---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2006 03:33:20 -0500
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: Army Times: 'Time for Rumsfeld to go'
Army Times: 'Time for Rumsfeld to go'
CNN News - Nov. 4, 2006
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/04/rumsfeld.departure/
(CNN) -- An editorial to be published in an independent
military publication Monday calls for Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld to be replaced.
And the Pentagon is countering by saying the new
"chorus of criticism" is "old news."
The editorial will appear Monday in the four weekly
publications that serve the four main branches of the
U.S. military, according to the senior managing editor
for Army Times Publications, the papers' parent
company.
It is owned by the Gannett Company, publisher of USA
Today and many local U.S. newspapers.
The editorial was posted Saturday on the Web sites of
the four publications: Army Times, Navy Times, Air
Force Times and the Marine Corps Times. (Read the
editorialexternal link)
It reads: "It is one thing for the majority of
Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed. But when the
nation's current military leaders start to break
publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear
that he is losing control of the institution he
ostensibly leads."
The timing of the editorial's publishing was not
prompted by Tuesday's midterm elections, said Army
Times' editor Robert Hodierne.
It was inspired by Bush statement this week that he
wants Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney in their
posts through the end of his term, the editor said.
(Watch Bush say Rumsfeld is staying on the job -- 1:20
Video)
Swaying conservative voters "is not our aim," Hodierne
told CNN on Friday.
"Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed
leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the
public at large," the editorial states. "His strategy
has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And
although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with
the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its
brunt."
White House spokesman Tony Snow said the president was
told about the editorial, and his reaction was to
"shrug it off."
Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman downplayed
the "new chorus of criticism."
[It] is actually old news and does not include
commanders in the field, who remain committed to the
mission," Whitman said.
"The assertion, without evidence, that senior military
officers are 'toeing the line' is an insult to their
judgment and integrity," he added.
Hodierne countered by saying that Rumsfeld has "lost
the support and respect of the military leadership"
considering "some of the public statements that
military leaders are making."
"... With their [other military leaders']
disagreements, added up with all of the other missteps
we believe he's made, it's time for him to be
replaced," Hodierne said.
Whitman said Rumsfeld has always "clearly and
accurately" described the challenges facing U.S. forces
in Iraq and Afghanistan and that the "war on terror"
will be a long struggle.
"This country and the leadership of the Defense
Department are going to ensure that our military forces
have the resources to successfully carry out their
mission, and to suggest otherwise is simply wrong," he
said.
This is the second time the military publications have
urged Rumsfeld to vacate his post.
In May 2004, when the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke,
an Army Times editorial said: "This was not just a
failure of leadership at the local command level. This
was a failure that ran straight to the top."
Army Times Publishing is the world's largest publisher
of defense and military-related periodicals, Hodierne
said.
The four weekly newspapers, distributed in base
convenience stores and commissaries around the world as
well as delivered to subscribers, have a combined
circulation of about 250,000.
--30--
____________________________________________
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2006 03:34:01 -0500
From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Subject: A Pro-Democracy Agenda
A Pro-Democracy Agenda
by Steven Hill and Rob Richie
TomPaine.com - November 07, 2006
<http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/11/07/a_prodemocracy_agenda.php>
[Steven Hill directs the Political Reform Program for
the New America Foundation and is author of Ten Steps
to Repair American Democracy. Rob Richie is executive
director of FairVote.]
Democrats appear poised to take over the U.S. House of
Representatives. At the top of their agenda should be
policies designed to introduce more democracy into the
"people's house."
Change is certainly needed. Our constitutional framers
designed the U.S. House to be the branch of government
with the most power and one where every member had to
be elected by the people. It was the place for
democracy in our system, in contrast to having
presidents picked by an Electoral College and U.S.
senators by state legislators.
But the reality is that the U.S. House now is more
reflective of the former Soviet Union than a democracy.
There has been one shift of partisan control in more
than five decades, spanning 26 elections and a period
of time when the presidency shifted between the major
parties six times. Providing for real accountability
must be a priority.
Changing the ugly traditions of recent congressional
leaders, we hope that Democrats would run the House
with more openness to ideas for policies regardless of
their source. The minority party should be able to
propose amendments, earmarks should be banned or at
least open to full disclosure, and substantial bills
should allow time for review and deliberation.
But the ultimate source of accountability is how we run
and structure elections. It's high time to modernize
our elections and bring them in line with international
norms. Without such modernization, we will fail to
establish a vital democracy. Consider these proposals:
1) Have an affirmative right to vote in the
Constitution. Sixty Democrats have already signed onto
House Joint Resolution 28, a proposal to establish an
affirmative right to vote in the Constitution. We
should make protection of our right to vote a national
concern, one demanding as many protections as that
other great pillar of democracy, our right to free
speech.
2) Make election officials nonpartisan and held
accountable. It hardly matters whether the method of
voting is with paper and pen or open-source
computerized equipment if election administrators are
not trustworthy or accountable for their actions.
Secretaries of state overseeing presidential elections
in 2004 in three battleground states-Ohio, Missouri,
and Michigan-were co-chairs of their state's George
Bush reelection campaigns. In Missouri the secretary of
state was running for governor and oversaw elections
for his own race! Not to mention a highly partisan
Republican secretary of state ran elections in Florida,
and a partisan Democrat did so in New Mexico. A Mexican
observer of the 2004 election commented, "That looks an
awful lot like the old Mexican PRI to me." Election
administrators should be civil servants who have a
demonstrated proficiency with technology, running
elections and making the electoral process transparent
and secure. If they make mistakes, they should face
consequences.
3) Create a national elections commission. The U.S.
leaves election administration to administrators in
over 3,000 counties and nearly 10,000 municipalities
scattered across the nation with few standards and
little uniformity. This is a formula for unfair
elections. Most established democracies use national
elections commissions to establish minimum national
standards and uniformity, and to partner with state and
local election officials to ensure pre-election and
post-election accountability for their election plans.
The Elections Assistance Commission established
recently by the Help America Vote Act is a pale version
of this and should be strengthened greatly.
4) Have universal voter registration. We lack a system
of universal voter registration in which citizens who
turn 18 years of age automatically are registered to
vote by election authorities. This is the practice used
by most established democracies, giving them voter
rolls far more complete and clean than ours-in fact, a
higher percentage of Iraqi adults are registered to
vote than American adults. Universal voter registration
in the U.S. is now possible as result of the Help
America Vote Act which mandated that all states must
establish statewide voter databases. Doing so would add
50 million voters to the rolls, a disproportionate
share being young people and people of color.
5) Use "public interest" voting equipment. Currently
voting equipment is suspect, undermining confidence in
our elections. The proprietary software and hardware
are created by shadowy companies with partisan ties who
sell equipment by wining and dining election
administrators with little knowledge of voting
technology. The government should oversee the
development of publicly- owned or at least publicly-
controlled software and hardware, contracting with the
sharpest minds in the private sector. And then that
open-source voting equipment should be deployed
throughout the nation to ensure that every county-and
every voter-is using the best equipment. Other nations
already do this with positive results.
6) Hold elections on a weekend or make them a national
holiday. We vote on a busy workday instead of on a
national holiday or weekend (like most other nations
do), creating a barrier for 9-to-5 workers and also
leading to a shortage of poll workers and polling
places. Puerto Rico typically has the highest voter
turnout in the United States, and makes Election Day a
holiday.
7) Ending redistricting shenanigans by adopting
proportional voting. Most legislators choose their
voters during the redistricting process, long before
those voters get to choose them. More than 98 percent
of U.S. House incumbents won re-election in every House
election from 1998 through 2004, with more than 90
percent of all races won by noncompetitive margins. The
driving factor is not campaign finance inequities but
winner-take-all elections compounded by rigged
legislative district lines. As a start, redistricting
must be nonpartisan, driven by nonpolitical criteria.
But by far the most important solution is a
proportional voting system that would make voters more
important than district lines.
8) Hold instant runoff voting. Our "highest vote-getter
wins" method of electing executive offices creates
incentives to keep third-party candidates off the
ballot as potential spoilers. Our current plurality
system is not designed to accommodate three or more
choices, allowing important policy areas to be
completely ignored by major party candidates. Most
modern democracies accommodate voter choice through
two-round runoff or instant runoff elections for
executive offices. Instant runoff voting has been
introduced with sparkling success in San Francisco and
Burlington, Vt., keeps winning at the ballot box and
has the support of both leading Democrats like Howard
Dean, Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama and leading
Republicans like John McCain. Three major November
campaigns this year would replace primary elections
with one majority, spoiler-free election in November-a
change Congress could adopt by statute for all their
elections.
Perhaps we can't win all these reforms at once, but we
can make advances if we keep our eye on the prize and
pursue opportunities that emerge. By taking real
action, Democrats can take a giant step toward earning
the faith and respect of voters from across the
spectrum. Whether you're a Democrat, Republican, Green,
Libertarian or independent, you can be part of one big
party: The "Better Democracy" party.
____________________________________________
portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news,
discussion and debate service of the Committees of
Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to
provide varied material of interest to people on the
left.
To submit an article to portside, go to:
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three videos, the most beautiful, the sublime, the compelling
below: perhaps an unintended homage to gustave moreau, certainly my most
beautiful work, which comes through, however strangely, in spite of the
necessary compression. taped inside the rilke church, if i may call it that, in
raron, accompanied with the falls at the very tip of the aletsch. here is
spirit at its most sublime, from the upward sweep of the nave, to the
grandiosity of the glacier itself, many thousands of feet below.
http://www.asondheim.org/rilketongue.mp4
below: closeup of the 'tongue' of the aletsch glacier, with modified very low
frequency radio signals taken from the same site. the signals were
contaminated, by local power generation, up there on the bluff. filtering was
difficult because the generators seemed somewhat unstable. i used extreme hiss
reduction, notch filtering, and graphic equalization to create something
'readable.' i'm fascinated that the glacier moves of course at a snail's pace
or slower - but accompanied these radio signals, which originate from mostly
from cosmic and atmospheric phenomena. radio emissions (from cosmic and
atmomspheric phenomena) - invisible events, interpreted as sound. again, the
sublime, which often appears without the body of this body of work.
http://www.asondheim.org/aletschvlf.mp4
below: foofwa on 'dance is' for a second take in a squat in geneva. this is
more personal than the first 'dance is' and as such it was taped in a more or
less straightforward manner. i find the take quite touching. we later talked
about the graffiti surrounding us; the tags were in english, and seemed to
represent a form of the usual colonization.
http://www.asondheim.org/foofwadanceis2.mp4
Cli!
1. Revised URLs. The following are all current and from the recent Alps /
Swiss project. Dancers are Foofwa d'Imobilite and Maud Liardon. Sites are
in Gruyere and the Aletsch. The files range in size from 820k on up; I
apologize for the size, but if they were compressed more, they would lose
essential detail.
These files will be online for quite a while. Information might be found
in http://www.asondheim.org/ov.txt and http://www.asondheim.org/ow.txt .
http://www.asondheim.org/jump.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/eatenbylight.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/rilkes.mov
http://www.asondheim.org/rilketongue.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/aletschvlf.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/foofwadanceis2.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/mercigrotto.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/virtualreal.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/alandanceis.mp3
http://www.asondheim.org/maudatar.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/charmchurch.mp3
http://www.asondheim.org/mauddanceis.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/restfaces.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/maudbrigcastle.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/rilke.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/maudpringychurch.mp4
http://www.asondheim.org/cath.mov
2. Cli!
Top/World/Deutsch/Gesellschaft/Umwelt,_Verkehr,_Energi#h#rea#letsc!
Glacie#ie#ituate##h#00#!hig#ro#h#onkordiaplatz#h!
Aletsc#lacie#a#!widt##pproximatel#.#rie#ot##h#h!
mos#laciate#ar##h#lp#a#nscribe##000#wis#ikin!
recommendatio#ro#h#ctivit#orkshop#escribin#!wal#longsid#h!
Aletsc#lacie#ro#iescheral##ru#IM#urop#agazin#xplore#h!
wonder##urope#!summe#ourne#roun#urope#wis#ikin!
recommendatio#ro#h#ctivit#orkshop#escribin#!wal#longsid#h!
Aletsc#lacie#ro#h#A#egio##h#os#laciate#re##h#lp!
an#ncorporate#h#letsc#lacier#h#arges#n#onges##ester!
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continenta#urop#ou#eu#u#ignore##lacie#Aletsc#s##lu!
gran#lacie#letsc#eathe#n#nformatio#bou#ringy#rance#h!
foo##ru#e#illag##h#djacen#illag##ring#th#ctua!
locatio##ru#e#rai#tation)#o##in#!Bienven!
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helpfu#otes#.#H#66#ringy-Gr!
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cattl#erd#n#dmir#h#uthenti#lpin#halet#it#hei#hingl!
roof#etwee#ring#n#!
son-Village#ring#.27904#!!
Top/World/Deutsch/Gesellschaft/Umwelt,_Verkehr,_Energi#h#rea#letsc!