kuniform

I’ve been deleting or readying a few posts I’ve had in draft mode for a long time. After reading Josh Marshall’s first story for Time Magazine, I decided to re-work these links I’d had. Marshall’s story talks about how there is a sudden uptick in terrorist activity, mostly amongst wannabee’s and has beens, including these recent plots in Miami against the Sears Tower and the idea of blowing up train tunnels in New York.

As Marshall notes, the tunnel plot was discovered in April but not made news until July, perhaps to help Republicans in the mid-term election. This report from June states that arrests in Canada cause U.S. officials to predict another terrorist attack coming soon on U.S. soil.

Here’s a Lou Dobbs editorial from a few months ago about the estate tax. You know when someone like Lou Dobbs, hardly a Woodstock attendee or commune member, is going after Bushie’s tax cuts, they’re not good for you. Sebastian Mallory at the Washington Post agrees in a column entitled “Reward for the hereditary elite.” That’s just what we should do—reward our elites, when they take advantage of their position of privilege to provide value to society. When they, like Bush, fail to do that, or, like Kerry or Gore, fumble away their opportunity to do so, our leadership class has failed us.

Talking about earmarks in Congress, the New York Times has a great article (now behind the Times Select wall) about the corruption in our federal government. The money quote comes from Dwight Eisenhower, a man not unfamiliar with the right wing attack machine of his era: “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

So, what is the thread that holds all this together? I think the boys over at talkingpointsmemo.com are right: Representative Hoekstra’s claims of Al-Qaeda’s leaking to the press information about our horrific NSA programs are just another smoke screen before the mid-term elections. The link they provide to the Harper’s article “Stabbed in the Back” is dead on. I believe the next few months will lead to another bunch of terrorist attack announcements with very little substance to them, as well as many more suggestions that the Democrats are traitors for rooting for failure in Iraq.
Now, do not get me wrong. I am not a Democrat. They are too into identity politics for me. I am into progressive politics, meaning that I believe in fairness, justice, and equity for all. It does not seem like either party is interested in ideas like the social contract, or that the rich must bear a portion of the burden just the same as the poor. Oh well, enjoy the links.