Mr. Bush’s Bad Misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan are doing grievous harm to our national defense and security in three clear cut ways the main stream media have reported too little on:

A. Enlistments are below quota
B. Re-enlistments are being rejected, even with $30,000 cash inducements
C. Our highly trained officer corps is looking for exit strategies into the civil sector

I’ve just blogged impressions from a long Saturday at DemocracyFest 2005 here. In the evening Howard Dean spoke and said we don’t need two Republican parties. At the moment, though, we have two Democratic parties – the corporate/broadcast version, and the new grassroots party that has emerged from Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. This was clear [...]

The Atlantic Monthly for July – August has two remarkable essays that are very much worth the effort to find and read. The Atlantic famously does not make its content available online without a full subscription. The essays are, however, easily worth the $6.00 newstand price for the issue.

The first essay is by James Fallows and is titled:

Countdown to a Meltdown
America’s Coming economic crisis.
A look back from the election of 2016

Fallows describes three periods leading up to the demise of the two party system:
1] Cocking the Gun; 2] Pulling the Trigger and 3] Bleeding.

And that is NOT a typo! Friedman is writing about his vision for a geo-green approach to policy. HE argues that “the solutions to our problems(of developing a geo-green strategy) are already here.”

Op-Ed Columnist
As Toyota Goes …

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: June 17, 2005

So I have a question: If I am rooting for General Motors to go bankrupt and be bought out by Toyota, does that make me a bad person?

It is not that I want any autoworker to lose his or her job, but I certainly would not put on a black tie if the entire management team at G.M. got sacked and was replaced by executives from Toyota. Indeed, I think the only hope for G.M.’s autoworkers, and maybe even our country, is with Toyota. Because let’s face it, as Toyota goes, so goes America.

snip —-

click on “more” to read the crux of his argument. Click on the link above to read the whole op-ed.

“Other than telling us how to live, think, marry,
pray, vote, invest, educate our children and, now,
die, I think the Republicans have done a fine job of
getting government out of our personal lives.”

–Craig Carter

Recent quote from the Sunday Oregonian’s “Short &Sweet” column

Transformative politics is not for sissies.
By: Dana Blankenhorn

If you’re going to really change political trends, and put the bottom rail on top for a generation, you can’t be gentle about it.

You can’t cajole. You can’t seduce. You have to go right for the throat. And you have to be ready for the whole of the old order to come down on you for it.

So let’s be clear about this right now. Love him or hate him, Howard Dean is a master politician.

A friend sent me this excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC. It’s been posted elsewhere online, but it’s a good fit for Greater Democracy. The intro in the email I received says “Smedley Butler was the one of the most decorated war heroes in U.S. history, and received [...]