Back in 2004, Thomas J. DiLorenzo wrote a piece titled “Bush’s Lincolnian Assault on Civil Liberties (Or, Al Gore is Right!)” Here is some background information:

Under Abraham Lincoln, Habeas corpus was unilaterally (and illegally) suspended … and the military, with the help of a secret police bureaucracy operated by William Seward, imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political opponents. They were thrown into gulags such as Fort Lafayette in New York harbor where they were never charged, had no idea how long they would be held, and their families often had no idea of their whereabouts. (See James Randall, Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln; and Dean Sprague, Freedom Under Lincoln). The Virginia patriot George Washington would have undoubtedly drawn his sword and fought another revolution over such an outrage.

Bush acted in a similar fashion, suspending habeas corpus, in the name of national security after 9-11. Vice President Al Gore has stated his opinion on this matter (the article has much more):

As Vice President Gore explained, “President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander-in-chief role and his head of government role to maximize . . . power . . .” Exactly. This is what makes him so “Lincolnesque,” much to the delight of the neocon establishment, no doubt. Father Abraham lives!

President Bush has “declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war,” Gore pointed out, “which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual citizen.”

Bush has said that he wants to spread his brand of democracy throughout the world. Well, it appears that he is getting his wish.  Yesterday, General Musharraf, “president” of Pakistan, has suspended the constitution. He did this in the pursuit of victory on the global war on terror. In doing so, he cited  President Abraham Lincoln . Mission accomplished (by the way, Bush gave his missioen accomplished speech on the USS Abrahan Lincoln). Publicly, the Bush administration has expressed disappointment in the suspension of the Pakistani constitution, but privately they probably feel “safer” knowing that their kind of leader is in charge. To the contrary, we should all feel ill at ease knowing that US support of brutal dictators, many of whom the US installed through coups, has left the world less stable.

When I first found blogs in 2003, they were a place I felt at home and not so alone as our country beat the war drums and went on to “re-elect” (??) this criminal administration. I needed a sense of community to shore up my sanity and found it in some of the larger Democratic and progressive blogs.

Then came flame wars and I found myself detached from any particular community. But I still felt like there was something here in this land of blogtopia that I wasn’t ready to give up. So I started to venture out to some of the smaller blogs – especially those written by people who looked and lived differently from me – and found a whole new world. I sometimes feel like the globe is at my fingertips and all I have to do is sit on my couch with this screen in front of me to explore it all. That works for me – given that I’ve always leaned more towards the couch-potato kind of challenge.

So in this weekly series I’m planning to do, I’ll take you along with me and try to just scatch the surface of the wealth of information, experience, and beauty that is the blogosphere.

First of all, Alas! A Blog has a breakdown on Racial Diversity in Presidential Campaign Staffs. Care to guess who has NO people of color working for him? How about a guess on which racial group is not represented in any of the campaigns? Click through to find out if you guessed right.

Angelina and Brad might want to take a look at a guest column written at Jane’s Blog that turns the tables on the issue of cross-cultural adoption a bit to help us see some of the challenges more clearly. Go check it out and walk a few blocks in those shoes.

Vox ex Machina has a roundup documenting cases of College Racism. I’d suggest you start this one by scrolling down to take a look at the size of the list while you ask yourself the question, “Why do we have an educational achievment gap in this country?”

According to the MSM, the response to the California wild fires vindicates the federal and state governments after the shame of how everyone responded to Katrina. But would you be surprised to learn that racism played a role in how victims were treated in Southern California? Nezua has the story over at The Unapologetic Mexican in Racism in a Time of Need.

You might have heard that Document the Silence asked us all to wear red this past Wednesday, October 31st to break the silence about violence against women of color. Many blogs picked up on the challenge and wrote about it this week. Check out what elle had to say about it in her diary titled simply Be RED.

In fact knowing, feeling, experiencing the ugliness of words, as so many women have, is one reason I support documenting the silence. Because I want the silence broken. And I want it broken by words we have learned to use to support, build up, nurture, preserve, love each other.

Because I am worn out by the alternative.

Janna, a new contributor at Citizen Orange tells us about a photography exhibit by David Bacon titled Living Under the Trees. In it, he documents the migrant workers who are living in tents, right next to the wealthy of California, in order to harvest the food that you and I find at our grocery stores.

One thing I haven’t heard much about since 9/11 is how African American Muslims have been feeling in this age of hype about Islamo-Fascism. If you’d like to hear one man’s take on that, I’d suggest a visit to Tariq Nelson’s blog and his diary titled What Happened to Good Islam? From the 117 comments to this post, I’d say that this is a hot topic in the American Muslim community.

Since this week we not only celebrated Halloween, but Dia de los Muertos, I’d like to stop by Latino Politico where Man Eegee takes us on a beautiful trip to visit his ancestors in Of Russian Thistle and Headstones.

Looking back 48 hours or so, I can only smirk at how odd a person I’ve become. Mundane moments to everyone around me can turn out to be powerfully instructive memories to my very identity and worthy mile-markers on my path to reconnecting to mis raíces. Resting now in the tierra, surrounded by nature in its various forms, are keys to the door that I keep trying to unlock.

And finally, if you haven’t found the blog No Impact Man yet, I’d suggest you make it a regular stop. Colin, who lives with his wife, daughter, and dog in NYC, decided to take up the challenge to live for one year with no net impact on the environment. He’s been writing about his experience daily covering everything from alternative activities he found to do with his daughter to tips on worm composts. The year is set to be over in about two weeks, so you’ll want to play close attention as he will probably be drawing conclusions soon. He has a recent diary up on Environmentalism Means Less Deprivation that is particularly powerful. But before you leave his site you MUST check out the photo essay here to see an amazing interaction:

Yes indeed, it is a wonderful world. And with the blogosphere at our fingertips, it’s all only a click away.

I often find discussions about Cuba frustratingly polemic. On one side are the demonizers, who see everything the Cuban government does as evil, even if it’s providing free healthcare, education, or inculcating equality as a value in Cuban society that is not going to be erased by any infusion of capital.

On the other side are the romanticizers, who  have such tight blinders on that they cannot see anything wrong with anything the Cuban government does. They refuse to admit that the central management system in Cuba suffers from severe bureaucratism, and they rationalize away the human rights abuses that certainly do take place on the island with a Bush-like excuse of, “we’ll they’re under constant threat, so they have to take tough security measures.” What, so it’s OK to torture somebody if you’re a Cuban government official but not if you’re a Bush Administration one?

Really, the only way we’re going to get a better perspective on any of this is to get rid of the idiotic embargo and restore full diplomatic relations between the two countries. That’s when the dirty laundry will also come out. Like Cuba’s relationship with the Stasi.

Today’s Miami Herald is reporting on some research done by an exile who was held in the Stasi prison in East Germany and then sent back to Cuba. He’s poured through thousands of documents and uncovered some quite interesting information. I normally take a lot of this kind of stuff with a grain of salt, but the information he’s uncovered can’t be explained away.

”Well, how was it?” asks Vázquez, a Cuban exile who was jailed in one of these very Stasi cells in 1987, when East Germany was under communist rule, and now leads tours through the prison-turned-museum.

More importantly, he has found hundreds of East German government documents on Stasi relations with Cuba’s own feared Ministry of the Interior, known as MININT, and is nearly finished writing what may well be the most thorough report to date on the links between the two security agencies.

Vázquez says he found the MININT is ”almost a copy” of the repressive Stasi security system, exported by East Germany to Cuba in the 1970s and ’80s, and that the ties between the two organizations run far deeper than previously known.

From how to bug tourist hotel rooms to an intriguing mention of the hallucinogenic LSD, the degree to which the Stasi trained and provided material and technical support to the security arm of Fidel Castro’s regime had a sweeping and harsh impact on Cuba.

I’d say the Stasi were a model of efficiency in State repression, so the degree of coordination suggests that Cuba’s state security model is extremely effective and efficient as well.

Here’s how the guy started investigating all of this:

But in 1987 Vázquez helped a visiting Cuban musician escape to Canada. He was arrested, interrogated for one week at the Stasi prison and then deported under armed guard to Cuba.

After several days at a Havana jail he describes as a ”medieval” experience, spent in ‘filthy, tiny cells with nothing to cover oneself with, listening to prisoners’ screams,” he was freed but blacklisted from most jobs.

He later married a German citizen, returned to Berlin in 1992 and in 1996 got to see his file in the Stasi archives. He began his research in 2002 and has dug up hundreds of files, read through thousands of pages of official documents and published dozens of articles in Miscellanea, a Swiss-based Cuban exile magazine.

And now he’s putting the finishing touches on his report, ”The Havana-Berlin Connection: State Secrets and Notes on the Collaboration between the Stasi and MININT.” He is now looking to publish the Spanish-language report in book form.

”I want to provoke a change,” he says. “When a security system has its own prisons, judges, lawyers and interrogators and no one controls them, as in Cuba, then the state security is what’s sustaining the Communist Party, and repression is what’s sustaining the Cuban regime.

This is not to say that everything was a rosy collaboration between the two sides:

But Stasi-MININT relations were not always warm.

Vázquez said the Stasi frequently criticized its Caribbean counterparts for being disorganized, carelessly leaking information to American spies and failing to master the use of secret codes.

”It was a cultural confrontation: the Cubans were one way — not punctual, for example — and the Germans were the opposite,” Vázquez said.

So, what could happen if we got rid of the embargo?

Well, a couple of more points about that. The embargo doesn’t just hurt everyday Cubans, it prevents US from being exposed to Cuba’s rich culture and wonderful, gregarious people, and from opportunities to invest there; it lets the Cuban government off the hook for its poor management practices; and, most importantly, it is an immoral act that makes everyday Cubans suffer by exacerbating shortages and making products that are available very expensive.

If we got rid of the embargo and reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba, the sheer number of people who would enter Cuba would help cause change all by itself. But as the information above suggests, that change would also at least begin to shed a small ray of light on some aspects of the Cuban government’s repressive apparatus.

Right now, we are coping with a terrible government of our own, which, as a superpower, has wreaked havoc around the world. We will be trying to shine the disinfecting light of the sun on the Bush Administration for years to come. As the opening of East Germany demonstrated, it is possible to have peaceful openings with other countries, which themselves, in the process of opening up, will have to come to terms with the abuses that their governments meted out to their own populations.

The sooner we can re-establish relations with Cuba, the sooner positive, peaceful change can start to happen. And the sooner we can start to beam some light into areas that are currently in the shadows.