Happy Gentile New Year to all you true believers out there (Yes, I wrote gentile New Year because it is a new calendar year based on the birth of one religion's prophet/messenger/whatever you want to call him).

I remember when it was 1998, and I'm not that old. And here we are at 2008. We are still in Iraq. Religious conservatives still want their religion to be the state religion, even if they claim they don't. We still have mercenary armies killing innocent civilians. Our government continues to liquidate the public treasury and transfer the wealth, the taxes of the millions of Americans, the money used to fund our dwindling yet vital infrastructure, into the hands of people who feel no need to share. The Waltons, sitting on the largest fortune of the world created by union busting, racism, exploitation of Americans and the developing world, still give little to no charity. The Israeli occupation continues, as well as Qassam rockets from Gaza. Ergo, no peace in the Middle East. Genocide continues in Darfur. The economic gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. More Americans are without adequate health care. Benzair Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan, signaling the continuance of military dictatorship and religious fundamentalism there. Evolution is still treated as if Darwin came home from the Galapagos yesterday. Women are still treated as unequals. Our attitudes towards homosexuality is the last refuge for apartheid. The Jena 6 still have not seen justice. The RIAA continues its anti-technology, anti-artist, anti-consumer, and anti-student crusade. And many more.

Yes, 2007 seems to have concluded the same as the thousands of years before it: with blood and tears and war and poverty. We can always hope 2008 will be better. Every year I write with a sense of cynical yet hopeful optimism that this will be the year that things began to change. And every year, I am constantly disappointed.

But, each of us, in our own way, must be the change. We must take action against Darfur, against the Israeli occupation as well as the Palestinian terrorism that accompanies it, action in favor of universal health care, in favor of science, and most importantly, and end to the silly, immoral, illegal, unjust, and barbaric war in Iraq.

With all of this in mind, I hope 2008 will be better than 2007. I leave you with encouraging words, for all liberals and those of you left-of-center:

"I'm a fighting liberal

You know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.

What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.

The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man's path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?

Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. 'Globalism' which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.

For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn't. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn't enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.

Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.

Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.

It's time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.

It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.

Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.

It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?"