Led by Democrats since the start of this year, the U.S. Congress now has a "confidence" rating of 14 percent, the lowest since Gallup started asking the question in 1973, and five points lower than what the Republican-controlled Congress scored last year.

            The voters put the Democrats in to end the war, and it's escalating. The Democrats voted money for the surge in Iraq and the money for the next $459.6 billion military budget. Their latest achievement has been to provide enough votes in support of Bush to legalize warrantless wire tapping for "foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States." Enough Democrats joined Republicans to make this a 227-183 victory for Bush.

            The Democrats control the House of Representatives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could have stopped the bill in its tracks if she'd really wanted to. But she didn't. The Democrats' game is to go along with the White House agenda while stirring up dust storms to blind the base about their failure to bring the troops home or restore constitutional government.

Listening to the Republican candidates for president warn against "socialized medicine," you might believe that national health insurance is really a plot to institute Soviet rule in the United States. The most feverish rhetoric comes from Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani, both hoping that their shrillness will prove that they are truly and deeply right wing -- all while trying to avoid honest debate about the future of American health care.

            For Romney, health reform is double-edged: As the former governor of Massachusetts, he claims credit for that state's new universal care program -- which he calls "fabulous" -- but he fears being labeled liberal. His solution is simply to ignore the basic provisions of the legislation that he signed. "This is a country that can get all of our people insured with not a government takeover, without HillaryCare, without socialized medicine," he proclaimed during a Republican debate this past spring. "We didn't expand government programs."

New university studies in Connecticut and California join the growing list of academic warnings about the use of Software Driven Devices [SDD] in the casting or counting of votes. What the scholars are telling us, that the computer security experts already knew, is that there is no way to prevent undetectable malicious software code from altering the outcome of an election.

Software can be altered with self-deleting code to provide erroneous vote outcomes on all SDD equipment, without exception. The SDD machines cannot safely be trusted to provide an honest count, none of them.

The touch-screen SDD danger is greatest because there is absolutely no way to verify the outcome. In Sarasota, Florida, 18,000 votes were lost in a 2006 congressional election and no one has yet been able to explain what happened. SDD propagandists blame "ballot design" and voter ignorance but the truth is if the votes were stolen no one will ever know, that is the nature of the SDD threat.

The problem with letting history judge is that so many officials get away with murder in the meantime -- while precious few choose to face protracted vilification for pursuing truth and peace.

     A grand total of two people in the entire Congress were able to resist a blood-drenched blank check for the Vietnam War. Standing alone on Aug. 7, 1964, senators Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse voted against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

     Forty-three years later, we don’t need to go back decades to find a lopsided instance of a lone voice on Capitol Hill standing against war hysteria and the expediency of violent fear. Days after 9/11, at the launch of the so-called “war on terrorism,” just one lawmaker -- out of 535 -- cast a vote against the gathering madness.

     “However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint,” she said on the floor of the House of Representatives. The date was Sept. 14, 2001.

In a report on a recent discussion between Senator Chris Dodd, Democratic candidate for president, and a group of bloggers, we learn that:

1. Even though 54% of Americans favor impeaching Cheney, and 40% oppose, Dodd opposes impeachment because, he says, he bases his actions on what the average American thinks, and

2. Even though any useful bill Congress might pass will be vetoed, Dodd is going to continue to oppose impeachment on the grounds that Congress needs to focus on other things, not because Dodd believes this makes any sense, but because Dodd believes the average American buys this line.

And we can infer that:

3. Dodd believes that after another year and a half of every useful bill being vetoed, every useful subpoena being rejected, every useful witness suffering miraculous memory loss, every contempt citation being blocked, and every sentence being commuted, the public will still believe that Congress should avoid impeachment in order to accomplish other things.