Fellow activists- and the Republican cohort, too:

Two items of interest today.

First, Fox News is trying to pull a 'Sinclair Broadcasting' coup by making all local Fox and UPN affiliates toe the right-wing Fox Cable News line. The only way to prevent fascists like Rupert Murdock from turning our nation into a one-party government is to let our government officials know that it won't be tolerated. The attachement is a petition for that purpose. I urge you to sign it and then fwd to others.

Last, this link from TomPaine.com ties together the whole Plamegate scandal into something comprehensible, and it also ties together some of the 'loose ends' in regards to the forged Italian documents used by the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) to fix the intelligence around the policy in order to justify a war with Iraq. Finally, it makes Cheney's complicity in this LeCarresque piece of treason explicit.

Which brings me to a moment of crisis in my own sense of patriotism. There is no question that I am looking forward to seeing these indictments come down, and mugshots of these criminals posted all over the internet, but I can't say it is with pleasure. At times I am so gleeful that I feel giddy, but then I have to remind myself: this is a period of incredible sadness for our nation. Our national leaders are so corrupt, vile, and self-serving that a federal prosecutor is attempting to throw who knows how many of them in prison. How can we, as patriots, feel good about that? Why should I feel good about removing Libby, Rove, and Cheney from office? Why should I look forward to impeaching and convicting our President for high crimes- forget the misdemeanors. But I do. I look forward to it like I looked forward to the collapse of the Soviet Empire and like I look forward to the eventual death of Osama bin Laden- or any other horrible evil that comes to an ignoble end.

What hurts the most in this emotional rollercoaster I find myself on is that, had our press been doing what it was supposed to have been doing all along, this national nightmare would have been over last November. None of this information is new. Judith Miller's lies about WMD's was obvious, yet went uncontested. The 'yellowcake' scandal was known, but unreported. The Downing Street Memos had already been published in The Daily Telegraph, but the American press did nothing to investigate them further. Considering the narrow margins of victory, any one of those events finding its way into the main stream media would have changed the outcome.

And this brings me back to the opening of this letter: right-wing ownership of virtually all facets of the American press. Armed Forces Radio broadcasts Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, and O'Rielly daily to all of our service personnel world wide, yet a lone liberal commentator like Ed Schultz from Air America is denied even one hour a day. Sinclair Broadcasting was brought to its knees only because of the national outrage of its partisanship with the Republican party in the days before the last election. Fox News, the Washington Times, and the New York Post are all mouthpieces of Rupert Murdock's fascist News Corp.; now Murdock wants more. These extremist arms of the neoconservative movement dominate nearly 90% of the news we hear today, and yet they want more. Were it up to them, this national tragedy would have been no more than a momentary talking point, to be quickly drowned in the flurry of the Michael Jackson trial, Runaway Bride, and the antioxidant powers of dark chocolate. Ignorance, as Orwell foretold, is strength.

It is the press, or more precisely, the lack of it, that has brought us to this point: hoping the lemmings of our lock-step fascist leaders run off the cliff, and praying that something other than lemmings remain to take back the ruins.