Fish such as Tilapia and Yellow Perch are raised in a large tank of water. Growing Power uses Tilapia and Yellow Perch in our aquaponics systems because they are relatively easy to raise and because we can market them to restaurants, market basket customers, and they are a favorite in ethnic markets. Read more about Yellow Perch and Tilapia below.

By using gravity as a transport, water is drained from the fish tank into a gravel bed. Here, beneficial bacteria break down the toxic ammonia in fish waste to Nitrite and then to Nitrogen, a key nutrient for plant development. On the gravel bed, we also use watercress as a secondary means of water filtration.

The filtered water is pumped from the gravel bed to the growing beds, where we raise a variety of crops from specialty salad greens to tomatoes. The water is wicked up to the crops roots with the help of coir, a by-product of coconut shells and a sustainable replacement for peat moss.

Finally, the water flows from the growing beds back into the tank of fish. Growing Power uses this type of aquaponics system because it is easy to build and only needs a small pump and heat to get the system running.

Types of fish we grow:

Yellow Perch

Yellow Perch is a species of perch found in the United States and Canada and is a glacial lakes species. They prefer cooler water which makes them ideal to raise in our hoop houses at Growing Power. These full-bodied fish are a favorite with chefs due to their white, flaky, delicious meat.

Yellow Perch are also in short supply. Lake Michigan's yellow perch numbers have decreased 80 percent since 1990. States surrounding the Lake Michigan have put regulations on yellow perch fishing. For instance, Wisconsin banned commercial fishing for yellow perch in Lake Michigan in 1997.

What does Perch eat? In nature, Yellow Perch are primarily bottom feeders and eat almost anything, but prefer minnows, insect larvae, plankton, and worms. At Growing Power, our perch eat a combination of commercial feed and worms.

Tilapia

Originally found in Africa, Tilapia has been farmed for more than 2,500 years. Tilapia is a perfect fish for aquaponics because of its rapid growth, large size, and because it tastes great. This hardy fish can adapt to most any condition with the exception of water temperature. Tilapia prefer warm water - at least 75 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes about 9 months for our Tilapia to grow to a harvestable size, about 1.5 pounds.

What does Tilapia eat? At Growing Power, we feed our fish duckweed, ground-up salad greens from the greenhouse, worms, and Tilapia love to eat algae from the side of the tank.

Why do we use compost in our system?

We fill our growing pots with a mixture of coir and compost. The coir is made from discarded coconut husks and helps wick water to the plant's root system. The compost provides extra nutrient to grow an abundance of crops within the system. Traditional hydroponic growing, or growing without soil, relies on fish waste alone to fertilize the crops. The problem is, you can only grow crops with lower nutritional needs such as basil. For example, in most traditional hydroponic systems, Boron is found in very low quantities. Boron is essential for flower development in crops - tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers - which means that production for these kinds of crops is very low in hydroponic systems. At Growing Power, we solved this problem by adding nutrient rich compost to the pots in our system. Still have doubts? Come by the farm and try one of our tomatoes grown in our aquaponics system. Satisfaction is guaranteed.

Interested in learning more? Come to Milwaukee and learn how to build your own system at a Growing Power's workshop. Can't make it to Milwaukee? See demonstrations based on our aquaponics model in a neighborhood near you:

Ft. Valley State in Georgia

As you might expect, the New York Times buries the lede in its latest story about Somalia, but surprisingly, the general outlines of the truth of the rapidly collapsing situation on this third front in the "War on Terror" can be gleaned from the piece. Some 14 paragraphs into the story, Establishment water-carrier Jeffrey Gettleman finally gets down to the heart of the matter, and, to his credit, delivers an admirably succinct précis of the latest imperial flameout:

In 2006, Islamist troops teamed up with clan elders and businessmen to drive out the warlords who had been preying upon Somalia's people since the central government first collapsed in 1991. The six months the Islamists ruled Mogadishu turned out to be one of the most peaceful periods in modern Somali history.

But today's Islamists are a harder, more brutal group than the ones who were ousted by an Ethiopian invasion, backed by the United States, in late 2006. The old guard included many moderates, but those who tried to work with the transitional government mostly failed, leaving them weak and marginalized, and removing a mitigating influence on the die-hard insurgents.

On top of that, the unpopular and bloody Ethiopian military operations over the past two years have radicalized many Somalis and sent hundreds of unemployed young men - most of whom have never gone to school, never been part of a functioning society and never had much of a chance to do anything but shoulder a gun - into the arms of militant Islamic groups.

That is pretty much it, give or take some details -- such as the extent of Washington's direct involvement in the ongoing destruction of Somalia, which as we have often noted here, involved not only arming, training and funding the Ethiopian invaders, but also dropping US bombs on fleeing refugees, lobbing US missiles into Somali villages, renditioning refugees -- including American citizens -- into captivity in Ethiopia's notorious dungeons, and running U.S. death squads in Somalia to "clean up" after covert operations. (The latter is no deep dark secret, by the way; U.S. officials openly boasted of it to Esquire Magazine.)

Now, as anyone not completely blinded by imperial hubris could have predicted, the entire misbegotten exercise has collapsed into the worst-case scenario. A relatively stable, relatively moderate government which held out a promise of better future for the long-ravaged land was overthrown-- ostensibly to prevent it from becoming a hotbed of radical extremism. The resulting violence, chaos and brutal occupation by foreign forces led directly and inevitably to -- what else? -- a rise in radical extremism. Thousands of innocent people have been killed, hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes, millions have been plunged into the direst poverty and the imminent threat of starvation and disease, unspeakable atrocities and unbearable suffering are arising, as they always do in any situation, anywhere, when a human community is destroyed.

Yet none of this penetrates the glossy shell of imperial hubris -- not even now, when the disaster is so glaring that even eager water-carriers of empire like Gettleman are forced to acknowledge reality (albeit in the closing paragraphs). For the real thrust of the Times story is not outrage at the living hell engendered by the Terror War's third "regime change" operation. No, the Times' "analysis" is clearly aimed at one goal: continuing the brutal occupation of the Ethiopian invaders.

The Ethiopians are making serious noises about withdrawing all or most of their troops in January. Perhaps Ethiopian strongman Meles Zenawi realizes he has been played by the great gamesters on the Potomac, expending massive amounts of blood and treasure only to end up in a face-losing retreat, and with a far more virulent, dangerous mess on his borders than before the invasion. Or perhaps he is playing games of his own. In any case, the Ethiopian threat has suddenly panicked the Lords of the West, who realize that, as in Iraq, the only thing holding up their local clients is the armed might of a foreign invader. Suddenly, the Western powers that backed the invasion are shocked -- shocked! -- to find that the warlords they installed in power (some of them openly in the pay of the CIA) have no popular support in the country, and, as Gettleman notes, now "controls only a few city blocks of the entire country." The only preventing the complete collapse of Washington's clients, he warns, is presence of the Ethiopians.

Thus the emphasis in the article on the dire consequences of Ethiopia ending its participation in the American-sponsored war crime in Somalia. Gettleman trots out some heavy Establishment lumber for the requisite fearmongering: The International Crisis Group, which he tells us is "a research institute that tracks conflicts worldwide." No doubt it does; for the group is chock-a-block with the great and good of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment, whose raison d'etre is "conflicts worldwide."

The ICG board is packed with such luminaries as Thomas Pickering, who served as the Reagan-Bush man in El Salvador when the US-backed government there was slaughtering civilians by the thousands to maintain its elitist-militarist rule. Pickering was a simpering apologist for the blood-letting, declaring that the dead civilians were all sympathizers with the insurgency, and thus "somewhat more than innocent civilian bystanders." Later, as US ambassador to Moscow, he went on to applaud Boris Yeltsin's violent suppression of democracy in Russia in 1993 -- an incident that seems largely forgotten these days in all the fulminations about Vladimir Putin "introducing" authoritarian rule in Russia.

ICG Co-Chair Pickering is joined by other such worthies as hardcore neocon Ken Adelman (who presciently -- and no doubt profitably -- jumped ship to endorse Barack Obama before the election); Zbigniew Brzezinski, who helped create the armed global jihad movement in order to hotfoot the Soviets in Afghanistan; Wesley Clark, brave bombardier of civilians in Serbia; Prince Turki al-Faisal, who directed the sinister, extremist-promoting Saudi intelligence apparat for decades; Richard Armitage, a PNAC vet and one of the key players in the operation of the imperial war-and-domination machine for years, who, like his former boss Colin Powell, has acquired a wholly unearned reputation as a "moderate"; Yegor Gaidar, who as Yeltsin's prime minister rammed through the "shock doctrine" economic extremist that gutted Russian society and ruined the lives of millions; and Lawrence Summers, one of the architects of the global economic meltdown, now serving as a top adviser to Barack Obama.

This group sent out analyst Rashid Abdi to use the NY Times as a megaphone to warn against the risks of ending savage, bloody foreign interventions into other countries:

"It will be bloody," predicted Rashid Abdi, a Somalia analyst at the International Crisis Group, a research institute that tracks conflicts worldwide. "The Ethiopians have decided to let the transitional government sink. The chaos will spread from the south to the north. Warlordism will be back."

Mr. Rashid sees Somalia deteriorating into an Afghanistan-like cauldron of militant Islamism, drawing in hard-core fighters from the Comoros, Zanzibar, Kenya and other neighboring Islamic areas, a process that seems to have already started. Those men will eventually go home, spreading the killer ethos.

"Somalia has now reached a very dangerous phase," he said. "The whole region is in for more chaos, I'm afraid."

Here we see the logic of militarism on full display: the only way to prevent the rise of terrorism in a country is by invading that country and occupying it with a foreign military force -- which, of course, only gives rise to more terrorism in that country. This circular reasoning seems absurd on its face, but it is in fact the highly efficient dynamic that drives and sustains the ideology of militarism in practical power.

Militarism -- either in its overt, unashamed form as espoused by the neo-cons and their outriders, or in the more subtly packaged, sugar-coated (and often self-deluding) version of the "humanitarian interventionists" -- is the ruling ideology of the American state. Like all ideologies, it comes in different shadings, different emphases, different factions, and so on, but the national power structure is firmly committed across the board to the use of violence -- and the ever-present threat of violence -- to advance a bipartisan agenda of American hegemony on the world scene. Some factions take great pains to present this hegemony as benevolent and altruistic; other factions don't care how it comes across ("Let them hate us as long as they fear us," was a sentiment frequently voiced in high circles at the beginning of the Terror War). But all factions are willing to kill people -- either directly or by proxy -- to maintain that hegemony.

And that's why, for the militarist mindset, situations such as the hell in Somalia -- or in Iraq -- or in Afghanistan -- are always win-win scenarios. If the application of brute force in Somalia had "worked" -- i.e, if the "regime change" invasion and subsequent repression had produced a quiescent client state willing to open up its resources to foreign exploitation and to jail, torture and kill any of its own citizens who threatened the profitable status quo -- then the militarists would have claimed it as a template that could and should be applied over and over around the world. It would have "justified" the militarist path.

But the collapse of Somalia into a sinkhole of chaos and extremism that could "threaten the whole region," perhaps the whole world, can equally be used to "justify" a militarist response; after all, how else can we protect ourselves from this heightened danger of terrorism, except with bigger military forces, more aggressive responses to potential threats, more power and scope for our security services, more authority for the "Commander-in-Chief" to help keep us safe, etc., etc.? What we have long said here about Iraq and Afghanistan applies to Somalia: the imperial warmongers have won, no matter what the ultimate outcome. More than a million innocent people now lie dead across the three Terror War fronts, but the perpetrators of these crimes -- not only the officials in government who order and carry out particular operations, but also the systems that sustain the militarist order (the Pentagon, the arms dealers, the military servicers, the security agencies and their shadow networks, the mercenaries, the innumerable corporations, think tanks, businesses large and small plugged into the profits of the war machine) -- go on from strength to strength. The officials either stay on in government, like Pentagon warlord Robert Gates, or go off to honorable, untroubled, and remunerative retirements, like Bush and Cheney, or else park themselves on corporate boards or in their own lucrative "consulting firms" until their particular faction takes power again. Meanwhile, the systems and institutions of militarism grow ever more entrenched and unquestioned and unchallenged.

This column is part three in a series on the legacy of the Bush administration's war on the press. Read part I and part II. In a May 2008 "Think Again" column, we addressed a coordinated Pentagon propaganda initiative, wherein the Bush administration trained retired military officers to repeat well-honed talking points during interviews with the press, who presented them as objective analysts. We focused on the revelations, which came out in a report by The New York Times' David Barstow, as well as the total blackout of the issue by guilty television networks.

Seven months later, the blackout remains, although virtually nothing has changed. Barstow followed up with another deeply reported piece this week, which focuses on former General Barry McCaffrey's myriad ties to private defense contractors that remain undisclosed while he opines for policies that favor their weapons on NBC (which is itself owned by the weapons contractor General Electric).

NBC still doesn't find any of these ties worthy of indicating on the air, nor have they mentioned McCaffrey's involvement in direct propaganda training from the Pentagon-and they've had plenty of opportunities to correct the record. Last Thursday, for example, McCaffrey was talking with Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News about U.S. military policy in Afghanistan. He also discussed Iraq on NBC earlier that day, and made appearances on September 6 and 9 to talk about Afghanistan. He was identified only as a retired general and "military analyst." Williams did address the situation once on his blog, where he wrote only of his "close friendship" with McCaffrey and assured readers that the general was a "passionate patriot"-as if this somehow excused his clear conflicts of interest.

All administrations attempt to manipulate the media, but the Bush administration may be in a class by itself. And many in the media have be so focused on their own troubles-whether financial or competitive-that they've been unable even to recognize the problem, much less combat it.

The Bush administration's manipulation attempts could hardly have been more obvious if they took out ads on Craigslist. They even went so far as to produce "news" segments that too often were broadcast by irresponsible local news outlets. The administration invested untold millions producing what they called "video news releases"-taped, edited packages that sold a particular administration line within the theater of actual news reporting. There would be a reporter with a microphone who would tell a story in a seemingly objective way, and the spots never mentioned that the "reporter" actually worked for the government. Many local television stations ran packages from "reporter Karen Ryan," for example. Ryan touted the benefits of Bush administration initiatives such as the Medicare Part D extension and No Child Left Behind, always signing off only with "In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan, reporting." Her "report" about Part D was seen on 40 different television stations across the country in less than a month, and none of them disclosed that the spots were paid for by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Of course, the main selling job for the administration was its catastrophic war in Iraq. The New York Times revealed in 2005 that the State Department produced fake news packages about the war, aviation security, and international farming. The spot about the Iraq war featured a jubilant Iraqi-American telling a camera crew in Kansas City: "Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A."

In addition, the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress frequently placed false news items about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. INC boasted in a letter to Congress in 2002 that 108 articles appeared in newspapers, news agencies, and magazines in the United States, Britain, and Australia based on information peddled by INC.

The administration also paid off members of the media to hold the administration line. I detailed in "Bush's War on the Press" the payments made to pundits Armstrong Williams ($240,000), Maggie Gallagher ($21,000), and Michael McManus ($10,000) to tout various domestic initiatives.

Most famously, the administration purposely indulged Jeff Gannon, a.k.a. former gay prostitute James Guckert, who was employed by a phony news agency run by Republican operatives. Gannon was frequently called upon by White House press secretary Scott McClellan with the words "Go ahead, Jeff," which always signaled that the press corps could be getting into an area that might embarrass the White House-or that they could be near discovering a nugget of genuine news. Gannon's oeuvre included such classics as "Kerry Could Become First Gay President."

As James Pinkerton, an official in both the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, and aide to Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, would admit, the degree of clearance Gannon enjoyed in this security atmosphere must have required "an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House." It had to be "conscious" that "some investigation should proceed, and they should find that out." This was how deep the denial was inside the mainstream with regard to the manner in which they allowed themselves to be used.

Washington Post media cop Howard Kurtz saw the culprit in the L'Affaire Gannon/Gucker as "these liberal bloggers, [who] have started investigating [Gannon's] personal life in an effort to discredit him." As any mobster worth his proverbial salt can tell you, when you get the cops doing your job for you, well, your work is done. You might as well sit home with the kids and relax.

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

It appears that Congress has reached an agreement to loan the automakers a few billion to get them through a tough spot. That tough spot is the time between now and the swearing in of Barack Hussein Obama. After all, "Help is on the way."

The announcement that 533,000 people lost their jobs last month was fewer than I actually expected; the government must be hiring again. The half million plus is not the real number however. Our working population grows at a rate of around 150,000 per month and the numbers for September and October were revised to an additional 199,000 job loses.

So let's do the math; 533,000 job losses in November, 150,000 jobs per month for the three month period for those who failed to find first time work, add the revised losses for September and October of 723,000 and we have a 90 day overall job loss of 1,706,000.

If this was a weight loss contest, we would certainly have a clear cut winner; the U.S. by a landslide. Our government fails comprehend the macroeconomic connectivity of one economic sector to another. They are happy as clams playing Whack-A-Mole and right now the automakers are popping up.

But who will save the airlines? Retail business? State, city, county and town governments? Who will bailout the homebuilders, the homeowners, the landscapers and concrete contractors? What about the remaining failing banks? Where will the additional trillions and trillions come from?

As the delusional economists from around the country weigh in with their predictions, the range goes from, "This situation is not nearly as serious as it appears," to "We are entering a time that will be more severe than the great depression."

My prediction never changes. Until such time that our leadership realizes that infinite growth is impossible, we will march steadily down hill. Until such time that the citizens of the United States demand that population be curtailed; our job losses and population gains will be lead to ever shrinking pieces of the same pie.

What is occurring economically in the U.S., and in the world for that part, isn't some mysterious unexplainable phenomena, but rather the normal course of natural physics correcting the ill conceived plans of man.

I have ended this blog many times over the last couple of years with such words as, Wake up Middle America; this is your final boarding call. Or, "This not a drill, this is the real thing." Or, "The last train is pulling away from the station."

Today I want to provide you with a link from former Presidential contender, Fred Thompson. It will make you think, make you laugh, and it's darn sure worth your time to watch it. I may induct ol' Fred into the King of Simple hall of fame for this one.

In the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Philip Morris, America's largest cigarette company, compared itself to the NAACP. And to a South Carolina death row inmate illegally denied due process. And to indigent criminal defendants not afforded adequate legal representation. And it did so to win a case against an elderly African American woman named Mayola Williams whose husband died from lung cancer in 1997, after smoking three packs of Marlboros a day for more than 40 years.

The tobacco company has declared itself a civil rights victim, says Ray Thomas, one of Williams' lawyers. "That they have the gall to do that shows how brazen they are," he says.

Philip Morris' victimhood dates back to 1999, when an Oregon jury hit the company with a $79 million punitive damages award in a lawsuit Williams filed after her husband Jesse died. She had argued that Philip Morris had deceived Jesse with its long-running misinformation campaign to convince the public that smoking was harmless, and that the company was thus liable for his death. (It's easy to forget that it wasn't until 1999-after the Williams verdict-that the tobacco company finally publicly admitted that smoking causes cancer.) The verdict was a rare smoker's victory. For nearly 50 years, Philip Morris had defeated an endless string of personal injury lawsuits by waging a war of attrition on the plaintiffs, a strategy perfected by the tobacco industry. As RJ Reynolds' general counsel explained in a 1988 memo, "To paraphrase General Patton, the way we won these cases was not by spending all of Reynolds' money but by making that other son of a bitch spend all his."

The first major verdict in a smoker's lawsuit in 1988 was for only $400,000. The lawyers who brought the case spent $2.5 million to win it; the tobacco company spent $50 million. After the Supreme Court sent that case back for a new trial, the lawyers gave up, virtually bankrupt. That's why, until 2001, when a smoker finally prevailed, no tobacco company had ever paid out a dime in damages. (The lawyers who eventually did get rich from tobacco litigation were not representing smokers but the states attempting to recoup Medicaidcosts related to smoking, a different issue.)

So naturally, after its big loss in Oregon, Philip Morris appealed, asking the Oregon appellate courts to overturn the verdict. The trial court judge had already trimmed the verdict to $32 million, saying that the original award was excessive. But the Oregon courts have not been a friendly playing field for the company. After hearing its appeal, the Oregon Court of Appeals responded by restoring the $79 million punitive damages award, a move the state Supreme Court approved unanimously, saying that Philip Morris' egregious conduct merited the stiff punishment.

Since then, the cigarette manufacturer has succeeded in appealing the case to the US Supreme Court no fewer than three times, including this latest trip. And despite two separate orders from the Supreme Court to revisit the size of the punitive damage award, the Oregon Supreme Court has continued to find reasons to uphold its original decision-unanimously. In the last round, the Oregon court found a problem with one of Philip Morris' proposed jury instructions, a state law issue, as grounds to avoid dealing with the question the Supreme Court had raised over the size of the award. An outraged Philip Morris calls this a "pretext" for refusing to overturn the award, and it has worked hard to frame its loss as the product of a rogue state court.

To do so, it has drawn on a case brought by the NAACP in 1958 after the state of Alabama tried to force the group to turn over its membership records. The case went to the Supreme Court four times because the Alabama courts, invoking state civil procedure rules, refused to comply with orders from above that it respect the civil rights group's constitutional due process rights. In court Wednesday, Philip Morris' lawyer Stephen Shapiro in effect compared the Oregon Supreme Court to racist Alabama judges, saying that the case was "very similar" to what happened in the NAACP case.

The rest of Philip Morris' argument relies on the sort of cases that the modern Supreme Court has been somewhat hostile toward: habeas corpus cases. Those are the appeals from criminal defendants, for instance, whose lawyers slept through their trials but whose convictions were upheld anyway. In the rare instances where defendants in those cases prevail, it's usually because the courts recognize that they had a poorly paid, incompetent lawyer who screwed up the procedural rule at issue. The courts find that the constitutional issues trump the state procedure. But those criminal defendants don't bear much resemblance to Philip Morris, which not only has enormous financial resources but was also represented at trial in this case by a lawyer who literally wrote the book on Oregon civil procedure rules.

Nonetheless, Shapiro repeatedly likened the company's plight to that of the defendant in a 2002 habeas case, Lee v. Kemna. In Kemna, a jury convicted the defendant of murder after his alibi witnesses disappeared from the courtroom and the judge refused to grant a recess in the trial so the witnesses could be located. The Supreme Court granted the defendant a new trial because it found that the state court procedural rule wasn't sufficient grounds to deny him a critical constitutional right. Philip Morris thinks it's in the same boat in the Williams case.

Yet the justices didn't seem to be buying that argument, perhaps for good reason. Kemna was an all-too-rare victory for a criminal defendant, says David Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor who worked on the case, noting that most criminal defendants in similar straits usually lose because the Supreme Court defers to the states to run their courts. "The Supreme Court's answer to those people is 'tough nuggies,'" he says. To give Philip Morris a victory, the high court would have to find some way to square such a decision with its general approach to criminal cases-which is not an easy act of jurisprudence. Indeed, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's new swing voter, wrote a dissent in Kemna, joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, in which he bashed the majority for disrespecting state courts and for not allowing the Missouri Court of Appeals to enforce its own rules.

Unfortunately, perhaps, for Williams, Kennedy seemed to have forgotten that case on Wednesday. His comments during oral arguments suggest that he was mighty upset that the Oregon Supreme Court had defied a direct order from the high court, however cleverly it might have done it. But Williams might not need Kennedy. During oral arguments, Justice Stephen Breyer, who had voted against Williams during her case's last visit to the court, noted that when he had first read Philip Morris' petition for certio rari, he thought that the Oregon court was indeed trying to do an end run around the Supreme Court. "I'm not sure that I think that now," he admitted.

After showing a surprising familiarity with the factual record, Breyer expressed skepticism that the Oregon Supreme Court had "ambushed" the tobacco company with an obscure, rarely used procedural rule, as Philip Morris had argued in its briefs. Instead, Breyer said he had to put himself in the shoes of the Oregon Supreme Court, and after doing so, he suggested that those Northwest justices actually did a pretty thorough job of handling the case and applied its rules the same way it had been done for 100 years.

Sunday morning, before dawn, I read in the New York Times that "the Pentagon is planning to add more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan" within the next 18 months -- "raising American force levels to about 58,000" in that country. Then I scraped ice off a windshield and drove to the C-SPAN studios, where a picture window showed a serene daybreak over the Capitol dome.

While I was on C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" for a live interview, the program aired some rarely seen footage with the voices of two courageous politicians who challenged the warfare state.

So, on Sunday morning, viewers across the country saw Barbara Lee speaking on the House floor three days after 9/11 -- just before she became the only member of Congress to vote against the president's green-light resolution to begin the U.S. military attack on Afghanistan.

"However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint," she said. The date was Sept. 14, 2001. Congresswoman Lee continued: "Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, Let's step back for a moment, let's just pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control."

And she said: "As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore."

The footage of Barbara Lee was an excerpt from the "War Made Easy",/I> documentary film (based on my book of the same name). As she appeared on a TV monitor, I glanced out the picture window. The glowing blue sky and streaky clouds above the Hill looked postcard-serene.

But the silence now enveloping the political non-response to plans for the Afghanistan war is a message of acquiescence that echoes what happened when the escalation of the Vietnam War gathered momentum.

During the mid-1960s, the conventional wisdom was what everyone with a modicum of smarts kept saying: higher U.S. troop levels in Vietnam were absolutely necessary. Today, the conventional wisdom is that higher U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan are absolutely necessary.

Many people who think otherwise -- including, I'd guess, quite a few members of Congress -- are keeping their thoughts to themselves, heads down and mouths shut, for roughly the same reasons that so many remained quiet as the deployment numbers rolled upward like an odometer of political mileage on the road to death in Vietnam.

Right now, the basic ingredients of further Afghan disasters are in place -- including, pivotally, a dire lack of wide-ranging debate over Washington's options. In an atmosphere reminiscent of 1965, when almost all of the esteemed public voices concurred with the decision by newly elected President Lyndon Johnson to deploy more troops to Vietnam, the tenet that the United States must send additional troops to Afghanistan is axiomatic in U.S. news media, on Capitol Hill and -- as far as can be discerned -- at the top of the incoming administration.

But the problem with such a foreign-policy "no brainer" is that the parameters of thinking have already been put in the rough equivalent of a lockbox. Dean Rusk, Robert McNamara and Lyndon Johnson approached Vietnam policy options no more rigidly than Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and Barack Obama appear poised to pursue Afghanistan policy options.

I was thinking about this when I left the C-SPAN building in the full light of day. The morning glow made the Capitol look majestic. Yet it was almost possible to see, streaked across the dome, an invisible new stain of blood and shattered bones.

Along with the grim patterns, there's a tradition of brave dissent on Capitol Hill. It's epitomized by Barbara Lee's prophetic statement just after 9/11 -- and by an earlier kindred spirit, the fierce Vietnam War opponent Senator Wayne Morse. If you'd like to see historic footage of them, retrieved from the nation's Orwellian memory hole, watch the "Washington Journal" segment by clicking here.

On Monday, USA Today reported that the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan "has asked the Pentagon for more than 20,000 soldiers, Marines and airmen" to raise the U.S. troop level in Afghanistan to 55,000 or 60,000. General David McKiernan says that is "needed until we get to this tipping point where the Afghan army and the Afghan police have both the capacity and capability to provide security for their people." Such a tipping point "is at least three or four more years away," "if we put these additional forces in here, it's going to be for the next few years. It's not a temporary increase of combat strength."

Is Afghanistan the same as Vietnam? Of course, competent geographers would say no. But the United States is the United States -- with domestic continuity between two eras of military intervention, spanning five decades, much more significant than we might think.

Dear Landeshauptmann Blagojevich,

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 various criminal activities which takes up the press and keeps our criminal activities out of sight, 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 Fuhrer Bunker," formally "The White House," on 12-27-2008. We salute you Herr Blagovich, Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Vice Fuhrer Cheney

If we have learned nothing else about Republicans, it's that, with few exceptions, they are vindictive, immoral, blood-thirsty, and just plain power-mad. Republicans are so much better at destroying things than Democrats are. They say and do whatever it takes to win. And if that doesn't work -- they seize it anyway.

So we were braced for another disappointment -- not because we didn't share Obama's vision of change and his hope for a better life for all Americans, but because voting machines were frantically flip-flopping votes from Obama to John McCain, minority voters were purged, telephones jangled with robocalls smearing Obama as an alien terrorist -- and John King over at CNN kept ramming solid red "magic" maps in our faces as proof that McCain could not lose.

So, what happened?

We woke up. After snoozing through massive homicide, refusing to confront genocide, ignoring fratracide and the hopelessness that has driven an alarming number of our military to commit suicide...we woke up. We stood united against a national addiction to chaos, bloodshed and corruption. We voted for a leader who promised to break that addiction, and to heal this nation in the name of the people.

By election night, we were giddy with relief. We clambered aboard that ship of state and rode the wave of long-lost hope -- free at last. Obama's win ripped a hole in the political air, and millions of us stood weeping as the blissful sound of Democracy wafted through every nook and cranny to swirl around this magnificent moment in our history.

But that was election night. Republicans, terrified of change, were in shock -- in total disarray. But the next morning, they were out in force -- maggots streaming from rotten turds whose blossoms had been stomped on.

The Heritage Foundation warned against the danger of the Left's "radical agenda" of health care, education and energy. House majority leader John Boehner was either drunk or stupidly arrogant, or both, when he maintained that Obama may have won, but his "far-left agenda" was out of step with the majority of Americans. Boehner did concede, however, that House Republicans might work with Obama "when it is in the best interest of our nation," and only when it promoted "superior Republican alternatives..."

Boehner's predecessor, Dick Armey, was quick to point out that Obama didn't win -- Republicans lost. And they lost because they were just too damned compassionate. Armey is chairman of Freedom Works, which advocates scrapping the Federal Income Tax, kicking older folks out of Social Security to keep from overburdening the young, and of course freedom -- such as that of network carriers to manage and control Internet content. According to Armey, Republicans have simply forgotten their principles.

Richard Haass, Council on Foreign Relations president, hissed, "The one thing I'm sure of is, events will test him. ...There will be coups. ...There will be genocide. ... There will be terrorism." Gee, Bush hasn't completed his sprint to the finish line yet, and those like Haass are already waxing nostalgic for the Bush Doctrine.

Georgia Congressman Paul Broun called Obama a "Marxist" who was determined to set up a jack-booted Gestapo civilian security force to use against citizens -- an ominious tactic taken right out of Hitler's playbook. In the ensuing flap, Broun refused to apologize, or to acknowledge that the "civilian national security force" proposed by Obama is, in reality, a two-year-old pilot program -- The Civilian Response Corps of the United States of America trained and equipped to "deploy rapidly to countries in crisis or emerging from conflict, in order to provide reconstruction and stabilization assistance." The State Department has already deployed members to Sudan, Chad, Haiti, Lebanon, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Intolerance, hate -- racism -- runs deep within the heart of this country. It's easy not to be racist, to support civil rights, equality -- but when confronted by a change so abrupt, so momentous as the election of an African-American president, many white Americans have problems calming their inner beast. William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, said when discussing the hundreds of threats against Obama that the election of a black president is "the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War. Racism is like cancer," Ferris said, "It's never totally wiped out, it's in remission."

Remission? Perhaps, except for those like the feral, all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling, all-concerned -- pretty much all-everything -- "Maha Rushie" Limbaugh, who has been in shrieking racist meltdown since the day Obama announced his candidacy. Referring to Barack Hussein Obama early and often, Limbaugh stoked racist fear by warning millions of Dittodeadheads they were being taken over by a "half-minority." In April 2007, Limbaugh aired an insulting Paul Shanklin parody, "Barack The Magic Negro," and went from that to trying to whip up murderous riots at the Democratic National Convention.

Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and their gang of slimy supremacist clones inflame the fires of fear and hate on a daily -- hourly -- basis. They know exactly what they're doing. "The economic mess Bush has gotten us into is all Obama's fault! The Obama recession is in full swing! We will soon be in the throes of an Obama depression! Obama's going to raise our taxes! Obama's coming after our 401k retirement checks! Millions more will lose their jobs! Quick -- burn a cross -- hang a noose in your tree before it's too late!"

And Michael Savage warns that Blacks don't want just a foot in the door; they are poised to take over the entire nation. On his Nov. 18 broadcast, Savage said, "I am telling you that there's gonna be a wholesale firing of competent white men in the United States government up and down the line, in police departments, in fire departments. Everywhere in America, you're going to see an exchange that you've never seen in history..."

If that's not enough to send us screaming into the night, our knees hitting our chins, Lisa Miller, former front-page religious writer for the Wall Street Journal, now Newsweek's Society/Religion editor, asks, in a shameful, code-word laden piece -- "Is Obama the Antichrist?"

Miller quotes several right-wing evangelicals, and she says conservative Christians believe a great battle is imminent. "After years of tribulation -- natural disasters, other cataclysms (such as the collapse of financial markets) -- God's armies will vanquish armies led by the Antichrist himself. He will be a sweet-talking world leader who gathers governments and economies under his command to further his own evil agenda." Miller says, given Obama's liberal positions on abortion and traditional marriage, it's no wonder that "Obama triggers such fear in the hearts of America's millennialist Christians." And, if we want proof -- one of the winning lottery numbers in Obama's home state of Illinois was 666 -- which Miller says everyone knows is the sign of the Beast, or the Antichrist.

The fascist lies and smears of Republicans and their doppleganger radio creeps should come as no surprise to those paying attention. However, the ripples of uneasiness and fear surging through Democratic ranks as a result of these assaults is a bit puzzling. Perhaps it's because after eight years of covering -- and uncovering -- deceit, lies, and monstrous war crimes perpetrated by George Bush, they are hesitant to trust another president regardless of his party affiliation. Or, perhaps they're afraid to have hope because they believe George Orwell's flat, no-wiggle-room assertion that -- "All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia."

Whatever the reason, each day brings a new rash of criticism about Obama's choices for his transition team, his economic team, his foreign policy team. His selection of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff, selection of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and his decision to keep Robert Gates as Defense Secretary for at least a year resulted in cries of betrayal throughout the left-wing blogosphere.

For two Democrats to agree on any one thing would indeed be change. Everybody has his/her own views as to who should make up the cabinet. And, since I'm the most liberal Democrat I know, it seems obvious that Obama should have put the environment into the hands of award-winning former vice president Al Gore, justice into the hands of Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, and Defense into the hands of former Supreme Allied Commander General Wesley Clark.

Those on the left who complain that Obama is "loading up his administration with Clintonites" should pause and take a deep breath. Anybody old enough to serve -- who has the experience to serve -- would necessarily come from either the Clinton or the Bush era. Which would you prefer? We should remember it is Obama's policies, not theirs, that will be put into effect. He promised change -- to be honest and up-front with all the people. He is keeping that promise.

Last week, in three days Obama held three press conferences wherein he outlined policies that reach far beyond the immediate crisis, such as his long-range plan to boost the economy by creating 2.5 million jobs. "We'll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children," he said, "and building wind farms and solar panels; fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead."

Millions of us who voted for Obama are weary of fighting our way through the tangles of an Orwellian world. We yearn to live in a Wellstonian world, one where "...politics is not about observations or predictions. Politics is what we create by what we do, what we hope for, and what we dare to imagine."

Obama is not perfect. The problems Bush is only too happy to dump on him are almost insurmountable and getting worse by the day. Obama will make mistakes, but he has promised that, with our help, the hopes of all Americans can be realized. Together -- we can change the direction of the country.

We will not jump ship. Come hate or high water -- we can do it.