George Allen doesn't like to answer questions. His staffer will take your contact info, and promise that someone will get you an answer, but (if you've had luck like mine) the answers never come.

So, here's the deal:

( sorta snarky, but also sorta serious )

Armando  posted this diary about a Rolling Stone article on the deep-seated culture of self-indulgent corruption in government, which I think lies at the heart of all of our problems today.  The line above, in a later comment, caught my attention and I wanted to share a few thoughts.

I'd just been reading Cindy Sheehan's article about how this is Bush's accountability moment, but after reading the RS article as well it just highlights to me about how this is our accountability moment, too.

I've thought off and on that, in a way, it's a mistake to make everything about one particular person or a group of specific people.  That they're doing these things is not the problem so much as it is that our system allows itself to be exploited this way; the system itself has become corrupted.  I believe it can be fixed, but it won't happen overnight, or on its own.

( more past the flip )

I ended up writing and sending this because when I called them all earlier today I was so furious over today's news (including Karl Rove's obnoxious tongue-wagging) that I couldn't collect my thoughts as coherently as I'd planned.

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It was a small rally in Arlington, VA, but it went really well and we even had people trickling in over the course of the thing.  The rally was held in front of the Arlington County government offices, and we ended by marching the block to the Arlington County Courthouse to wave our signs and chant about keeping the judicial filibuster intact.

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Funny how quickly they forget how handy these tools were for them when they were the "embattled" minority.

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The only thing that's over is the election, there's still a lot of democracy ahead of us that needs sorting out.  Even though votes are still being disputed, we need to focus now on the work that we always knew was waiting for us after the election was over.

In his article Fascism, Anyone?, political scientist Dr. Lawrence Brit identifies fourteen characteristics common to fascist regimes.  At this page, each of the fourteen is presented as topic headers, with links to news and other articles demonstrating how the Bushies and other Rabid Righties (including provocateur hack Ann Coulter) adhere obsessively to one or more of them.

Anybody else seen this?  I thought it was an interesting way to present their actions in context, and plan to forward it to a bunch of my friends.  The original article is posted at the Council for Secular Humanism website; not sure what their deal is but the name alone is probably grounds for immediate dismissal by Conservative Christians and other Fundies.

Anyway, thought it might be of interest to folks here.  I'm still paging through it, myself.  You can also download a .pdf flyer with an overview of the fourteen characteristics for sharing with friends (and others).  Enjoy!