right, not from the Bush White House, which understands that overturning Roe would lead women to defect from the GOP en masse), it's hard to imagine that the desire to confirm anti-Roe judges would lead a majority of Senate Republicans to cut their own throats.

Instead of revisiting Roe v. Wade, a second Bush administration is more likely to focus on judges who will restore the Constitution in Exile. The phrase comes from a 1995 article by Douglas Ginsburg, a federal appeals court judge in Washington, D.C., whom Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court after the Senate rejected Bork. Condemning American judges for being too deferential to the regulatory state, he announced, "For sixty years the nondelegation doctrine has existed only as part of the Constitution in Exile," along with other "ancient exiles" repudiated after the New Deal.

The legal doctrines to which Ginsburg referred were largely abandoned in the 1930s to allow the federal government broad discretion to regulate health, safety, the environment, and the workplace. The most important of the post-New Deal doctrines was an expansive interpretation of Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce, which the Court extended to include any activities that might affect commerce indirectly. In 1995, however, the Supreme Court began taking tentative steps toward resurrecting some of the constitutional limitations on the regulatory state that had been dormant since the '30s. In controversial 5-4 rulings, the Court limited Congress's power to ban guns in schools, for example, and to punish violence against women, holding that the laws did not involve commercial activities and therefore couldn't be justified by Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce.

These decisions have been appropriately criticized as activist and contemptuous of Congress by liberal supporters of the regulatory state. A provocative new book by Thomas Keck accurately calls this The Most Activist Supreme Court in History because it has struck down 33 federal laws since 1995, the highest annual average ever. Nevertheless, the Rehnquist Court's so-called federalism revolution has not yet delivered what the conservatives hoped. Every time the conservative justices have appeared on the brink of striking down a federal statute with real political support, such as the Environmental Protection Act, O'Connor or Kennedy have written hedging opinions reassuring moderates that the Court intends to challenge congressional power only at the margins. But, if O'Connor or another liberal justice were to retire, and if Bush nominated a true believer in the Constitution in Exile, the federalism revolution would go into overdrive. And Democrats might not be able to block the appointment because, unlike abortion, federalism is not, at the moment, an issue the public understands or cares much about.

If Bush is reelected, the president's advisers are determined to choose justices who will be strict constructionists in the mold of Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. White House officials told me that even a respected judicial conservative like J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who has urged moderation in federalism cases, has been criticized by some presidential advisers as a "squish" for his refusal to carry the Constitution in Exile to its logical conclusion. Instead, these advisers might recommend someone more like Judge J. Michael Luttig, who tangled with Wilkinson in a recent case involving the constitutionality of environmental protections for red wolves. (Wilkinson said Congress could protect the wolves to promote tourism because tourism affects commerce; Luttig found the connection between tourism and commerce too remote.)

Although both Wilkinson and Luttig are intellectually serious and thoughtful candidates, both would be resisted by Senate Democrats because their records are well-known. Therefore, Bush might try a stealth candidate who has a shorter paper trail. Indeed, the White House already has a list of stealth candidates along these lines, many of whom are federal appellate judges appointed during Bush's first term. These candidates include people like Steven Colloton of Iowa, Jeffrey Sutton of Ohio, and Edith Brown Clement of Louisiana, whom the Senate unanimously confirmed in 2001.

How would a stealth candidate like Clement perform on the Supreme Court? Everything about her record suggests she would enthusiastically support the federalism revolution. This year, for example, a group of Texas developers challenged the constitutionality of the Endangered Species Act after the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, in an effort to protect a rare species of underground bugs, denied them a permit to develop a shopping mall. The Texas appellate court rejected the challenge, but Clement joined a blistering dissent by Judge Edith Jones (another possible Bush Supreme Court nominee) criticizing the panel for crafting "a constitutionally limitless theory of federal protection."

Taken to its logical limits, the Constitution in Exile would call into question not only environmental protections but workplace regulations like the Occupational Safety and Health Act. Furthermore, in the hands of a determined Bush majority on the Supreme Court, Congress's power to ban discrimination might be challenged as well. In a series of cases, the Supreme Court has limited Congress's power to authorize private individuals to sue states for discrimination or other violations of federal law. So far, the effect of these decisions has been muted by the fact that Congress still has the power to refuse to fund state programs unless the states promise in advance not to discriminate.

But some partisans of the Constitution in Exile on the lower courts are already questioning that power. In an important case this year, a panel of the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., upheld a suit against the suburban Metro public transportation system by an employee who claims he was fired because he suffered from bipolar disorder. Congress had the power, the judges held, to condition the receipt of federal transportation funds on Metro's willingness to waive its immunity from lawsuits. In an unsettling dissent, however, Judge David Sentelle, a supporter of the Constitution in Exile, disagreed that Congress had the power to "expose the states to liability" for discrimination suits, because he thought there was only a remote connection between the purpose of the federal grant (supporting transportation) and the conditions of its receipt (preventing discrimination). This radical logic, if embraced and extended by a Bush-appointed Supreme Court, would represent a declaration of war on Congress, preventing the legislature from prohibiting race and sex discrimination in programs that receive federal funds and calling into question Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments.

As long as Congress remains Republican, it's conceivable a Bush Supreme Court could get away with attempting to impose restrictions on congressional power that have been unthinkable since the '30s. But, eventually, the Constitution in Exile might be invoked to strike down federal laws that the current Congress cares intensely about--such as federal criminal laws whose connection to interstate commerce is sometimes hard to discern. At some point, if the Court turns sharply right on federalism issues, it's not hard to imagine a conflict between Congress and the Court more dramatic than anything we've seen since the Warren era. In short, the greatest danger from a Bush Court is not the overruling of Roe v. Wade but the overruling of the post-New Deal regulatory state.

What about a Kerry Court? Throughout his campaign and Senate career, Kerry has not indicated much interest in using the courts as an engine of social change. And, even if he wanted to do so, he is likely to face a Republican Senate that would make it hard to appoint liberal activists in the style of William Brennan. It seems a fair bet, therefore, that Kerry would appoint judges like the Clinton appointees, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who believe the Court should reflect changes in social attitudes rather than unilaterally impose them in the face of popular resistance. In addition to political pressure to appoint the first Latino justice, which Bush would face as well, Kerry might look to Clinton appointees like David Tatel and Merrick Garland on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Washington, D.C. Circuit, both scrupulous, intelligent, and fair-minded moderates.
Over the long term, it's true that Kerry justices would be more likely than Bush justices to recognize a constitutional right to gay marriage, for example. But, on the current Court, both the liberal and moderate conservative justices understand the dangers of a public backlash and are therefore unlikely to impose gay marriage on the nation anytime soon. And, while Kerry justices would take a more expansive view of Roe than Bush justices--continuing to strike down bans on partial-birth abortions, rather than reversing course and upholding the congressional ban--these are issues at the margins of our sexual politics that only constitute a tiny fraction of the total abortions performed.

But there is one area where Kerry justices could diverge dramatically from Bush justices: the relevance of international law. On the Rehnquist Court, Breyer and Ginsburg have enthusiastically endorsed looking to international laws and judicial opinions to determine the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Last month, during arguments about the constitutionality of allowing 16-year-olds to be executed, both Breyer and Ginsburg emphasized that the 110 countries that allow capital punishment have renounced the execution of juvenile offenders. This prompted Scalia to interject with annoyance, "So what did John Adams think of the French?"
The willingness of liberal justices to consult international norms in constitutional cases has become a rallying cry for social conservatives: Bork's most recent book is called Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges. But, although Bork's book is a slapdash polemic, other, more thoughtful conservative scholars, such as Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School, have argued persuasively that too much attention to international law could thwart U.S. constitutional traditions and reignite a domestic culture war. There are, after all, dramatic legal and cultural differences between European and American views about free expression, privacy, and due process. This means that, if judges become too willing to look to Europe, they may impose values on U.S. legislatures that the American public will be moved to resist. Moreover, there is nothing inherently progressive about European views on these contested issues: If U.S. courts looked to Europe in abortion cases, for example, they would allow more restrictions than Americans now tolerate.
Breyer and Ginsburg have been appropriately cautious in invoking international norms, citing them only as additional evidence of a consensus in cases where a clear majority of states have also rejected a controversial practice, such as sodomy laws or the juvenile death penalty. But it's possible that younger justices of a more internationalist bent might be more aggressive about invoking a purported international consensus to strike down practices that a majority of the American public continues to support--such as the death penalty for adults. For example, Dean Harold Koh of Yale Law School, mentioned as a possible Kerry Supreme Court nominee, has supported the idea that U.S. courts should expansively apply international legal precedents without the authorization of the president and Congress. And some justices have begun to invoke international law in areas where there is intense social disagreement, such as affirmative action. If anything could reignite the culture wars, it would be a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to thwart deeply felt currents in American public opinion in the name of the international community. Given Kerry's emphasis on international opinion in his campaign, there's no reason to expect him to be attuned to this danger.
Concerns about the Supreme Court never determine presidential elections, but particular elections can indeed redefine the Court. After his landslide reelection in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made five nominations in the next four years; Nixon, elected in a squeaker in 1968, made three in similarly short order. The Republicans have a more aggressive agenda for reshaping the Court than the Democrats, and Bush has made his constitutional vision clear. It has little to do with overturning Roe v. Wade, but it has everything to do with resurrecting limits on federal power that might tie Congress's hands in domestic affairs as well as in the war on terrorism. Although Bush has aggressively expanded the size of the national security state since September 11, he has committed himself to a judicial vision that could render some of his own programs--including federal criminal laws he supports--unconstitutional. Kerry would feel less immediate pressure to use the courts as engines of social change because liberals won the old culture war; but, if the justices he appoints are too expansive in their concern about international opinion, they might inadvertently ignite a new culture war. In short, neither Bush nor Kerry justices are likely to be consistent defenders of judicial restraint. But at least voters in this election have a clear choice: conservative judicial activism or liberal judicial activism. Take your pick.

Jeffrey Rosen is the legal affairs editor at TNR.

Friedman postmortem

Tom Friedman's postmortem in the Times is as good as any on the subject of the divide in Amercia today.

Word for the Day

macedoine · (mas-i-DWAN) · noun

1. A mixture of diced fruits or vegetables, often
served as salad, appetizer, or dessert.
2. A medley or mixture.

[From French macédoine, from Macédoine (Macedonia), apparently an allusion to the diversity of people in the region.]
. . .
Again, shamelessly stolen from wordsmith.org

Two Americas

As I said in my postmortem yesterday, I AM sick of all this, for now, but I intend to become active in MoveOn and Democracy for America before the midterm elections. We can't give up.

Notice how Edwards's class-based concept of TWO AMERICAS can be interpreted another way? The electoral map this year looks almost identical to 2000 ... Red America is the South, intruding into Indiana and Ohio, maybe even Iowa... the Great Plains and Mountain West. Blue America is where most of America's historical strength and greatness originates: the Upper Midwest, Eastern Seaboard, New England, Tidewater as far South as Maryland and D.C., and the West Coast (which will in future probably come to include Nevada and possibly even Arizona and New Mexico).

It's like the Pre-Civil War geographic divide. You have to wonder how long Blue America will be willing to be governed by a region with decisively different political philosophy, notwithstanding the fact that most commerce, and the majority of the people, in this country are seated in Blue America.

We have to consolidate our philosophy, organize, and press for reform that takes disproportionate electoral power away from the small Western states especially. This won't be feasible in the short term, because the powerful in the Republican party aren't stupid, and they know how to hold onto power... but somehow, someday, we have to ensure that power does not continue to reside with vested interests which have become so adept at culture wars that they have the so-called "heartland" voters as overswayed as the Nazis had pre-war Germans.

All over now, get used to it

It's all over now, and the collective sigh of disappointment of almost half the electorate is more poignant than usual, after what many of us believed was a truly crucial election.

I won't even try to express all the negative consequences of what I believe is America's WRONG WRONG WRONG choice, but there, right before WRONG WRONG WRONG, is the point... it is, clearly, America's choice. Bush won the popular vote quite decisively. The youth vote sat out the election, as usual. Those who disenfranchise themselves have no right to complain; this is the choice of the American people.

Many of us, myself included, feel that this Brave New Republic of which we are now citizens somehow isn't the Republic into which we were born. There was a switch onto very much the wrong track back there somewhere (more than one no doubt, but I'm talking about emotional response here, not critical policy analysis). Still, this is our country, and we (most of us) don't have any realistic choices but to make the best of our citizenship in it, and, most importantly, to work, however frustrating it is, however slowly, however much retrogression we face, to make this nation better to live in, and a better force in the world.

I intend to revert to groundhog mode for a while... I'm TIRED of politics. I hope those few readers of my little blog who may click into it going forward will find some of what I choose to post here interesting.

But I do not intend to give up on a citizen's duty, which I believe is increased in troubled times, to work for changes in policies he believes are harmful, and to try to ensure good governance, by whatever resources he can muster. Moveon.org, Howard Dean's Democracy for America, and other political action groups will have to be our guides to civic action, as we slowly build coalitions needed to take America back from the Vast Right Wing Conspiracay which has so thoroughly succeeded in seizing control of its governance. I refuse to believe that such action is futile, or that we won't eventually succeed in redirecting the country towards a more humane -- and sane -- policy overall.

On a side note, I'm leaving up the post about leaked exit polls from election day, as a signal warning against getting caught up in such unreliable information. It does no good to allow yourself to be buoyed by information that just isn't true, so when they say the information isn't reliable, it's best to just ignore it, for real.

Update: Later Leaked Exit Polls tilt to Kerry

Late but still pre-poll closing leaked exit polls (and here and here) are very positive for Kerry. These figures are unreliable, but it's worth noting that the conventional wisdom based on past elections is that early exit poll figures tend to favor Republicans, who tend to vote early.

In just a few hours, none of this will mean anything, but here it is anyway.

Word for the Day

zabernism · (ZAB-&r-niz-`m) · noun

:the misuse of military power; aggression; bullying. (In disuse, bordering on obsolete).

[After Zabern, German name for Saverne, a village in Alsace, France. In 1912, in
this village, a German military officer killed a lame cobbler who smiled athim.]

"Both countries have been slaves to Kruppism and Zabernism--because they were sovereign and free! So it will always be. So long as patriotic cant can keep the common man jealous of international controls over his belligerent possibilities, so long will he be the helpless slave of the foreign threat, and 'Peace' remain a mere name for the resting phase between wars."

--H.G. Wells; In The Fourth Year: Anticipations of a World Peace; 1918.

. . . . . .
shamelessly stolen from wordsmith.org

Meta-analysis predicts Kerry win

Please see this Princeton Meta-analysis: predicting a Kerry win with a relatively high degree of confidence. (I picked up this link from Andrew Sullivan's web log, see Links). Note the caveats, however: for these analytical predictions to be true, the assumptions about undecided voters breaking to the challenger and voter turnout both favoring Kerry have to be accurate. Still, this is the most encouraging statistical information I've seen yet.

Down to the Wire

Here we are, down to the wire in what all the predictors still indicate is an election too close to call, even though some events in the last few crucial days seem, somewhat incongruosly, to have aided Bush. Not least among these is the notorious Bin Laden tape. Logically, this should help Kerry or at least have little or no effect: it should remind voters that Bush's anti-terrorism "war" has been a miserable failure at capturing and destroying Al Quaida and its leaders, having been sidetracked by the catastrophic war in Iraq. But the psychology of war fever is not rational, and the net effect of this reminder that Bin Laden is still out there probably is to gain Bush a small slice of still undecided or wavering voters. I can only hope any such benefit to Bush is too small to determine the outcome in any critical races.

Analysts, including Republican pollsters, have concluded that some of the unrecorded, i.e. unpolled, vote, especially among minorities, will likely increase Kerry's overall vote in the 12 or so battleground states, possibly by more than one or two percent. Whether this, and the unprecedentedly vigorous get out the vote effort being mounted by the Democratic Party, will be enough to tip the balance in enough states to equal 270 electoral votes is just not predictable, no matter what anyone says at this point.

A colleague reports one piece of predictor analysis: The Packers won over the weekend, so that means, according to an arcane tradition about the winner, (please don't ask me why, I have no idea), that Kerry will win the election. As a total non-sportsfan, this is a straw I can scarcely grasp at, but I'll take any good news at this point, as we wait on pins and needles for the result of the most critical election in a generation.

Word for the Day

defalcation · "dE-"fâl-'kEI-sh&n, di-; "de-f&l- · noun

1 archaic : deduction, curtailment
2 : the act or an instance of embezzling
3 : a failure to meet a promise or an expectation

Etymology: Medieval Latin defalcatus, past participle of defalcare, from Latin de- + falc-, falx 'sickle;' + noun ending -tion

George Soros's Message

President Bush has led us in the wrong direction. The invasion of Iraq was a colossal blunder and only by repudiating the President's policies at the polls next Tuesday can we hope to escape from the quagmire in which we find ourselves. John Kerry won all three debates but President Bush invokes his faith and that inspires his followers. In the end, it boils down to a philosophical difference over how to deal with an often confusing and threatening reality.

After the traumatic events of 9/11, President Bush rose to the occasion and he carried the nation behind him. But he has led us in the wrong direction. He used the war on terror as an excuse for invading Iraq. If we re-elect President Bush, we are endorsing his policies and we shall have to live with the consequences. If we reject him at the polls, we shall have a better chance to regain the respect and support of the world and break the vicious circle of escalating violence.

Please be sure to vote next Tuesday, November 2. And please pass along this message to others. Our future may depend on defeating President Bush.

Sincerely,George Soros

Word for the Day

cavitation · kâ`-v&-'tEI-sh&n · noun

: the process of cavitating (verb): as a) : the formation of partial vacuums in a liquid by a swiftly moving solid body (as a propeller) or by high-intensity sound waves (i.e. intense turbulence); also : the pitting and wearing away of solid surfaces (as of metal or concrete) as a result of the collapse of these vacuums in surrounding liquid; b) : the formation of cavities in an organ or tissue especially in disease

Etymology: cavity + -ation

Bush Admin. War Profiteering

For a moderate Republican (yes, there actually is such a thing!)... view of the Administration's war profiteering and why they should be voted out of office for it, follow this link. (Bull Moose).

Another soldier's story: Vote Bush Out

For another soldier's story, please see this link to The Washington Note.

Brooke's Story

This has been around the internet for a few weeks, but I post it (sent to me by a friend) because it's such a good antidote to the nauseatingly manipulative "Ashley's Story" ad put out by the Dark Forces of Evil.

To Whom it May Concern,
I found out that my brother, Sergeant Ryan M. Campbell, was dead during a graduate seminar at Emory University on April 29, 2004. Immediately after a uniformed officer knocked at my mother's door to deliver the message that broke her heart, she called me on my cell phone. She could say nothing but "He's gone." I could say nothing but"No." Over and over again we chanted this refrain to each other over the phone as I made my way across the country to hold her as she wept.
I had made the very same trip in February, cutting classes to spend my brother's two weeks' leave from Baghdad with him. Little did I know then that the next time I saw him would be at Arlington National Cemetery. During those days in February, my brother shared with me his fear, his disillusionment, and his anger. "We had all been led to believe that Iraq posed a serious threat to America as well as its surrounding nations," he said. "We invaded expecting to find weapons of mass destruction and a much more prepared and well-trained Republican Guard waiting for us. It is now a year later, and alas, no weapons of mass destruction or any other real threat, for that matter."

Ryan was scheduled to complete his one-year assignment to Iraq on April 25. But on April 11, he emailed me to let me know not to expect him in Atlanta for a May visit, because his tour of duty had been involuntarily extended. "Just do me one big favor, ok?" he wrote. "Don't vote for Bush. No. Just don't do it. I would not be happy with you."

Last night, I listened to George W. Bush's live, televised speech at the Republican National Convention. He spoke to me and my family when he announced, "I have met with parents and wives and husbands who have received a folded flag, and said a final goodbye to a soldier they loved. I am awed that so many have used those meetings to say that I am in their prayers and to offer encouragement to me. Where does strength like that come from? How can people so burdened with sorrow also feel such pride? It is because they know their loved one was last seen doing good. Because they know that liberty was precious to the one they lost. And in those military families, I have seen the character of a great nation: decent, and idealistic, and strong."

This is my reply: Mr. President, I know that you probably still "don't do body counts," so you may not know that almost one thousand U.S. troops have died doing what you told them they had to do to protect America. Ryan was Number 832. Liberty was, indeed, precious to the one I lost-- so precious that he would rather have gone to prison than back to Iraq in February. Like you, I don't know where the strength for "such pride" on the part of people "so burdened with sorrow" comes from; maybe I spent it all holding my mother as she wept. I last saw my loved one at the Kansas City airport, staring after me as I walked away. I could see April 29 written on his sad, sand-chapped and sunburned face. I could see that he desperately wanted to believe that if he died, it would be while "doing good," as you put it. He wanted us to be able to be proud of him. Mr. President, you gave me and my mother a folded flag instead of the beautiful boy who called us "Moms" and "Brookster." But worse than that, you sold my little brother a bill of goods. Not only did you cheat him of a long meaningful life, but you cheated him of a meaningful death. You are in my prayers, Mr. President, because I think that you need them more than anyone on the face of the planet. But you will never get my vote.

So to whom it may concern: Don't vote for Bush. No. Just don't do it. I would not be happy with you.
Sincerely,
Brooke M. Campbell
Atlanta, GA