Why, for God’s sake, does nothing change? The war goes on, the money flows, the blood flows, the lies stay exactly the same. Have you noticed? Have you ever wondered, with a stab of transcendent confusion, why a self-correcting rationality hasn’t kicked in by now, why a saner awareness hasn’t made itself evident in the macro-affairs of the nation by now?

Folks, we have a seriously dysfunctional situation on our hands, more pervasive, I fear, than most of us realize. Deep into Bush II, our government appears to have taken on a crack house dysfunctionality. The institutional checks and balances that Americans are so proud of — including, of course, the watchdog media — have been so compromised by the war-junkie administration they’ve served and enabled they have almost no objectivity left with which to challenge or counter it. And thus the national war addiction permeates every facet of governance, and the media’s coverage thereof.

Are you ready to pay for the next Chernobyls---in advance? Are you willing to have nuclear power PREVENT a solution to the climate crisis?

Twenty-two years ago today, an apocalyptic cloud rose up from Unit Four, in the heart of the Ukraine. For the next few hundred generations, you and your progeny will breathe its radioactive fallout, which was thousands of times worse than that released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Conservative estimates of Chernobyl's financial costs are in the $500 billion range. In downwind regions festering with cancer and birth-defected children, the ultimate death toll is impossible to estimate.

Another Chernobyl could be happening as you read this. And you are already on line to pay for it.

The so-called "reactor renaissance" is built on high-priced lies and public liability.

Not one of the 104 US reactors now licensed to operate, and not one of the new ones being hyped, can get insurance from private sources against another Chernobyl.

The interests of war, which siphon off 40 percent of every dollar we pay in taxes, have no choice but to declare peace — or at least truth — anti-American, because the blood myth of national exceptionalism, and the perpetual insecurity it creates, is all they’ve got.

It’s also all they need.

Did anyone, for instance, expect the Petraeus-Crocker testimony before Congress this week to affect or even address what we’re actually doing in Iraq? The best we get is some mild criticism from the opposition party, stern words about our “missteps” in the waltz to victory, ineffective calls for a timetable for troop withdrawal that, sincere or wholly insincere, will not in fact lead to a timetable for troop withdrawal because nothing is on the line in this testimony; and, in any case, no congressperson dares trample on “the seeds of nascent democracy” our boys and girls have been planting over there for the last five years. And lo, “There has been growth,” the general declared. And those baby democracies are so cute!

Seventy-six years ago, to many ears on the left, Franklin D. Roosevelt sounded way too much like a centrist. True, he was eloquent, and he'd generated enthusiasm in a Democratic base eager to evict Republicans from the White House. But his campaign was moderate -- with policy proposals that didn't indicate he would try to take the country in bold new directions if he won the presidency.

Yet FDR's triumph in 1932 opened the door for progressives. After several years of hitting the Hoover administration's immovable walls, the organizing capacities of labor and other downtrodden constituencies could have major impacts on policy decisions in Washington.

Today, segments of the corporate media have teamed up with the Clinton campaign to attack Barack Obama. Many of the rhetorical weapons used against him in recent weeks -- from invocations of religious faith and guns to flag-pin lapels -- may as well have been ripped from a Karl Rove playbook. The key subtexts have included racial stereotyping and hostility to a populist upsurge.

Do we have a major stake in this fight? Does it really matter whether

A new collection of essays edited by Mark Crispin Miller called "Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of Democracy, 2000 - 2008," tells the story better than any single source I've seen yet.

The Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida in 2000 that would have made Al Gore president. This is not speculation. The recount was later done.

Numerous elections were stolen in 2002, in Colorado, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and elsewhere, including Senate, Governor, and House races in Georgia that were practically openly swiped by Diebold's elections unit president flying in at the last minute and altering the election machines. The theft of Don Siegelman's 2002 election as governor of Alabama was almost as transparent. One county reported a set of results from electronic machines that made Siegelman governor, then recalculated and reported a different set of results. The new results were statistically impossible, and the pair of reports strongly suggested exactly how the machines were rigged, first mistakenly and later as intended.