Don't tell Obama and McCain, but the war they are both counting on to make their bones as commander-in-chief -- the "good war" in Afghanistan, which both men have pledged to expand -- is already lost. Their joint strategy of pouring more troops, tanks, missiles and planes into the roaring fire -- not to mention their intention to spread the war into Pakistan -- will only lead to disaster.

Who says so? America's biggest ally in the Afghan adventure: Great Britain. This week, two top figures in the British effort in Afghanistan -- Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, and Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British military commander in Afghanistan -- both said that the war was "unwinnable," and that continuing the current level of military operations there, much less expanding it, was a strategy "doomed to fail."

The biggest headlines went to the comments by Cowper-Coles, whose frank assessment was quoted in a secret French diplomatic cable that was published by a muckraking French magazine last week. Cowper-Coles put it plainly:

The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust....The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution. Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis.

These are indisputable facts that have been glaringly obvious to most sentient observers for many years. Yet the diplomat's acknowledgement of reality has been greeted as a shocking breach of decorum by his fellow professional liars in Anglo-American officialdom. His brief outburst of truth (which, to be fair to the good knight, was meant to be in secret; he didn't mean to tell the public the truth!) was quickly disavowed in Washington and London. Although the cable's authenticity was not in question, the UK Foreign Office said that their ambassador's comments "did not reflect official British policy."

That is certainly the unvarnished truth, for "official British policy" has long been to "do whatever the hell the Americans tell us to do." Cowper-Coles was upfront about this too:

Acknowledging that there is no option other than supporting the Americans in Afghanistan, the ambassador reportedly added, "but we must tell them that we want to be part of a winning strategy, not a losing one." The American strategy, he is quoted as saying, "is destined to fail."

Then, just when the Brits thought they were putting a lid on a story that was most displeasing to their Potomac masters, their top military officer in Afghanistan confirmed and amplified the ambassador's analysis in an interview with The Times. Speaking after his unit's second tour on the battlefield in Afghanistan, Brigadier Carleton-Smith said bluntly:

"We're not going to win this war....We want to change the nature of the debate from one where disputes are settled through the barrel of the gun to one where it is done through negotiations," Carleton-Smith said. "If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that's precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this. That shouldn't make people uncomfortable."

The American-installed president of Afghanistan, former oil company factotum Hamid Karzai, echoed the British assessment. In fact, he went so far as to invite Taliban supremo Mullah Omar -- ranked just a notch below Osama bin Laden in official American demonology -- to return to the country for peace talks, with full guarantees for his personal safety and liberty. Omar quickly rejected the overture, but there is clearly a growing consensus for a negotiated settlement.

A consensus everywhere but Washington, that is. There, in the marbled courts of the Potomac Empire, fierce factional opponents such as Barack Obama and John McCain are marching lock-step with George W. Bush on escalating the war in Afghanistan: more troops, more airstrikes, more "collateral damage."

This bipartisan Washington strategy was distilled perfectly by none other than Karl Rove, the ostensibly retired Bush Regime mastermind who is now working behind the scenes for McCain. As Eric Margolis reports in the Edmonton Sun:

I recently asked Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's former senior adviser, how this seemingly impossible war could be won. His eyes dancing with imperial hubris, Rove replied, "More Predators (missile armed drones) and helicopters!"

It sounds like Rove is giving Obama advice on Afghanistan as well. The Democratic candidate's stated polices on the conflict dovetail exactly with those of Rove, Bush and McCain: Thousands of more troops. More military hardware. More drone missile strikes, not only in Afghanistan but in Pakistan as well. Obama has also pledged to pressure the Europeans to send more troops and hardware of their own to Afghanistan, with "fewer restrictions" on their combat operations.

In other words, the American political establishment is committed to plunging headlong into what almost all outside experts -- including America's closest allies, not to mention the Afghans themselves -- say will be a bloodsoaked, botched catastrophe.

Both Obama and McCain have loudly proclaimed themselves to be agents of "change." And on Afghanistan, we can see that these two wise statesmen are telling the truth. No matter who wins, we will see great change in Afghanistan -- for the worse.

II.

All of this is most curious. The ostensible reason given for the seven long years of continuous death and destruction in Afghanistan -- and the justification for its escalation for many years to come -- is, of course, the 9/11 attacks in the United States. But even if for some reason you took the official account of 9/11 as the gospel truth in every respect, Afghanistan played no role in it at all. We are told that the attack was masterminded by bin Laden's Karl Rove, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- who operated in Pakistan. We are told that the other conspirators operated mostly in Germany -- and the United States. There has never been any evidence presented that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan had the slightest operational role -- or even the slightest knowledge -- of an attack on the United States.

On the other hand, there is a good deal of credible evidence that the United States promised to attack Afghanistan -- months before 9/11 -- if the Taliban didn't play ball on oil deals and other issues. There is evidence that even before the attacks, the Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to international justice, if evidence of his involvement in terrorism was presented. This offer was repeated even more frantically after 9/11. But as for evidence of Afghan involvement in 9/11, there is none.

Thus the only ostensible reason given for the seven-year U.S.-NATO onslaught in Afghanistan is that the Taliban regime gave refuge to bin Laden and his small organization after they were kicked out of Sudan. This was done with the backing of one of the Taliban's closest allies at the time: the Bush Family's business partners, the Saudi royal family. And as Margolis notes, bin Laden, whatever else he might be, was also a national hero in Afghanistan for his part in the Washington-backed holy war against the Soviets.

But for taking in Osama (himself the scion of yet another Bush business partner, the Bin Laden family), at the request of America's ally, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan has had to pay with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of its people, and with seven years of war, chaos, terror and ruin. Even though they had nothing to do with 9/11. Even though they had offered to give bin Laden up for an internationally monitored trial.

But as Margolis notes:

...the current war is not really about al-Qaida and "terrorism," but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin to the West.

III.

Yet beyond these more immediate, gritty concerns, there is also the blind, iron logic of perpetual war that drives any imperial power. Like a shark, it must keep moving, must keep the water churning, obscured with clouds of blood and fear -- or else it will stand revealed as the naked, brutish, pointless thing that it is: a bestial lust for domination, a secretion of the chemical mud that lies in the lower swamps of our misfiring, imperfect brains. Every imperial project bedecks itself with high-flown rhetoric and shining, self-glorifying, emotion-rousing ideals. These are internalized by millions of individuals, who are then unable to see the world in any other way. Whatever is done in the name of these ideals is rational, reasonable and right; anything that threatens their primacy and authenticity is evil, insane and worthy of destruction.

(This dynamic doesn't apply solely to imperialism, of course. Any all-consuming mythology of meaning and explanation can generate this kind of blind, partisan passion -- as the current presidential campaign illustrates so well, on both sides.)

That's why an empire must keep marching, and roaring in the thought-obliterating noise of war and fear. Peace gives space for reflection, for questioning, for the development of a more human, more humane response to reality. And all of these are deadly to the mud-brain lust for domination, and to the inflated rhetoric that cloaks it. For when empires stop -- or are stopped -- the meaninglessness of the entire project is laid bare.

In his new book, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe, Robert Gellately quote from the remarkable collection of reportage and private writings by the Russian novelist Vassily Grossman, who covered almost every major Eastern battlefront in World War II. Grossman relates how Soviet soldiers were astounded by the level of comfort and wealth in Germany -- even in the ruined Germany of 1945. Grossman writes:

...our soldiers started to ask themselves, why did the Germans attack us so suddenly? Millions of our men have now seen the rich farms in East Prussia, the highly organized agriculture, the concrete sheds for livestock, spacious rooms, carpets, wardrobes full of clothes. They saw all the paved roads and what was by comparison boundless plenty and luxury and asked themselves plaintively: 'But why did they come to us? What did they want?"

It is not hard to imagine someone in Afghanistan or Iraq looking at the lives of most Americans and asking the same questions. The Germans left their spacious rooms and carpets to slaughter millions of people in foreign lands because they had internalized the emotion-laden, self-glorifying ideals of an imperial project, whose inherent, horrifying emptiness was finally exposed in the husk of a shriveled little man in a concrete bunker putting a bullet through his brain. There was no point to it all.

The imperial desire to hold sway over the distribution lines of the world's oil resources is an immediate impetus behind the destruction of Afghanistan. But the particular pathology of the American elite, especially the Bush Faction, has dictated the particular form this desire for domination has taken. In an excellent essay-review of several new books on the "War on Terror," Pankaj Mishra notes a telling example of the Potomac mindset:

Busy unleashing his awesome firepower on Iraq, Rumsfeld had no idea what to do after his streamlined army reached Baghdad, apart from letting stuff happen. Wiser in Battle, the memoir of the US lieutenant general Ricardo Sanchez (HarperCollins), reveals that, as the Iraqi resistance unexpectedly intensified, the defeat in Vietnam began to prey on Bush's mind, unraveling his syntax as he harangued his commanders in Iraq:

Kick ass! ... We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal ... There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!

Anyone who has read Hitler's "table talk" will feel a shiver of familiarity -- and revulsion -- when reading Bush's words. This is the voice of our mud-brain thrashing its way through broken fragments of higher-order thought. This is the voice of an imperial elite -- of our imperial elite.

[For more on how the myths and lies of imperial power are internalized, then acted out in malign, destructive ways, see this important new essay by Arthur Silber, "Perverse Priorities in a World of Lies."]

IV.

And so the meaningless imperial project will keep churning forward; this is one solemn campaign promise that we can count on the candidates to honor. The howling atrocity in Iraq will continue in one form or another, but it will now be compounded beyond measure by a new injection of murderous folly in Afghanistan -- a project doomed from the start, as Mishra notes:_

As Tariq Ali bluntly clarifies in his new book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power (Simon & Schuster), the post-9/11 project of "nation-building" in Afghanistan, which prioritised western interests over all others, was always doomed. It was "a top-down process", trying to create "an army constituted not to defend the nation but to impose order on its own people, on behalf of outside powers; a civil administration that will have no control over planning, health, education etc, all of which will be run by NGOs, whose employees will be far better paid than the locals, and answerable not to the population but to their overseas sponsors; and a government whose foreign policy is identical to Washington's."

American bombing raids, which have killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, further unite fractious Afghans against foreign usurpers. Tariq Ali correctly prescribes skepticism against strategists and journalists who blame Pakistan for increasing attacks on western forces in Afghanistan while disregarding the fact that "many Afghans who detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of NATO and the behaviour of its troops that they will support any opposition."

Mishra then concludes:

Seven years on, hundreds of thousands are dead, and millions of refugees on the move, while the US seems only to have boosted its old enemies in Afghanistan, Iran and Lebanon, and created formidable new ones in Iraq and Pakistan. In The War Within, Woodward shows the US president slipping deeper into his own world. "We're killin' 'em! We're killin' 'em all!" But not even the Bush administration, which has proved ready to do unspeakable things to its perceived enemies, can kill them all. It can continue to stage elaborate shock-and-awe spectacles, but if, as is increasingly evident, the target audience refuses to be impressed by them, they are rendered utterly futile - even dangerously counterproductive. "Force," as James Baldwin pointed out in the early 1970s during the US bombing of Indochina, "does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for instance, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary and this revelation invests the victim with patience."

...A gracious acceptance of the limits of US firepower may not be forthcoming from the next administration, which will face the hard choice to get out or fight on. Indeed, failure may make it even more determined to maintain the pride of US arms and the image of the mightiest power on earth. The prospect of humiliation in Vietnam was what prompted Nixon's devastation of Cambodia, setting the stage for the genocidal Pol Pot. As Hannah Arendt wrote, "when all signs pointed to defeat", the goal was "no longer one of avoiding humiliating defeat but of finding ways and means to avoid admitting it and 'save face'."

Could smashing up Iran or invading Pakistan become the face-saving formula for the exponents of "shock and awe"? ...[Such] is the crazy logic of a wounded militarism that, notwithstanding its battered economy, the US may soon be embattled on many more fronts in what is already its most damaging war.

The United States has lost its pointless war against the people of Afghanistan. Yet both the "progressive" standard-bearer and the "conservative" stalwart have sworn to expand the conflict. Both have internalized the rhetoric and beliefs of a violent imperial project. Both men have shown themselves too weak in truth to escape the fear of appearing weak in the false light of militarism.

I am watching the debate on CSPAN over HR 1424 the "Emergency Economic Stabilization Act." As you can imagine there is empty rhetoric on both sides of the issue and there is bi-partisan support and opposition. If anything, it's a little more interesting than usual.

Rep Gary Miller (R-Ca), in a rare lapse of guarded "poli-speak" said that this bill would help the "Small People." Meaning, you and I. Fundamentally, that's what we are to the Congressional-Wall Street Cabal---the "Small People."

But, watching the proceedings, I am underwhelmed how these people are all of a sudden worried about we "Small People."

Congress, under the failed leadership of Nancy Pelosi, has passed laws to undermine our 4th Amendment rights to be safe and secure in our personal correspondence, phone calls and emails. Nancy Pelosi's Congress has given George Bush over 500,000,000,000.00 dollars to wage his insane wars in Iraq and now they are going to give his Secretary of the Treasure, Henry Paulson, (Former CEO of Goldman-Sachs), 850,000,000,000. 00. That's a lot of zeros!

Congressperson after Congressperson have risen to say that we must hand over billions of "Small People" tax dollars so "Small People" will not "lose their jobs" or "lose their homes." We "Small People" have been losing our jobs and our homes at record paces only rivaled in the 1930's, and not one Bill was passed to help the "Small People" keep our jobs and homes. Tent cities are arising all over the country and Congress is going to bailout an industry that caused these cities and not only that, but use our money to help keep the CEO's in the style to which they have become accustomed.

Congressperson after Congressperson have also risen to say that their constituents, we "Small People" are overwhelmingly against the bailout of corporate piracy and pillaging, but he/she will vote for the Bill anyway, because he/she knows better what is good for us "Small People." We will eat our spinach and like it, because our REPRESENTATIVES have become mini-dictators in the shadow of the Fuhrers who are exercising fascistic control over every aspect of our lives.

I would like to remind everyone that at the beginning of the year, Congress passed another "emergency" bill that gave we "Small People" a few hundred dollars that did nothing to stimulate the economy. The solution to the crisis may cost billions of dollars, but not to hand to Wall Street. The bill failed on Monday, but Wall Street did not crash.

The solution is to put our economy to work for we "Small People." Federal Jobs programs that pay living wages to repair our crumbling infrastructure and rebuild the Gulf States so "Small People" can return to their homes.

Put a moratorium on foreclosures until the housing bubble can adjust to reasonable levels and restructure loans with fixed interest rates so "Small People" can pay their mortgages and the economy will "Gurgle Up" to the Congressional-Wall Street Cabal. We need to extend food stamp and unemployment benefits to pump money directly into the "Small People" economy.

Taxes need to be raised on the top one percent of wealthy people in this country that own more wealth than the bottom ninety percent combined. Taxes need to be reduced dramatically for the bottom 99%. A .25 transaction fee for the people who gamble on Wall Street must also be levied and put into the "Small People" economy for such programs as education and energy.

Regardless, if HR1424 passes or fails, every Congressperson, Democratic or Republican, who voted to sell out the "Small" Person needs to be retired and not sent back to Congress in January.

Reject fear-based politics. We "Small People" need courageous REPRESENTATIVES that will work on real solutions for us, because, as a matter of fact, we are not the "Small People," we are the sovereigns in this Republic and we need to reassert our sovereignty and show our employees in DC that we mean business.

Help me replace Nancy Pelosi in January, she has been the biggest Bush enabler of them all. She sent a very obsequious letter to George Bush this week promising him that Congress would pass a Bill for him. Not only did she not hold him accountable for the crimes he has committed while in office, she is giving him one last victory (at the expense of we "Small People") before he shamefully rides into the sunset while our Republic is burning and Nancy Pelosi plays her fiddle, obediently. George Bush is going to leave quite a mess, and this Congress has proven that they not only do not know how to clean up his messes, but they have collaborated in the orgy that made the mess.

Update: HR 1424 just passed and Congress applauded the marauding of our Republic. We "Small People" have been given a significant defeat.

237-153
Democrats: 154 yeas; 58 nays
Republicans: 86 yeas; 103 nays
31 Reps not voting
(c) 2008 Cindy Sheehan

Good Morning Middle America, your weekend addition of the King of Simple News is on the air.

My publisher recently asked me if my next book would be titled "I Told You So." I replied that I thought it may be more appropriately titled, "Survival Middle Class."

As my predictions come true one by one, I can't help remind myself that forecasting such dire happenings has nothing to do with genius on my part, but simple old 8th grade math with a dash of common sense.

The most recent of my futuristic forecasting to come to fruition was China's claim that they would in fact go on with their economic bliss long after the U.S. was toast.

When you make a deal with the devil the outcome is predictable; the situation gets too hot to handle. When the people who run our country are related to that devil, it makes things doubly difficult.

I pointed out during the writing of my book that China would use the U.S. market, U.S. money, U.S. technology, U.S. Corporations and our ignorant U.S. leadership to propel themselves into a Chinese domestic expansion program. Guess what?

China has a massive internal market that pales that of America. All they needed was help to build the infrastructure and sha-zam, instant commerce. U.S. government and corporations gladly provided all that they needed. Greed is a powerful enemy.

When our government and corporate leaders were wallowing at the Chinese trough and casting America's future aside with the insane promise that global trade with poverty stricken workers was good for America, I could scarcely contain myself.

Today, China says that they make no excuses for becoming an industrialized nation and the U.S. will have to find another way to reinvent ourselves. China is also turning down the money tap that supplies us with our continual request of more than a Billion dollars per day that keeps our foolish leadership treading water.

America's greatest enemies aren't in Iraq or Iran, they're running for president. Our failures and our current situation didn't come from the invading hordes of China; they came from Washington D.C. and stepped off the elevators on Wall Street.

The enemies of Main Street and our rural farms and ranches are the American elitists of Congress and Corporate America. These people didn't use bullets and bombs to destroy the greatest nation on earth; they used a ball point pen and the total ignorance and cowardice of the American people in a bold daylight heist that resulted in the the wholesale destruction of the Middle Class.

While America is literally being gutted and robbed by the actions of our government and corporations, we send young men and women to die in foreign lands all over the face of the planet in defense of the profits of those who are destroying us from within! WHY CAN'T WE SEE THAT?

Yet we are told that the world's most massive and growing military is necessary to keep US safe. Who is it really keeping safe?

At this point and time, nothing short of revolution will change Middle America's collision course with third world status. Allowing the criminal and manipulated markets of Wall Street to correct, rather than be bailed out, would have been a good start if we were ever to begin healing.

But, it isn't American's that our government is worried about healing, it's our foreign lenders and the corporate investments in those foreign nations that require your suffering and tax dollar. Let there be no mistake about that.

Consider that William Jefferson Clinton signed both NAFTA and the WTO in back to back years...virtually guaranteeing the wholesale destruction of the Middle Class.

Consider that George W. Bush wished to move our Social Security money to Wall Street!

Consider that Barrack Hussein Obama and John McCain wish to allow all illegal immigrants to remain in the U.S. and to open a path for even greater immigration, while at the same time more than 750,000 American workers have lost their jobs in the past nine months.

I apologize for the lack of humor in my article today...I just don't feel all that funny today.

"My daughter's dream became a nightmare," sadly said Gloria Barrios, seven months after her daughter, US Air Force Senior Airman Blanca Luna, was murdered on Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas.

On March 7, 2008, Senior Airman Luna, 27, was found dead in her room at the Sheppard Air Force Base Inn, an on-base lodging facility. She had been stabbed in the back of the neck with a short knife. Luna, an Air Force Reservist with four years of prior military service in the Marine Corps including a tour in Japan, was killed three days before she was to graduate from an Air Conditioning, Ventilation and Heating training course.

When she was notified of her daughter's death, she was handed a letter from Major General K.C. McClain, commander of the Air Force Personnel Center, which stated that her daughter "was found dead on 7 March 2008 at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, as the result of an apparent homicide." When her body was returned to her family for burial, Barrios and other family members saw bruises on Blanca's face and wounds on her fingers as if she were defending herself. One of the investigators later told Mrs. Barrios that Blanca had been killed in an "assassin-like" manner. Friends say that she told them some in her unit "had given her problems."

Seven months later, Luna's mother made her first visit to the base where her daughter was killed, to pry more information from the Air Force about her daughter's death. Although the Air Force sent investigators to her home in Chicago several times to brief her on the case, she was concerned that the Air Force would not provide a copy of the autopsy report and other documents, seven months after Luna was killed. The Air Force says it cannot provide Mrs. Barrios with a copy of the autopsy as the investigation is "ongoing." Mrs. Barrios plans to have an independent autopsy conducted.

She was accompanied by her sister and six persons from a support group in Chicago and by several concerned Texans from Dallas, Fort Worth and Denton. The Chicago support group, composed of long-time, experienced social justice activists in the Hispanic community, also included Juan Torres, whose son John, an Army soldier, was found dead under very suspicious circumstances in 2004 at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Because of his battle to get documents from the Army bureaucracy on the death of his son four years ago, Torres has been helping the Barrios family in their effort to gain information about the death of Luna.

When Mrs. Barrios and friends arrived on the Air Base they were greeted by five Air Force officials. Mrs. Barrios requested that her support group be allowed to join her in an Air Force-conducted bus tour of the facilities where her daughter went to school and the lodging facility where she was found dead, but the request was denied. Mrs. Barrios then asked that her friend and translator, Magda Castaneda, and I be allowed to go on the bus and attend the meeting with the base commander and investigators.

After consultation with the base public affairs officer, Deputy Wing Commander Colonel Norsworthy decreed that only Mrs. Barrios' sister and Mr. Torres could accompany her. Mrs. Barrios, her sister and Mr. Torres are not fluent in English. Mrs. Barrios told the Air Force officers she did not feel comfortable with having translators provided by the Air Force and again asked that Mrs. Castaneda be allowed to translate for her as Mrs. Castaneda had done numerous times during Air Force briefings at her home. She asked that I be allowed to go, as I knew the military bureaucracy.

In front of the support group, the Air Force public affairs officer, George Woodward, advised Colonel Norsworthy not to allow Mrs. Casteneda and me to come on the base and attend the meetings as both of us were "outspoken in the media and their presence would jeopardize the integrity of the meeting with the family."

Mrs. Castaneda countered that during a previous meeting with the Air Force investigators in Chicago, she had been told by one investigator that she asked too many questions. Could that be the reason that she was unable to accompany Mrs. Barrios, she asked? Mrs. Barrios also reminded the officers that after she was interviewed for an article about her daughter that was published in July in the Chicago Reader, "Murder on the Base," she was warned by an Air Force official not to speak to the media again.

Mrs. Castaneda demanded that Woodward provide her a copy of the article on which he based his decision to recommend to the deputy base commander that she not be allowed on the base to translate for the family. Several hours later, Woodward gave Castaneda an article from Indy media in which she was quoted as the translator for Mrs. Barrios, and in which she had translated Barrios' statement: "Luna a four year Marine veteran."

While Colonel Wright (the author of this article) has written numerous articles concerning the rape and murder of women in the military, she reminded the officers that she holds a valid military ID card as a retired colonel, that she had not violated any laws or military regulations by writing and speaking about issues of violence against women in the military and that most families of military members who have been killed are at a disadvantage in dealing with the military bureaucracy in finding answers to the questions they have about the deaths of their loved ones. She reminded the officials that the parents of NFL football player Pat Tillman, who after three Congressional hearings on the death of their son in Afghanistan in 2002, still don't have answers to the questions of who killed their son and why the perpetrator of the crime hasn't been brought to justice. Families of "ordinary" service members, and particularly families with limited knowledge of the military and with limited financial means find themselves at the mercy of the military for information.

The base Catholic chaplain and the staff Judge Advocate, both colonels, were silent during the exchange. One would have thought that perhaps a chaplain who watched as Mrs. Barrios, a single mother whose only daughter had been killed and whose English was minimal, broke down in tears and sat sobbing on the curb as the public affairs officer described her friends as "outspoken and a threat to the integrity of the meetings" would have been sensitive to a grieving mother's need for a family friend who had translated in all the previous meetings with the Air Force investigators - but he was silent. Likewise, the senior lawyer on the base, who no doubt had handled many criminal cases, would have recognized that a distraught mother would need someone who could take notes and understand the nuances of the discussion in English during the very stressful discussions with the investigators - but he was silent. Instead, the colonels bowed to the civilian public affairs officer's advice that "outspoken" women were a threat to the "integrity of the meeting." Eventually, Mrs. Barrios, her sister Algeria and Juan Torres met with Brigadier General Mannon, commander of the 82nd Training Wing, and with three members of the Office of Special Investigations. Mrs. Barrios said they were given no new information about the investigation and questioned again why her friends, who over the past seven months have been a part of the briefings from the Air Force, had been kept out of meetings where the Air Force officials knew they were not going to provide any new information.

Since 2003, there have been 34 homicides and 218 "self-inflicted" deaths (suicides) in the Air Force, and in 2007-2008 alone, five homicides and 35 "self-inflicted" deaths according to the Public Affairs Office of the 82nd Training Wing at Sheppard Air Force base.

On the same day that Mrs. Barrios went to Sheppard Air Force Base, October 3, 2008, the US Army announced that a US Army woman sergeant had been killed near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, by a stab wound in the neck. Sergeant Christina Smith, 29, was stabbed on September 30, 2008, allegedly by her US Army husband Sergeant Richard Smith, who was accompanied by Private First Class Matthew Kvapil.

Smith was the fourth military woman murdered in North Carolina in the past nine months.

On June 21, 2008, US Army Specialist Megan Touma, 23, was killed inside a Fayetteville, North Carolina, hotel, less than two weeks after she arrived at Fort Bragg from an assignment in Germany. She was seven months pregnant. Sergeant Edgar Patino, a married male soldier assigned to Fort Bragg, whom Touma knew from Germany and who reportedly was the father of the unborn child, has been arrested for her murder.

On July 10, 2008, Army 2nd Lt. Holley Wimunc, an Army nurse at Fort Bragg, was killed. Her estranged husband, Marine Corporal John Wimunc of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, has been arrested in her death and the burning of her body and Lance Corporal Kyle Alden was arrested for destroying evidence and providing a false alibi.

Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach had been raped in May 2007 and protective orders had been issued against the alleged perpetrator, fellow Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean. The burned body of Lauterbach and her unborn baby were found in a shallow grave in the backyard of Laurean's home in January 2008. Laurean fled to Mexico, where he was captured by Mexican authorities. He is currently awaiting extradition to the United States to stand trial. Lauterbach's mother testified before Congress on July 31, 2008, that the Marine Corps ignored warning signs that Laurean was a danger to her daughter.

As a small voice from the back of the room, I have one question regarding the discovery of the illiquidity of all the huge corporate conglomerates who have taken over the finances of this ostensibly democratic nation. When is somebody going to jail?

Now, I don't profess to truly understand the ins and outs of our financial system and I have absolutely no concept of anything over a million of anything. I think I am in good company as you would be safe in assuming that the majority of the Americam people are in the same boat as I. However, those of us with intact brain cells do remember the Enron fiasco when Congressional hearings were held which exposed the various forms of chicanery which had been perpetrated by the corporate moguls and their compliant accountants. It seems that they had engaged in what they termed "creative accounting" in order to induce pigeons, (pardon me, investors), to continue to trust them with trust funds and other forms of financial donations. We watched with a sense of irony as first one and then another of the perpetrators were marched off to the Federal Countty Clubs. (But our money was still gone.)

Now we learn that the same sort of underhanded and blatantly dishonest business practices had brought down many of those companies who had been entrusted with the very lifeblood of our capitalist financial and political system. They had created false balance sheets which listed the packages of home, auto, small business, and miscellaneous loans which had been issued to patently and obviously poor credit risks at their face value rather than discounting them due to the likelihood that a large percentage of them would default. This created the false image of a company in robust health and highly eligible for the consideration by potential investors.

The only reason we have heard advanced as to the reasons for this perfidy have to do with the eligibility of the corporate officers to draw bonuses, raises, and parachutes with a higher carat of gold content, which only further drained the corporate coffers and caused the business foundation to shake still more. It was only when the whole house of cards was preparing to come down around the ears of the entire system was this condition uncovered by the oblivious souls who were in the position of guardians of the public good, who had been blithely watching the stock market go up and up.

We have been told that it is our fault for borrowing or buying things we could not afford. Shame on us that, if we were searching for a new home with a limited budget, that the fast-talking sales person told us that they had access to "creative financing" which would allow us to pay the interest only for the first two years to allow us time to get our feet under us before having to start paying on the principle. Or shame on us when we went shopping for a used car to replace the old one that had just gasped its last and the slick salesman said that, by the same method, we could afford to drive away in "this little baby right here. And shame on us when our bank told us that Adjustable Rate Loan was the newest thing and had many advantages. Double-shame that we fell for the easy credit card approvals that appeared in our mail regularly. Well, now we have to pay for those mistakes, in spades!

Rather than to risk the collapse from spreading to the international market with the dollar sinking into oblivion, we were told that it would be necessary to obligate the American taxpayers for generations to come for buying out those worthless loans and putting right the condition of these companies. Now, I could be wrong and I readily admit to naiveté in these matters, but I felt it would have been as productive and more fair to the American people if the government were to take them into Federal receivership, terminate without severance pay all the people involved in the conspiracy to defraud, and set the firms on the right path before releasing them back to the control of the shareholders.

However, we must assume that Congress knows best and chose to take another path and the American people will have the opportunity to judge their actions in the upcoming election. While the Congresspersons are at home campaigning, perhaps we will be able to ask them to further account for their reasoning and explain their actions. There are many questions that the wage slaves and others who feel disconnected from the nuts and bolts of managing our futures would like answered if answers there be. Among them are:

Why, when we lose our jobs or have a medical catastrophe dowe not receive any assistance from the government until our resources are so depleted that we qualify for welfare?

Why was it necessary to make the bankruptcy court so restrictive that relief was all but unavailable through that action?

And, oh, so many more questions why we, the people, are treated so much less generously than the multi-billion dollar corporations. If we make a simple mistake on our income taxes, the vaunted accountants from the Internal Revenue Service fall upon us like so many fire ants and we pay up or go to jail and they will follow us to the ends of the earth to collect every penny, costing us out job or profession and ruining our families forever after. Yet, those who are engaged in such corporate criminality are allowed to float away in their golden parachutes and dwell forever after on the Riviera.

Dear Uberfuhrer Boxer,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, Ralph Nader, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Anthony (Fat Tony) Kennedy.

Without your lock-step calling for the repeal of the Constitution, your support of our two coup d'etats, your calling for emptying the treasury before we leave office and giving it to the wealthy goons on Wall Street even though 80,000 voters told you not to, Iraq and these many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Democratic Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Iron Cross 1st class with ruby clusters presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Bush at a gala celebration at "der Wolf's Lair," formally "Rancho de Bimbo," on 10-31-2008. We salute you Frau Boxer, Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Vice Fuhrer Cheney

And the reality is even more imbalanced than that graph illustrates: between (1) the tiny margins the Democrats have had when controlling the Senate, (2) the true functional majority of "GOP + Blue Dogs" in the House, (3) the extraordinary centralization of power in the White House, and (4) Democratic complicity and fear, it is GOP policy which ends up prevailing in virtually every instance of alleged "bipartisanship" even during those tiny slivers of ostensible Democratic control.

The overarching reality of the country is that we've lived under unchallenged Republican rule and the country has virtually collapsed on every level. No matter how dumb Rich Lowry and David Brooks fantasize The Regular People to be, those facts are far too glaring to suppress.

UPDATE: In comments, Harksaw suggests adding the Supreme Court to the graph, based on which party appointed the justices. Doing so produces this:_

We've been an overwhelmingly Republican-dominated country for the last eight years (at least) and the results of that couldn't be clearer -- or more devastating.