The final(?) results are in from the polling on Tuesday and are given below. Thank you, one and all, for your support!
With some 29,000 absentee ballots – nearly 15% of the total – still to be counted, I hope to make further gains, including from troops in Iraq and elsewhere. Maybe I’ll even climb out of the cellar! (Don’t ask me what the “O” means.)

Diane Benson - D 81,408 40.2 %
Alexander Crawford - L 3,390 1.7 %
Eva Ince - G 1,437 0.7 %
Bill Ratigan - O 1,409 0.7 %
Don Young - R * 115,062 56.8 %
439 of 439 precincts reporting

Nationwide, sixty percent of eligible voters are so alienated from the political process that they didn’t bother to vote. It is certainly understandable that masses of workers and impoverished see no hope for change under the new Democratic majorities in Congress.
Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated once again on Wednesday that “impeachment is off the table”. Two weeks before the election, MSNBC reported that 51% of Americans think that impeachment should be "on the table". Two months before the new Congress convenes, Pelosi announces that the majority voice SHALL NOT BE HEARD.

Leaders of both capitalist parties enthusiastically welcomed the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but the nominee to succeed him, Robert Gates, has a “curriculum vitae” that could be swapped with practically any other member of the Bush inner circle, including Rumsfeld. Here is what the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org) says about Gates:

“In nominating Gates, Bush praised the career CIA official as someone who ‘understands the challenges we face in Afghanistan’ because of the role he played as Reagan’s deputy director of the CIA when he ‘helped lead America’s efforts to drive Soviet forces from Afghanistan.’

“In other words, he is one of the American intelligence officials who established intimate ties with Osama bin Laden during the CIA-backed war that shattered Afghan society. As such, he played a role in fostering the very Islamist terrorists who ultimately carried out 9/11. Nothing could express more starkly the cynicism of America’s ruling elite than Bush’s touting such a record as a qualification for leading the ‘war on terror.’

“Gates’s ties to terrorism do not end with bin Laden. In the mid-1980s he was tied to the network of White House operatives and CIA agents who organized the ‘Iran-contra’ operation, in which covert arms sales to Iran were used to provide illegal funding for the US-backed ‘contra’ terror war against Nicaragua. He has likewise been linked to covert efforts in the 1980s to supply weapons to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein during its war against Iran.

“That such a figure is being introduced as the champion of a ‘fresh perspective’ on Iraq is the clearest warning that even more horrific crimes are being prepared.”

Thanks again to everyone who supported my campaign. I will continue to offer my opinions and ideas, here and elsewhere.

Election Day is here, and “all my trials soon be over”. I have suggested to a few people that everyone should run for Congress (or other political office) at least once in their life. I have no idea how many votes I'll get, but I get good vibrations here in Juneau, even though many who offer smiles and encouragement will vote for Diane Benson. (Even Diane thanked me for running and highlighting important issues, and I appreciate it.)

Regrettably, I have had to "block" one of my most prolific critics. I explained it to him in the following email:

"One of the functions of my blog is a campaign website. It is listed in the election pamphlet and elsewhere as such. It seems self-evident to me that any candidate who allowed his website to be used for purely personal attacks on himself - or anyone - does not take himself seriously, at the least, and is probably mentally unstable to boot. Why don't you criticize the contents of the blog?
"I appreciate your concern for my health, and I do the best with what I got, but isn't one of the great merits of the internet that anyone can get on his soapbox and air his opinions? You don't have to like them; you don't even have to read them,"

Perhaps Ted will use his energy to go after Young or Stevens in two years. (And, Ted, surely a man of your years and experience must know that he who laughs last, laughs best. I may be in my grave when the day of reckoning comes, but come it will.)

Below is a message I sent to the political newsletter “counterpunch”.

In doing research for a blog article on "John Negroponte and the Kiss of Death", relating to his recent visit to Baghdad, I have tried to uncover (so far without success) his hand in the coup that overthrew the first democratically elected government in Fiji, in 1987.

I recall from the time that Negroponte had been relieved of his death squad activity in Honduras and Nicaragua in order to "help" the U.S. Embassy in Fiji in the days between the election, for the first time, of the Fiji Labour Party, and the coup. The Wikipedia article on the coup says that although some have suggested a U.S. hand in it, the theory "has little support among educated commentators".

I felt at the time and remain convinced that the mere presence of Negroponte provided a huge enough fingerprint to convict the Reagan administration of this anti-democratic exercise in regime change. But then, I didn't go to Yale, so I guess I'm not educated.

The issue is timely not only for how it relates to the Maliki government in Iraq, but because Fijians, in particular the Indian population, continue to suffer from the effects of the 1987 coup, up to and including the current constitutional crisis. (The Bush administration now hypocritically warns against a military coup.)

May I suggest that you use your superior resources to investigate and analyze the Negroponte connection and disclose it to a wider reading public. I would also appreciate any links or references to assist my research.
Thanks.

Bill Ratigan

I have tried to avoid entries consisting of little more than links to other sites. The main argument for this was that by researching various sources and “collating” them, I improved my grasp of a question and my understanding of possible solutions.

I break that tradition here. Yes, I’m getting a bit lazy, but sometimes I can do no better than what others say on a given problem, and I also want to refer you to one of my principal news sources, the World Socialist Web Site (wsws.org). They collate the news and provide insightful analysis. I don’t always agree with their conclusions, but they’re certainly thought-provoking.

As examples I present two articles from Friday’s edition. The first is on John Kerry’s botched joke. The opening sentence is a gem: “John Kerry is guilty of the most fatal of blunders for an American bourgeois politician: speaking the truth inadvertently.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/kerr-n03.shtml

The second article is important because it deals with a subject which must not be discussed in polite society, including most of the mainstream press: the inhuman treatment of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, in a naval brig in South Carolina.

Padilla was given up during the “aggressive interrogation” of Abu Zubaydah, a mentally handicapped al-Qaeda functionary. There’s no doubt that Padilla bore watching – he may have led to other dangerous people. Instead, the FBI arrested him and, based on his fantasies about a “dirty bomb”, Bush declared him an “enemy combatant” and sent him on his Kafkaesque journey. Of course, Padilla was no closer to making a nuclear weapon than I am to riding a jackass to the moon. His current indictment makes no mention of the dirty bomb. The article quotes the conclusion of his legal brief:

“For most of one thousand three hundred and seven days, Mr. Padilla was tortured by the United States government without cause or justification. Mr. Padilla’s treatment at the hands of the United States government is shocking to even the most hardened conscience, and such outrageous conduct on the part of the government divests it of jurisdiction, under the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment, to prosecute Mr. Padilla in the instant matter.”

The link is:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/nov2006/nyt-n03.shtml

One final request: in case you are unfamiliar with the case of Ali al-Timimi, please research it. This is a heinous miscarriage of justice – as are most of Bush’s anti-terror prosecutions. I’ll paste the Wikipedia article to get you started:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_al-Timimi

The unfolding events in Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico, should be of great interest to Americans because the outcome will profoundly affect the future of Mexican society and U.S.-Mexican relations on issues including immigration.
Federal riot police, backed by tanks and helicopters, are preparing to attack protesters in the capital city, also called Oaxaca, to end the turbulent protests which have lasted for months.

President Vicente Fox ordered in the federales after three people were killed on Friday, including a New York photographer, Bradley Roland Will. He was shot twice in the abdomen by a plainclothes police officer, according to witnesses. According to an article in today’s (online) New York Times, Mr. Will was a well-known activist on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He was filming for Indypendent, “a radical collective that published a weekly newspaper and maintained a Web site dedicated to subjects like immigration, the Iraq war and the struggles of the developing world.” The Times article continues:

“The Oaxaca attorney general, Lizbeth Cana, labeled the protesters urban guerrillas and said it was understandable that local people were lashing out at them violently. ‘The people are fed up with permanent violence, threats and kidnappings,’ she said, according to The Associated Press. But the mayor of a nearby town said the five men being detained for possible involvement in Mr. Will’s killing were not disgruntled ordinary local citizens but police officers and local officials.”

The struggle began in May, when the state’s 70,000 schoolteachers went on strike, as they have done in every year since 1980. This year the demands included higher pay, more schools in remote villages, and free breakfast and uniforms for all students.

According to an article in The American Prospect, “The strike mushroomed in size and significance this year after [Governor Ulises] Ruiz ordered the use of tear gas and police power on June 14 to try and disperse protestors. The violent police action outraged many in the city, and as a result the teachers’ union, in coalition with other groups including farmers’ cooperatives, Indian rights organizations, and revolutionary parties, revised their demands to include the governor stepping down from power.”

The teachers reached an agreement last week, but the protesters have not backed down from their demands that Ruiz be removed and corruption in government be eliminated.


The confrontation should be seen as a prelude to the impending crisis over presidential succession. On December 1st President Vicente Fox’s is due to hand over power to Felipe Calderon, of Fox’s PAN party, who the courts have said won July’s presidential election.

It’s a situation similar to that in this country in 2000, except that unlike the gutless Democrats here, the declared loser of the election, Manuel Lopez Obrador, has suggested that he will set up a parallel government and shadow cabinet. In sending the federal riot police to “restore order” in Oaxaca, Fox is also sending a clear message to the poor and disenfranchised of Mexico City and throughout the country, that any attempt to contest the succession of Calderon will meet with similar repression.

This is undoubtedly the most explosive situation Mexico has faced since 1968, when police massacred hundreds – perhaps thousands – of protesters in Tlatelolco, Mexico City.

Who will win? The answer was foreshadowed in the Times article which reported the following incident:
“Riot police stood in formation across the main highway leading to Mexico City, facing down protesters waving white flags and protest signs 20 feet away.
“A demonstrator, Gloria Juarez, approached the officers and stuck white roses and carnations in their black uniforms.
“‘It makes me sad that they want to kill my people,’ she said. ‘I want to change their hearts.’”
How many more Gloria Juarezes are there? And will the police and military heed their pleas?
Will Lopez Obrador play a role similar to that of Francisco Madero, who led the revolution that overthrew the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz in 1911, only to be murdered less than two years later by the forces of reaction? That was followed by two decades of terrible bloodshed. Will the Mexican workers and their leaders have learned any lessons from that bitter experience?
And what will be the role of the Bush Administration? One important reason for the poverty and unrest in Mexico and the flight of workers northward is the draconian social policies imposed by the Washington-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Porfirio Diaz famously said: “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” I doubt that Mexico is any closer to God, but it is much closer to the U.S. when you consider all the modern military technology of the juggernaut to the north. The American economy was expanding then; now we are the world’s leading debtor nation. And Bush is no Woodrow Wilson.

Thanks for the positive comments. No one brought up my new word, which I’ve decided for now to move from the text to the title. If it’s gonna fly, or go down in flames, it might as well be on top. If the piece gets published, it should be an attention-grabber

Thanks to Phil for the link to the Cal Thomas column. Go to Archives, Oct. 26:
http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?catid=1117

Below is a letter to the Anchorage Daily News. Tmesis may be over the top, but I couldn’t resist. After all, I really was dumbfounded. It’s a word I picked up from the NYT crossword. I once heard a previous editor of the puzzle (Eugene Maleska?) say that a good crossword is both entertaining and instructive. It’s a standard which I also find applicable in judging novels, movies, and other works of “art”. I apologize if there’s little entertainment in the following piece. As always, comments are welcome.
I would include Thomas’s column, but I didn’t find it online, and my typing skills prohibit such a major undertaking. Reading it was bad enough. I think you’ll get the drift. What I did discover is that Thomas is "the most widely syndicated op-ed columnist in the country, appearing in 540 newspapers."

Thanks to Phil for the link to the Cal Thomas column:
http://www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20061026tq--b-a.txt&catid=1117&code=tq--b

I was at a loss for words to describe my amazement at the column in Thursday’s opinion section by Cal Thomas, so I had to make one up. You can look up tmesis, right under Tlingit, and fill in the blank.)

To include “Rumsfeld” and “1984” in the same headline does more than evoke Orwellian images. Is Thomas so smitten with his master that he failed to do some basic homework? Or does he really think his selective view of history will go unnoticed by the reading public?
The Defense Secretary had invited “a small group of columnists” to lunch to discuss a speech he gave in October 1984. Thomas quotes him as saying that terrorism is “state-sponsored, by nations using it as a central element of their foreign policy.”

The brutal war between Iraq and Iran was in full swing, and the Reagan administration was desperate that Iran didn’t win it. Reagan had removed Iraq from the list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, and he was working to re-establish full diplomatic relations with Iraq, which had been severed following the Arab-Israeli Six Day War in 1967. A key role in this effort was played by President Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld.

By the summer of 1983 there was already overwhelming evidence that Iraq was using chemical weapons, including mustard gas and nerve gas against the Iranians. The U.S. government felt compelled to issue a denunciation of the attacks. After all, the Geneva Conventions do not look kindly on states that traffic in chemical weapons, or CW.

Rumsfeld went to Baghdad in March 1984. Earlier in the month, the State Department had issued a statement saying, “Available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons.” The details of Rumsfeld’s visit were revealed in December 2003, in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. They include a cable sent to Rumsfeld by then-Secretary of State George Schultz. In the cable, Rumsfeld was urged to tell Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz that the U.S. statement “was made strictly out of our strong opposition to the use of lethal and incapacitating CW, wherever it occurs.” It was not intended to imply a shift in policy, and the U.S. desire “to improve bilateral relations, at a pace of Iraq’s choosing” was “undiminished”. “This message bears reinforcing during your discussions.”

The Washington Post reported in December 2003:
“Publicly, the United States maintained neutrality during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, which began in 1980.
“Privately, however, the administrations of Reagan and George H.W. Bush sold military goods to Iraq, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological agents, worked to stop the flow of weapons to Iran, and undertook discreet diplomatic initiatives, such as the two Rumsfeld trips to Baghdad [the first was in December 1983], to improve relations with Hussein.”
Twenty-four of the largest American corporations profited from the arms sales, and Iraqi scientists were invited to symposiums in California and New Mexico on nuclear weapons technology. The names of the companies, and their dealings, were included in Iraq’s report to the U.N. in December 2002, in the 8000 pages that Bush tried to expunge.
In short, while making speeches on the threat of global terrorism, Rumsfeld was doing his best to assist Saddam Hussein in obtaining “WMD”. We can also conclude that Rumsfeld had no more compunction about flouting the Geneva Conventions in 1984 than he does in 2006.
Another acolyte of the Prophet Donald, Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also attended the luncheon. A few days earlier, Pace had paid homage to his boss: “He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country.” It would all be comical were the issues (Iraq, separation of church and state, etc.) not so serious.