Yes. Well. Would that it were so.

Right now there isn't a viable alternative to the two party system (two parties in one, you might say) domestically, and the international struggle to counter rising American hegemony is on an extended hiatus, with the exception, of course, of some radical resistance movements here and there.

Of course the world looks on in wonder as American hegemony and Empire grinds to an ingnoble end in the sands and swamps of Mesopotamia. The rest of the world assumes, perhaps correctly, that our most recent outbreak of Imperial Fever is doomed; it is too corrupt and incompetently managed to survive. But I wouldn't be so sure.

Our Corporate-Fascist Lordly Class isn't going to give up so easily.

with two factions, everything makes a lot more sense.

That party is the Shareholders' Equity Party, the Corporate Capitalism Party.

Elections are won and lost with money. Money comes from private and corporate contributors. The big money individuals are, for the most part, representative of corporate interests. The corporate contributors contribute for the purpose of seeing their agenda advanced through regulation, deregulation, government contracts and subsidies of various sorts. That is where the majority of campaign funds come from. Both parties are taking money from the same class of people, a class whose members have more in common with each other than they do with ordinary citizens.

In a capitalist society you must always follow the money if you expect to have any understanding of the processes that influence a society's institutions, be they economic, religious, political, educational or family.

I personally see America as a predominately corporatist and increasingly fascist society. I do not hazard a guess as to whether or not the dark path we have taken is reversible at this point. What is happening to us has happened to every other empire. We are probably past our apex. I am heartened by the knowledge that other empires have survived this process and now prosper under the organization of the EU and the UN.

I do think that America is in for a great fall. I do not think it will be terrorists that put us on our knees. We will be the ones responsible for our downfall. We will do it by squandering our wealth, our technology and science, our global goodwill and our children at the altar of corporate capitalism and fundamentalist religion. Greed is the Achilles heel of capitalism. Fear is the Achilles heel of religion. Both greed and fear share one trait in common: like a gas they expand until they fill all the available space. Unless they are contained.

I just heard an interview with Greg Palast, the [American] BBC journalist who was the only reporter to investigate the voter fraud that led to Bush "winning" the last two elections.

He's now written a book called Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans--Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild. I haven't read it, but the interview I heard concerned the section in which he details Karl Rove's concerted and so far successful effort to purge voter roles, and votes, to ensure future Republican wins no matter what the country really feels.

The issue is absolutely married to the recent US attorney purges, during which Rove strategically placed attorneys who would pursue false and wasteful accusations of "voter fraud" in the 2008 election against black and Democrat voters, guaranteeing a Republican win.

The disgusting thing about this story is that, while it was in the largest, front-page headlines in the UK when it came out, not a peep have we heard about it in the US MSM. What's worse -- Palast has emails from Rove's office in which Rove brags about this very fact, that the MSM hasn't even bothered to mention the story.

Unfortunately, the interview isn't yet online, but my local public radio producer has interviewed Palast before, and plenty of other important voices such as Scott Ritter before the Iraq invasion. If you're interested in hearing these voices of reason, here's the site: http://www.chartock.net/

"...This figure is in dispute, as the article you cited says in multiple places. I can find places in the charts where this guy R.J. Rummel seems to be in dispute with himself. ...

Yes, it is in dispute. It stood at 200,000,000 for many years until revised upwards. All figures are in dispute.

However, I have never read an academic say he was of an order of magnitude or anything like that. Even though people on the left and the right hate the very idea, I have not seen any real refutation.

I am no academic, nor expert in the field of government killing its own --- but unless one is blind, one sees that government does not automatically convey safety. The Jewish folks I work with love to remind me all the time that one must always be on guard and alert to the knock on the door in the night.

Like where or how you arrived at this little nugget of demographic knowledge:

Small businesspeople are infinitely more likely to be libertarians than are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and there is a reason for that.

You don't need to defend Cato's stand on civil liberties to me. I applaud it. May I not be critical of Cato on other grounds? I have been "citing Cato scholars approvingly" myself in my effort to point out that there is something quite rotten over at Lew Rotwell. Having said that, if I could cut and paste policy positions of the candidates, even I might snip this or that from Ron Paul and construct the perfect Frankenstein candidate. None of them are perfect in my estimation (or 100% to my liking) but I'm not the only person in this enormous country who gets to vote. Bill Richardson comes quite close, I must say, but he hasn't a chance any more than Wes Clark. Glenn is spot on there. Our beltway media is broken. The fact that Glenn will not pull his stuff from there does not surprise me. Glenn and the first amendment, Mona. It's a tough act to split up. Please, chill out, girl. We are your friends here, albeit hypercritical friends. But I do enjoy seeing you get all saucy and snarky.