Great Northern Plains

2010-05-18T00:23:00.002-06:00

From Police Chief to Prison: Kerik Starts Sentence

In the coming days, Bernard B. Kerik will begin work as a groundskeeper, or maybe a housing orderly, at a starting salary of 12 cents an hour. His blog, where he defended his blemished record and discussed finding strength in Rocky movies, will go dark. His exercise regimen, which helped shape his fireplug physique, will be limited to the hours between dinner and bedtime.

Mr. Kerik, the former police commissioner of New York, surrendered at Cumberland Federal Correctional Institutional in Cumberland, Md., at 1:45 p.m. on Monday, said Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons.

Now officially registered as Inmate 84888-054, Mr. Kerik will serve his four-year prison term in the facility’s minimum-security wing, which houses more than 450 other inmates, Ms. Ponce said. He pleaded guilty last year to eight felony charges, including tax fraud and lying to White House officials.

Mr. Kerik’s days will most likely look much like those of most federal inmates, she said. He will rise around 6 a.m. and eat breakfast at 6:30. After a medical and psychological evaluation, he will begin work at a job prison officials will assign him — salaries start at 12 cents an hour and rise to 40 cents. The money will be deposited in his commissary account to be spent on snacks, stamps or personal hygiene items.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/nyregion/18kerik.html

2010-04-18T22:17:00.001-06:00

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2010-04-12T21:25:00.001-06:00

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2010-02-22T20:21:00.001-07:00

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2010-02-20T14:24:00.003-07:00

Ira Cohen mylar photos:

2010-02-18T18:48:00.002-07:00

Vincent Price & Barbara Steele in Pit & the Pendulum ('61).

2010-02-07T18:07:00.004-07:00

They're here already!

2010-01-06T04:54:00.001-07:00

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2009-12-29T17:21:00.001-07:00

Click on image to enlarge & don't forget: this stuff really happened.

2009-12-22T06:56:00.000-07:00

Click on image to enlarge & don't forget: this stuff really happened.

2009-12-12T22:23:00.002-07:00

The Paradise (1626).

Roelant Savery (or Roeland(t) Maertensz Saverij, or de Savery, or many variants ^[2]) (1576, Kortrijk - buried February 25, 1639, Utrecht), was a Flanders-born Dutch Golden Age painter.

After his schooling, Savery traveled to Prague around 1604, where he became court painter of the Emperors Rudolf II (1552-1612) and Mathias (1557-1619), who had made their court a center of mannerist art.

2009-10-09T08:34:00.000-06:00

2009-05-06T18:15:00.000-06:00

2009-04-28T07:39:00.000-06:00

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2009-04-27T08:46:00.001-06:00

The Bush White House's Appalling and Evil Legacy: Now We Know the Whole Story

By Frank Rich, The New York Times
Posted on April 27, 2009, Printed on April 27, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/138472/

We don't like our evil to be banal. Ten years after Columbine, it only now may be sinking in that the psychopathic killers were not jock-hating dorks from a "Trench Coat Mafia," or, as ABC News maintained at the time, "part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement." In the new best seller "Columbine," the journalist Dave Cullen reaffirms that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris were instead ordinary American teenagers who worked at the local pizza joint, loved their parents and were popular among their classmates.

On Tuesday, it will be five years since Americans first confronted the photographs from Abu Ghraib on "60 Minutes II." Here, too, we want to cling to myths that quarantine the evil. If our country committed torture, surely it did so to prevent Armageddon, in a patriotic ticking-time-bomb scenario out of "24." If anyone deserves blame, it was only those identified by President Bush as "a few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our values": promiscuous, sinister-looking lowlifes like Lynddie England, Charles Graner and the other grunts who were held accountable while the top command got a pass.

We've learned much, much more about America and torture in the past five years. But as Mark Danner recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, for all the revelations, one essential fact remains unchanged: "By no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it." When the Obama administration said it declassified four new torture memos 10 days ago in part because their contents were already largely public, it was right.

Yet we still shrink from the hardest truths and the bigger picture: that torture was a premeditated policy approved at our government's highest levels; that it was carried out in scenarios that had no resemblance to "24"; that psychologists and physicians were enlisted as collaborators in inflicting pain; and that, in the assessment of reliable sources like the F.B.I. director Robert Mueller, it did not help disrupt any terrorist attacks.

The newly released Justice Department memos, like those before them, were not written by barely schooled misfits like England and Graner. John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee graduated from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan and Brigham Young. They have passed through white-shoe law firms like Covington & Burling, and Sidley Austin.

Judge Bybee's rsum tells us that he has four children and is both a Cubmaster for the Boy Scouts and a youth baseball and basketball coach...

2009-04-22T20:32:00.001-06:00

Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link

Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: April 22, 2009 07:42:11 PM

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

The use of abusive interrogation — widely considered torture — as part of Bush's quest for a rationale to invade Iraq came to light as the Senate issued a major report tracing the origin of the abuses and President Barack Obama opened the door to prosecuting former U.S. officials for approving them.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation and stress positions and waterboarding, which simulates drowning, insist that they were legal.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration....

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html

2009-04-21T10:49:00.000-06:00

Juan Cole explains:

Harman Scandal: All about War on Iran

Two things here. It should be remembered that this whole affair has been about getting up a war on Iran. That was the point of Franklin leaking to Rosen and Weissman in the first place. Someone should go back through Harman's statements on Iran.

Second, the transcript should be released and if it is as alleged, Harman must resign. Congress declares wars or implicitly authorizes them. American soldiers have a right to know that the representatives who send them to war are doing so on behalf of US interests. And that congressional intelligence reports are not plants by a foreign intelligence service.

Let us just stop and review what is being alleged, and to underline what it means for US security and policy.

The US is spied on, and a classified Pentagon document is passed to the Israeli embassy by AIPAC officials. They are caught because the FBI had them under surveillance. Apparently the FBI is one of the few US government institutions that is not corrupt on the issue of foreign influence on US institutions and policy. Then when the two AIPAC spies are indicted, a Mossad agent attempts to derail the prosecution by suborning a member of Congress and promising her the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee.

Harman is denying it all, of course. But then so did Rosen and Weissman deny it all (or allege that the lack of a US official secrets act means that their passing of a classified Pentagon document to a Mossad agent was not in fact treason or illegal). Harman's denial is clever, since the NSA wiretap is presumably classified, and so she can't be contradicted until the document is released. ... http://www.juancole.com/2009/04/harman-scandal-all-abou...

2009-04-21T10:46:00.000-06:00

21 Apr 2009 11:34 am
Andrew Sullivan asks:
Is Cheney Panicking?

The one thing you saw most plainly in the Plame affair is how obsessed Dick Cheney is with public image, the chattering classes and spinning stories that might reflect poorly on him. The act is the elder statesman, authoritatively reviewing the world scene, soberly making judgments, calmly explaining it later to those pesky people who are required to elect you every four years. The reality is a man who lost it on 9/11, leapt immediately to apocalyptic conclusions, and then, as the dust cleared, was unable to go back on the war crimes he had authorized and so dug in ever more deeply to justify them. I don't think anyone begrudges that kind of misjudgment at the beginning, although one would have hoped for calmer heads in a crisis, but the attempt to institutionalize the torture of first resort into an entire program of black sites, torture manuals, Orwellian euphemisms, and legal fantasy was bound, like the institutionalization of Gitmo, to collapse under any successor who actually wanted to return the US to the rule of law and the world of civilized nations.

Did Cheney believe he could hide all this for ever?

Did he believe that hundreds of randomly seized human beings could be consigned to the black hole of Gitmo for ever? And was he really going to launch this kind of appalling attacks on his successors whenever they tried to move past this stuff or be forced, by the law itself and the Geneva Conventions, to investigate and prosecute violations of core human rights?

The ratcheting up of the rhetoric - “I think you have to be very careful. The world outside there — both our friends and our foes –will be quick to advantage of a situation if they think they’re dealing with a weak president or one who’s not going to stand up and aggressively defend America’s interests" - is particularly Weimar. He's lashing out now, and using his surrogates to write chilling op-eds defending all of it. I see this as a sign of weakness, not strength. Obama draws these people out like moths to the flame.

That flame is the truth. Let us see it all.

more at:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/20...

2009-04-20T20:28:00.002-06:00

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2009-04-20T13:26:00.002-06:00

Jane Harman: Double Agent

The allegation against Representative Jane Harman were made by two former officials who told "Congressional Quarterly" that she was taped by the National Security Agency on a court-approved wiretap.

According to the former officials, Mrs Harman, who is Jewish, told the suspected agent that she would "waddle into" a case involving two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the dominant pro-Israel lobby group "if you think it'll make a difference"...

One former official involved in the AIPAC case was quoted as saying that the Bush administration's decision not to pursue Mrs Harman was the "deepest kind of corruption" possible. "It's a story about the corruption of government - not legal corruption necessarily, but ethical corruption."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/...

Harman responds to CQ: Report ‘recycles three year-old descredited reporting.’

Rep. Jane Harman’s (D-CA) office issued a statement this afternoon responding to a story by CQ’s Jeff Stein, which reports that the NSA caught Harman offering a quid pro quo to unnamed Israeli agents in return for their help in becoming House Intelligence Committee chair. The report also said that then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stopped an FBI investigation into Harman’s quid pro quo deal because he needed her help to sell the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Harman’s statement denies the report and deflects blame onto the Bush administration for wiretapping a Member of Congress:

The CQ Politics story simply recycles three year-old discredited reporting of largely unsourced material to manufacture a ’scoop’ out of widely known and unremarkable facts – that Congresswoman Jane Harman is and has long been a supporter of AIPAC, and that some members of AIPAC regarded her as well-qualified to chair the House Intelligence Committee following the 2006 elections. Congresswoman Harman has never contacted the Justice Department about its prosecution of present or former AIPAC employees and the Department has never informed her that she was or is the subject of or involved in an investigation. If there is anything about this story that should arouse concern, it is that the Bush Administration may have been engaged in electronic surveillance of members of the congressional Intelligence Committees.

Harman’s statement appears not to have fully addressed the issue regarding Gonzales, simply stating that the Department of Justice “has never informed her that she was or is the subject of or involved in an investigation.” This, of course, leaves open the possibility that an official from another executive department or a member of Congress told her of the case.

Update: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington is calling for Congress and the Justice Department to launch an investigation into Harman's activities...
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/20/harman-respons-cq /

2009-04-15T03:53:00.000-06:00

Glenn Greenwald

Tuesday April 14, 2009 14:42 EDT

The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition

(updated below - Update II)

Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing "right-wing extremist activity." The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration" and "groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they're on the train to FEMA camps. The Right's leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: "Here we go Again," protesting that "this seems so nakedly ideological." Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it's "Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!" Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS -- as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) -- now considers the Constitution to be a "subversive manifesto." Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin's Hot Air stomps its feet about all "the smears listed in the new DHS warning about 'right-wing extremism.'"

It's certainly true that federal police efforts directed at domestic political movements -- even ones with a history of inspiring violence in both the distant and recent past -- require real vigilance and oversight, and it's also true that the DHS description of these groups seems excessively broad with the potential for mischief. But the political faction screeching about the dangers of the DHS is the same one that spent the last eight years vastly expanding the domestic Surveillance State and federal police powers in every area. DHS -- and the still-creepy phrase "homeland security" -- became George Bush's calling card. The Republicans won the 2002 election by demonizing those who opposed its creation. All of the enabling legislation underlying this Surveillance State -- from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act, from the various FISA "reforms" to massive increases in domestic "counter-Terrorism" programs -- are the spawns of the very right-wing movement that today is petrified that this is all being directed at them.

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you...

2009-01-15T14:27:00.001-07:00

Good News From The World of Science!

You may have hallucinations but you'll be able to remember them.

Seven Cups of Coffee a Day May Lead to Hallucinations:
Jan. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Consuming the caffeine in seven cups of instant coffee a day may leave you more likely to see, hear and smell things that aren’t there, U.K. researchers said...
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601203&sid=a9S...

Drinking coffee reduces risk of Alzheimer's: study:
STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Middle-aged people who drink moderate amounts of coffee significantly reduce their risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, a study by Finnish and Swedish researchers showed Thursday...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090115/hl_afp/swedenfinla...

2009-01-15T14:19:00.002-07:00

From Free Republic (right wing nut site in Fresno.)

Alien Abductions Stopped By the Name of Jesus Christ....

Posted on Thursday, January 15, 2009 2:34:55 PM by TaraP

Dirk Vander Ploeg, the Publisher of UFO Digest, recently asked me if I knew of alien abductions having been stopped by the utterance of the name of Jesus. He told me that 'apparently this information is being withheld by Mufon and other reporters, investigators etc.'

I reminded him that I had written about the possibility of such occurrences in several articles including, Extraterrestrials Tremble at the Name of Jesus, UFO Digest March 29, 2007, and more recently The Birth of Christ caused the Extraterrestrial Fallen Angels to Tremble December 3, 2008.

The word of God tells us that demons (as well as fallen angels, i.e. extraterrestrials) tremble at the name of Jesus (James 2:19) because God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above all names (Philippians 2). At the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow of those on the earth, and those under the earth and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10).

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/2165220/po...

2009-01-13T14:21:00.002-07:00

Pro-Israel Rally Attended by Big-Time NY Dems Descends into Calls for 'Wiping Out' Palestinians

By Max Blumenthal, AlterNet
Posted on January 13, 2009, Printed on January 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/119372/

Watch Max Blumenthal's exlusive video of the rally on the right-hand side of the screen.

On January 11, an estimated 10,000 people rallied in front of the Israeli consulate in midtown New York in support of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip. The rally, which was organized by UJA-Federation of New York and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York in cooperation with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, featured speeches by New York’s most senior lawmakers. While the crowd was riled to righteous anger by speeches about Hamas evildoers, the event was a festive affair that began and ended with singing and joyous dancing.

Sen. Chuck Schumer highlighted Israel’s supposed humanitarian methods of warfare by pointing to its text messaging of certain Gaza Strip residents urging them to vacate their homes before Israeli forces bombed them. “What other country would do that?” Schumer shouted from the podium. Gov. David Paterson appeared on stage wearing one of the red hats distributed to demonstrators as symbols of the red alerts some residents of Israel endure when Palestinian groups fire rockets their way. Paterson cited the many Qasam rockets that have fallen on Israel as a justification for the country’s operations in Gaza, a military assault that has resulted in over 800 casualties and thousands of injuries.

Then Paterson highlighted the anti-Semitism that has followed in the wake of Israel’s attack on Gaza, highlighting the beating of a teen-age girl in France. “This kind of anger and hatred spreads like a disease,” Paterson said, “and one thing I've always pointed out is there's no place for hate in the Empire State.”

But hatred was plentiful at the rally Paterson addressed. Right in front of the stage, a man held a banner reading, “Islam Is A Death Cult.” Rally attendees described the people of Gaza to me as a “cancer,” called for Israel to “wipe them all out,” insisting, “They are forcing us to kill their children in order to defend our own children.” A young woman told me, “Those who die are suffering God’s wrath.” “They are not distinguishing between civilians and military, so why should we?” said a member of the group of messianic Orthodox Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch group that flocked to the rally.

No one I spoke to could seem to find any circumstance in which they would begin to question Israel’s war. No number of civilian deaths, no displays of extreme suffering -- nothing could deter their enthusiasm for attacking one of the most vulnerable populations in the world with the world’s most advanced weaponry. There are no limits, no matter what Israel does, no matter how it does it...

http://www.alternet.org/story/119372/pro-israel_rally_a... /

Crazy people.

2009-01-09T03:51:00.002-07:00

I Survived the Bush Presidency

Roger Stone is a Republican consultant who led the “Brooks Brothers riot” against the Miami-Dade County election board during the Florida recount in 2000.

There have been many times I've regretted it. When I look at those double-page New York Times spreads of all the individual pictures of people who have been killed [in Iraq], I got to think, “Maybe there wouldn't have been a war if I hadn't gone to Miami-Dade. Maybe there hadn't have been, in my view, an unjustified war if Bush hadn't become president.” It's very disturbing to me...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-... /

That is just sad...sad we can't try & convict everyone in the Brooks Bros. Riot for murder.

Note from Wiki:

The Brooks Brothers riot was a demonstration by Republican congressional staffers at a meeting of election canvassers in Miami, Florida on November 19, 2000, organized for the purpose of bringing about the cancellation of a hand recount in which 10,750 ballots remain uncounted in the recount of the 2000 United States presidential election. The name refers to a traditional brand of suits associated with conservative business attire like that of the protesters.^[1] The crowd was reported to have been directed by Congressman John E. Sweeney,^[2] a Republican from New York.

2009-01-07T20:42:00.001-07:00

Neoconservatism dies in Gaza

The recent Israeli offensive has put the final nail in the coffin of the Bush administration's Middle East fantasy.

By Juan Cole

Jan. 08, 2009 |

The Gaza War of 2009 is a final and eloquent testimony to the complete failure of the neoconservative movement in United States foreign policy. For over a decade, the leading figures in this school of thought saw the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the institution of a parliamentary regime in Iraq as the magic solution to all the problems in the Middle East. They envisioned, in the wake of the fall of Baghdad, the moderation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the overthrow of the Baath Party in Syria and the Khomeinist regime in Iran, the deepening of the alliance with Turkey, the marginalization of Saudi Arabia, a new era of cheap petroleum, and a final resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on terms favorable to Israel. After eight years in which they strode the globe like colossi, they have left behind a devastated moonscape reminiscent of some post-apocalyptic B movie. As their chief enabler prepares to exit the White House, the only nation they have strengthened is Iran; the only alliance they have deepened is that between Iran and two militant Islamist entities to Israel's north and south, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The neoconservatives first laid out their manifesto in a 1996 paper, "A Clean Break," written for an obscure think tank in Jerusalem and intended for the eyes of far right-wing Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party, who had just been elected prime minister. They advised Israel to renounce the Oslo peace process and reject the principle of trading land for peace, instead dealing with the Palestinians with an iron fist. They urged Israel to uphold the right of hot pursuit of Palestinian guerrillas and to find alternatives to Yasser Arafat's Fatah for the Palestinian leadership. They called forth Israeli airstrikes on targets in Syria and rejection of negotiations with Damascus. They foresaw strengthened ties between Israel and its two regional friends, Turkey and Jordan.

They advocated "removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," in part as a way of "rolling back" Syria. In place of the secular, republican tyrant, they fantasized about the restoration of the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, and thought that a Sunni king might help moderate the Shiite Hezbollah in south Lebanon. (Yes.) They barely mentioned Iran, though it appears that their program of expelling Syria from Lebanon and weakening its regime was in part aimed at depriving Iran of its main Arab ally. In a 1999 book called "Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein," David Wurmser argued that it was false to fear that installing the Iraqi Shiites in power in Baghdad would strengthen Iran regionally.

The signatories to this fantasy of using brute military power to reshape all of West Asia included some figures who would go on to fill key positions in the Bush administration. Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, became chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, a civilian oversight body for the Pentagon. Douglas J. Feith became the undersecretary of defense for planning. David Wurmser first served in Feith's propaganda shop, the Office of Special Plans, which manufactured the case for an American war on Iraq, and then went on to serve with "Scooter" Libby in the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

The neoconservatives used their well-funded think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP, an organ of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the Hudson Institute, among others, to promote this agenda of the conquest of Iraq as a solution of all ills...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/01/08/gaza/in...

2009-01-06T19:37:00.000-07:00

Unprecedented Numbers of Americans Question Israel's Actions in Gaza
By Max Blumenthal, Huffington Post. Posted January 6, 2009.

Almost as soon as the first Israeli missile struck the Gaza Strip, a veteran cheering squad suited up to support the home team. "Israel is so scrupulous about civilian life," Charles Krauthammer claimed in the Washington Post. Echoing Krauthammer, Alan Dershowitz called the Israeli attack on Gaza, "Perfectly 'Proportionate.'" And in the New York Times, Israeli historian Benny Morris described his country's airstrikes as "highly efficient."

While the cheerleaders testified to the superior moral fiber of their team, the Palestinian civilian death toll mounted. Israeli missiles tore at least fifteen Palestinian police cadets to shreds at a graduation ceremony, blew twelve worshipers to pieces (including six children) while they left evening prayers at a mosque, flattened the elite American International School, killed five sisters while they slept in their beds, and liquidated 9 women and children in order to kill a single Hamas leader. So far, Israeli forces have killed at least 500 Gazans and wounded some two thousand, including hundreds of children. Yesterday, the IDF blanketed parts of Gaza with white phosphorus, a chemical weapon Saddam Hussein once deployed against Kurdish rebels.

"It was Israel at its best," Yossi Klein Halevi declared in the New Republic.

By New Year's Day, Israel's cheering squad had turned the opinion pages of major American newspapers into their own personal romper room. Of all the editorial contributions published by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times since the Israel's war on Gaza began, to my knowledge only one offered a skeptical view of the assault. But that editorial, by Israeli novelist David Grossman, contained not a single word about the Palestinian casualties of IDF attacks. Even while calling for a cease fire, Grossman promised, "We can always start shooting again."

...

But while Israel's PR machine cranked its Mighty Wurlitzer to full blast, drowning out all opposing voices with its droning sound, a surprisingly substantial portion of the American public decided to dance to its own tune. According to a December 31 Rasmussen poll (so far the only measure of US opinion on the Gaza assault), while Americans remained overwhelmingly supportive of Israel, they were split almost evenly on the question of whether Israel should attack Gaza -- 44% in favor of the assault and 41% against it. The internals are even more remarkable.

While Republicans supported the assault on Gaza by a large margin, a predictable finding, only 31% of Democrats did. Members of the Democratic base thus stood in sharp contrast to most of their elected representatives (freshman Rep. Donna Edwards is a notable exception), who backed the latest Israeli assault in lockstep, and seem to support Israel no matter what it does. The rift between the progressive base and the party played out on Barack Obama's Change.gov site, which was deluged in recent days with demands for a statement condemning Israel's assault on Gaza...
http://www.alternet.org/audits/117568/unprecedented_num...

2009-01-06T01:57:00.002-07:00

Israelis, sipping Pepsi, watch bombardment of Gaza town

By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers

SDEROT, Israel — A tower of white smoke rose from the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun after another Israeli bombardment Monday morning, and a half-dozen Israelis, perched on a dusty hilltop, gazed at the scene like armchair military strategists.

Avi Pilchick took a long swig of Pepsi and propped a foot on the plastic patio chair he'd carried up the hillside to watch the fighting. "They are doing good," Pilchick, 20, said of Israeli forces battling Palestinian militants in Gaza, "but they can do more."

Somewhere in Beit Hanoun, Ashraf El-Masri's family cowered in their concrete tenement home, their neighborhood surrounded by Israeli soldiers. El-Masri said that five residents had been killed by Israeli shelling that morning, and the blasts had traumatized the youngest of his nine children into a terrified silence.

The scenes were separated by less than two miles, but they illustrated the dramatically different perspectives on Israel's ground incursion into the Gaza Strip on its second full day...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/59013.html

2009-01-06T01:47:00.000-07:00

Click on image to see enlarged version.

2008-12-30T03:51:00.001-07:00

Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House

The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.

by Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum February 2009 With assistance from Philippe Sands.

January 20, 2001 After a disputed election and bitter recount battle in Florida whose outcome is effectively decided by the Supreme Court, George W. Bush is sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States. In foreign affairs he promises an approach that will depart from the perceived adventurism of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in places such as Kosovo and Somalia. (“I think the United States must be humble,” Bush said in a debate with his opponent, Al Gore.) In domestic affairs Bush pledges to cut taxes and improve education. He promises to govern as a “compassionate conservative” and to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He comes into office with a $237 billion budget surplus.

On the day of the inauguration the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, declares a moratorium on the Clinton administration’s last-minute regulations on the environment, food safety, and health. This action is followed in the coming months by disengagement from the International Criminal Court and other international efforts. Nonetheless, the early presumption is that the administration’s affairs are in steady hands, though some disquieting signs are noted.

Fabulous article:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/bus...

2008-12-20T17:25:00.001-07:00

Bush Insider Who Planned To Tell All Killed In Plane Crash: Non-Profit Demands Full Federal Investigation
http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20081220/pl_usnw/bush_insi...

Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush's 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport. Velvet Revolution ("VR"), a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell's activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush. Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would "throw under the bus."

A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to VR in July that Mr. Connell's life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR's attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell's not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.

On October 31, Mr. Connell appeared before a federal judge in Ohio after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating the rigging of the 2004 election under the direction of Karl Rove. The judge ordered Mr. Connell to testify under oath at a deposition on November 3rd, the day before the presidential election. Velvet Revolution received confidential information that the White House was extremely concerned about Mr. Connell talking about his illegal work for the White House and two Bush/Cheney 04 attorneys were dispatched to represent him.

An associate of Mr. Connell's told VR that Mr. Connell was involved with the destruction of the White House emails and the setting up of the off-grid White House email system...
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Like a mafia family. Cross them & you die.
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One of my sources died in a plane crash last night
December 20, 2008 | by Larisa Alexandrovna (AtLargely.com)

I don't usually reveal sources, but I think this is incredibly important. Michael Connell died in a plane crash last night. He was a key witness in the Ohio election fraud case that I have been reporting on. More importantly, however, he had information that he was ready to share.

You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all "known" Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.

He has flown his private plane for years without incident. I know he was going to DC last night, but I don't know why. He apparently ran out of gas, something I find hard to believe. I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully. If you want to understand the context more broadly, I suggest you read this article I did a while back about the break-ins and arson cases that Siegelman and others have experienced.

Just to be very clear and state again, I am not claiming conspiracy theory or direct relation to Karl Rove or the White House in any of these events. What I am saying, however, is that these possible relationships cannot and should not be overlooked by investigators. There are far too many serious and reasonable questions that must be answered for the public.

I have been to Mr. Connell's home. Mr. Connell has confided that he was being threatened, something that his attorneys also told the judge in the Ohio election fraud case. When I met with Heather, his wife, I did so carefully because of the threats he was getting.

I left a note for her in her mailbox and asked her to meet me in a local park near their home. Heather came and through our conversation I got the sense that these were not bad people or corrupt people. The Connell's really believed that what they were involved in served God's plan. Regardless of of what any of us think about their religious views or allegations relating to Connell's involvement in various things, I do think these were good people who got caught up in something bigger than themselves. My heart goes out to Heather and the children.
(Updates at link above)

2008-12-17T12:14:00.001-07:00

Drunk George Tenet lashed out at Bush’s neocons: ‘The Jews’ who tried to ‘pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him.’»

Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg recently picked up a copy of Patrick Tyler’s forthcoming book, A World of Trouble, which focuses on “America’s tortured relations with the Middle East.” Goldberg says that the book’s prologue contains a “whopper of a scene” featuring former CIA director George Tenet “drunk on scotch, flailing about Prince Bandar’s Riyadh pool, screaming about the Bush Administration officials who were just then trying to pin the Iraq WMD fiasco on him.” Tyler reports that Tenet also “mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration” as “the Jews“:

According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel’s political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, “the Jews.”

A footnote in Tyler’s book says that Tenet “initially denied staying at Prince Bandar’s palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool.” “He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill,” reports Tyler.

2008-12-13T03:19:00.000-07:00

That Was No Small War in Georgia -- It Was the Beginning of the End of the American Empire

By Mark Ames, Radar. Posted December 13, 2008.

(This article was published in the final issue of Radar magazine, which was bought out and shuttered just as this issue went to print. This is the first online publication of this article. It has been updated by the author.)

Tskhinvali, South Ossetia -- On the sunny afternoon of August 14, a Russian army colonel named Igor Konashenko is standing triumphantly at a street corner at the northern edge of Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, his forearm bandaged from a minor battle injury. The spot marks the furthest point of the Georgian army's advance before it was summarily crushed by the Russians a few days earlier. "Twelve Georgian battalions invaded Tskhinvali, backed by columns of tanks, armored personal carriers, jets, and helicopters," he says, happily waving at the wreckage, craters, and bombed-out buildings around us. "You see how well they fought, with all their great American training -- they abandoned their tanks in the heat of the battle and fled."

Konashenko pulls a green compass out of his shirt pocket and opens it. It's a U.S. military model. "This is a little trophy -- a gift from one of my soldiers," he says. "Everything that the Georgians left behind, I mean everything, was American. All the guns, grenades, uniforms, boots, food rations -- they just left it all. Our boys stuffed themselves on the food," he adds slyly. "It was tasty." The booty, according to Konashenko, also included 65 intact tanks outfitted with the latest NATO and American (as well as Israeli) technology.

Technically, we are standing within the borders of Georgia, which over the last five years has gone from being an ally to the United States to a neocon proxy regime. But there are no Georgians to be seen in this breakaway region -- not unless you count the bloated corpses still lying in the dirt roads. Most of the 70,000 or so people who live in South Ossetia never liked the idea of being part of Georgia. During the violent land scramble that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the South Ossetians found themselves cut off from their ethnic kin in North Ossetia, which remained part of Russia. The Russians, who've had a small peacekeeping force here since 1992, managed to keep the brewing conflicts on ice for the last 15 years. But in the meantime, the positions of everyone involved hardened. The Georgians weren't happy about the idea of losing a big chunk of territory. The Ossetians, an ethnic Persian tribe, were more adamant than ever about joining Russia, their traditional ally and protector.

The tense but relatively stable situation blew up late in the evening of August 7, when on the order of president Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's army swept into South Ossetia, leveling much of Tskhinvali and surrounding villages and sending some 30,000 refugees fleeing north into Russia. Within hours, Russia's de facto czar Vladimir Putin counterattacked -- some say he'd set a trap -- and by the end of that long weekend the Georgians were in panicked retreat. The Russian army then pushed straight through South Ossetia and deep into Georgia proper, halting less than an hour's drive from Saakashvili's luxurious palace. All around me is evidence of a rout. A Georgian T-72 tank turret is wedged into the side of a local university building, projecting from the concrete like a cookie pressed into ice cream. Fifty yards away you can see the remains of the vehicle that the orphaned turret originally was part of: just a few charred parts around a hole in the street, and a section of tread lying flat on the sidewalk. Russian tanks now patrol the city unopposed, each one as loud as an Einstrzende Neubauten concert, clouding the air with leaded exhaust as they rumble past us.

But listening to Colonel Konashenko, it becomes clear to me that I'm looking at more than just the smoldering remains of battle in an obscure regional war: This spot is ground zero for an epic historical shift. The dead tanks are American-upgraded, as are the spent 40mm grenade shells that one spetznaz soldier shows me. The bloated bodies on the ground are American-trained Georgian soldiers who have been stripped of their American-issue uniforms. And yet, there is no American cavalry on the way. For years now, everyone from Pat Buchanan to hybrid-powered hippies have been warning that America would suddenly find itself on a historical downslope from having been too reckless, too profligate, and too arrogant as an unopposed superpower. Even decent patriotic folk were starting to worry that America was suffering from a classic case of Celebrity Personality Disorder, becoming a nation of Tom Cruise party-dicks dancing in our socks over every corner and every culture in the world, lip-synching about freedom as we plunged headfirst into as much risky business as we could mismanage. And now, bleeding money from endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're a sick giant hooked on ever-pricier doses of oil paid for with a currency few people want anymore. In the history books of the future, I would wager that this very spot in Tskhinvali will be remembered as both the geographic highwater mark of the American empire, and the place where it all started to fall apart...

http://www.alternet.org/story/112457/that_was_no_small_...

2008-12-11T01:11:00.002-07:00

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui

http://counterpunch.com/lendman12102008.html

Dr. Aafia Siddiqui - "Prisoner 650"

A brief word about Aafia. She's a highly educated researcher with a doctorate in genetics from MIT. She mysteriously disappeared from Karachi in March 2003 with her three children, after which Pakistani officials denied any knowledge of her whereabouts. It was later learned she was at Bagram under draconian conditions with her children (aged one month to seven years). She's incarcerated now in New York, but it's not known if her children are still alive and if so where they're held.

Human rights organizations, British journalist Yvonne Ridley, and MP Lord Nazir raised questions about her detention, and, according to Nazir "she (was) physically tortured and continuously raped by the officers at the prison" - for over four years. Chalk it up to "Western values" that (in a post-9/11 climate) view Muslims as sub-humans to be subjected to unlimited degradations.

Ridley called Aafia a "grey lady" "because she (was) almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her. This would never happen to a Western Woman." It did to Aafia, and her ordeal continues under US detention.
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We need to find & punish the people who did this.

(Hint: They're in the White House for a few more weeks.)

2008-12-10T05:31:00.000-07:00

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948

On December 10, 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights the full text of which appears in the following pages. Following this historic act the Assembly called upon all Member countries to publicize the text of the Declaration and "to cause it to be disseminated, displayed, read and expounded principally in schools and other educational institutions, without distinction based on the political status of countries or territories."

PREAMBLE

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, Therefore THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY proclaims THIS UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article 1.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2.
Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3.
Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4.
No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5.
No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6.
Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7.
All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8.
Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10.
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11.
(1) Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

(2) No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12.
No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.

(2) Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14.
(1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

(2) This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15.
(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16.
(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.

(2) Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.

(3) The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17.
(1) Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.

(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18.
Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20.
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.

(2) No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21.
(1) Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.

(2) Everyone has the right of equal access to public service in his country.

(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22.
Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23.
(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25.
(1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26.
(1) Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.

(3) Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27.
(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28.
Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29.
(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.

(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.

(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30.
Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html

2008-12-10T00:20:00.001-07:00

Babylon's history swept away in US army sandbags

BABYLON, Iraq (AFP) — Fragments of bricks, engraved with cuneiform characters thousands of years old, lie mixed with the rubble and sandbags left by the US military on the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq.

In this place, one of the cradles of civilisation, US troops in 2003-2004 built embankments, dug ditches and spread gravel to hold the fuel reservoirs needed to supply the heliport of Camp Alpha.

Today, archaeologists say a year of terracing work and 18 months of military presence, with tanks and helicopters, have caused irreparable damage. The Americans remained five months in Babylon and then handed over to the Poles who pulled out 16 months later.

Hands on hips, and wearing a seemingly permanent air of dismay, Maithem Hamza, director of the -- totally empty -- museum on the site, points to the soil: "Look at this land, it is packed with remnants. They filled their bags with them."...
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jvUp...

2008-12-09T10:03:00.001-07:00

Reporting from Washington -- In case any Bush administration officials have trouble summing up the boss' record, the White House is providing a few helpful suggestions.

A two-page memo that has been sent to Cabinet members and other high-ranking officials offers a guide for discussing Bush's eight-year tenure during their public speeches.

Titled "Speech Topper on the Bush Record," the talking points state that Bush "kept the American people safe" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, lifted the economy after 2001 through tax cuts, curbed AIDS in Africa and maintained "the honor and the dignity of his office."

The document presents the Bush record as an unalloyed success.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la...

2008-12-06T10:29:00.000-07:00

A very dark Black Friday

Jdimytai Damour died on the floor of a Long Island Wal-Mart, trampled by a mob thinking only of bargains and buying.

By Erika Hayasaki

December 6, 2008

Reporting from New York — He took his last breath on a gray floor, between a row of soda machines and a device that disperses change for cans and plastics.

Trampled by a mob of bargain-hungry Black Friday shoppers, Jdimytai Damour, 34, died by asphyxiation, leaving people across the world asking: Why, and how?

Audio-enhanced chatter captured on a cellphone video posted on YouTube, along with interviews with witnesses, offers a hint. The video shows a police officer crouching by a 6-foot-5, 270-pound man lying at the entrance of a Long Island Wal-Mart. A paramedic pumps the man's chest so forcefully his limp legs and feet joggle. Shoppers peer in from behind glass doors, as others stand a few feet away, hands in pockets.

"They need to shock him," a voice says. The paramedic stops pumping.

The man's shirt has been pulled to his neck, revealing his large belly. A woman in the crowd mutters "pregnant." Another cracks a joke.

The women begin to laugh.

The trouble began well before the sun rose...
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-tr...

2008-12-03T16:04:00.001-07:00

Tomgram: Robert Dreyfuss, Is Iran Policy Still Up for Grabs?

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

After all, that massive U.S. air attack on Iran that anti-imperial critics long expected to arrive, that Seymour Hersh wrote about, that so many feared, never happened and, with Barack Obama's election, should certainly have been put to rest in a deep grave for all eternity. But don't underestimate the neocons, or their ability to reconfigure themselves for a Democratic administration. Robert Dreyfuss, author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, who also produces The Dreyfuss Report for the Nation magazine's website, offers up some tantalizing clues to their possible future resurrection -- and some altogether eerie connections between neocon Washington and the future Obama team.

To give Dreyfuss his creds, only the other day the Wall Street Journal actually began an editorial on the new Obama national security "team" by attacking an analysis Dreyfuss had done of it the previous week. ("The names floated for Barack Obama's national security team 'are drawn exclusively from conservative, centrist and pro-military circles without even a single -- yes, not one! -- chosen to represent the antiwar wing of the Democratic party.' In his plaintive post this week on the Nation magazine's Web site, Robert Dreyfuss indulges in the political left's wonderful talent for overstatement. But who are we to interfere with his despair?") Given their right-wing proclivities, the Journal's editorial writers then offer the equivalent of high praise for Obama's choices: "So far," they conclude, "on security, not bad." That should make just about anyone who voted for Obama to change American global policy in significant ways pause a moment for reflection.

snip...

Still Preparing to Attack Iran
The Neoconservatives in the Obama Era
By Robert Dreyfuss

What, exactly, does Barack Obama's mild-mannered choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services, former Senator Tom Daschle, have to do with neocons who want to bomb Iran?

A familiar coalition of hawks, hardliners, and neoconservatives expects Barack Obama's proposed talks with Iran to fail -- and they're already proposing an escalating set of measures instead. Some are meant to occur alongside any future talks. These include steps to enhance coordination with Israel, tougher sanctions against Iran, and a region-wide military buildup of U.S. strike forces, including the prepositioning of military supplies within striking distance of that country.

Once the future negotiations break down, as they are convinced will happen, they propose that Washington quickly escalate to war-like measures, including a U.S. Navy-enforced embargo on Iranian fuel imports and a blockade of that country's oil exports. Finally, of course, comes the strategic military attack against the Islamic Republic of Iran that so many of them have wanted for so long.

It's tempting to dismiss the hawks now as twice-removed from power: first, figures like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith were purged from top posts in the Bush administration after 2004; then the election of Barack Obama and the announcement Monday of his centrist, realist-minded team of establishment foreign policy gurus seemed to nail the doors to power shut for the neocons, who have bitterly criticized the president-elect's plans to talk with Iran, withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, and abandon the reckless Global War on Terrorism rhetoric of the Bush era...

http://www.tomdispatch.com /

2008-11-29T18:50:00.002-07:00

From The Sunday Times

November 30, 2008

Obama’s first problem is US war crimes

The president-elect has to take a stand on Bush’s dark legacy

Andrew Sullivan

A small and largely unnoticed spat among the transition planners for the president-elect, Barack Obama, broke out last week. It was the first genuinely passionate debate among the Obamaites and it centres on a terribly difficult and terribly important decision that will be among the first that Obama has to make.

How does he deal with the legacy of criminal actions of his predecessor’s administration when it comes to detention, interrogation, abuse and torture of terror suspects? That has long hovered in the back of the minds of those of us who supported Obama, in large part because he alone had the moral authority to draw a line underneath the criminality of the George Bush-Dick Cheney years and restore credibility and honour to America’s antiterror policies...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/and...

2008-11-25T13:54:00.001-07:00

Click image to see enlarged version

2008-11-24T19:23:00.000-07:00

Too Big to Succeed?

By Steven Pearlstein
Monday, November 24, 2008; 10:24 AM

Of all the rescues mounted by the government so far this year, none carries with it more symbolism, or more irony, than that of Citigroup.

Until recently, Citi was not only the largest U.S. financial institution, but the very embodiment of the new financial order. Under the relentless empire building of former chief executive Sanford Weill, it was Citi that brought down the old regulatory wall that had separated commercial banking from investment banking and insurance.

The combination of Citibank with Solomon Smith Barney under the bright red umbrella of Travelers Insurance was accepted with a regulatory wink and nod by the Federal Reserve while then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan worked to persuade Congress to make it legal by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, put in place during the Great Depression to prevent another market crash like that of 1929. Now that another market crash has required the government to rescue Citi, there will certainly be those who wonder whether the New Dealers didn't have it right all along...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

2008-11-24T01:40:00.000-07:00

Looking Deeper into Palin's Beliefs

As the Republican Party attempts to regroup and begins to splinter between the moderate and far right wings, progressive thinkers will have to be conscious of any tendency to smugness. No need to worry, some say. If Palin's crowd comes out on top of the power struggle they will be so extreme and irrelevant that they will attract insufficient numbers to ever pose a significant threat again. They can be gleefully consigned to history there to be viewed occasionally as a bizarre relic of a disturbed and wacky time in the country's political journey.

However, things will not necessarily be that simple. As the organizer of a large conference after the 2004 presidential election on The Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right, I am concerned that things may not unfold so smoothly. We know from the 1930's that a global depression can provide the most fertile ground for the rise of extremist politics. The militant nationalisms of that time would never have retained their grip on power without the economic desperation of the population and their longing for charismatic leadership that would restore the power and wealth of the nation and assign blame to the groups responsible for unemployment, idle factories, dropping incomes, diminished national pride, hopelessness and futility.

That is why Obama's first priority must be the economic well being of both the United States and the world. If we were to be faced with decline and poverty, the door would open to dark, nationalist forces that would undoubtedly take a religious form. And what would that form be? The conference in New York in spring 2005 examined a phenomenon known as Dominionism -- the belief that godly Christians are now mandated by the Lord to take political power to purify America, return it to its Christian origins, and create a biblical society with biblical laws for biblical crimes. The End Times would be upon us, the Book of Revelation would provide the geopolitical road map, and the spiritual war with secularists, Muslims and others would be conducted ruthlessly.

Well educated people and progressives do themselves a disservice if they dismiss this worldview as simply idiotic, unthinkable, and confined to a lunatic fringe. Sarah Palin's rise shows there is still an appetite in America for charismatic leadership devoid of political substance; for a pretty face, a down home manner, and a torrent of ugly, distorted political attacks delivered with a sexy vibe - the heels on and the gloves off...

...It's time to educate ourselves more about The New Apostolic Reformation and the spiritual warfare to which Palin's Assemblies of God Church appears to subscribe. When the prayer warriors of this movement delight in the burning of a Transcendental Meditation Center and the persecution of African 'witches' as perceived results of their spiritual efforts, we should all be concerned. We can learn more from web sites like talk2action.org that are engaged in thorough investigations of the disturbing belief systems prevalent in Dominionist churches. Journalists need to ask Sarah Palin directly about her religious beliefs regarding spiritual warfare, the End Times, even the appearance of the Anti-Christ.

It's well known that certain fundamentalist circles suspect that Obama is 'The One,' a forerunner of the Beast foretold in the Book of Revelation. Check out the views of Hal Lindsey, author of the fundamentalist classic, The Late, Great Planet Earth. Could that suspicion lie behind their unwavering attempts to 'expose' his links to terrorists, his sympathy for Islam, his phenomenal charisma that, they feel, can only be explained by diabolical forces that stand behind him? No doubt Sarah Palin thinks of herself as a good mom, a nice person, a follower of Jesus, and a devoted public servant. But death threats against Obama immediately spiked when her inflammatory, lipsticked rhetoric began to work its influence on the minds of unthinking people...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-white/looking-deepe...

2008-11-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

Presidents Kill People, Especially Bush
By Cenk Uygur

It's a weighty job. It's no exaggeration to say that the president makes life and death decisions all the time. We were interviewing Michael Isikoff of Newsweek yesterday on The Young Turks and we discussed this part of his latest story:

As NEWSWEEK reported last summer, President Bush approved more relaxed rules of engagement for U.S. forces along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Pentagon once required "90 percent" confidence on the part of intelligence agencies that a "high-value target" was present before approving Predator strikes inside Pakistan. Under the revised rules, U.S. officials on the ground now need only 50 to 60 percent confidence to shoot at compounds suspected of sheltering foreign fighters, according to knowledgeable U.S. sources who would speak of sensitive matters only anonymously.

Think about that. Even if you have a president with a conscience, one out of ten times someone is going to walk into the Oval Office and say, "I'm sorry Mr. President, our intelligence didn't pan out - we accidentally hit a wedding. Ten civilians killed."

That is tough. That is what Obama will have to deal with. Once you think about it that way, you almost don't want the job.

Now let's move on to a president without a conscience. George Bush. Think about the decision that Isikoff explains above. I understand hitting a target that has 90% certainty of being Al Qaeda fighters, simply because you'll almost never a hundred percent certainty. We can't have a president frozen with indecision or who never takes a shot no matter how certain his intelligence people are that we have Al Qaeda on the other end.

But I at least want the president up at night worrying about the consequences of his decisions. Every time he gives the order, people die. We just hope that we get it right most of the time (and even if you have the right guys, it should give you small amount of pause if you're human; let alone the tragedy of hitting the wrong people).

Look at what Bush does instead - lowering the bar to about 50% certainty that it's an actual enemy target. That means half the time he blows up a wedding, or a group of kids playing in the yard, or innocent men sitting in a coffee house, or a just an average family sitting around their kitchen table. And why is he doing this? Obviously, because he wants to get Osama bin Laden or another top Al Qaeda leader before he leaves office. In other words, for his reputation.

This is why I don't like George Bush. You're not supposed to say it in polite circles, but I think he is a despicable person. Yes, I mean that on a personal level. I think he shows sick indifference to the lives of others. Maybe it's standard fare for politicians to be more concerned about their own careers than the lives of others, but there is a line. Would you take a 50% chance that you'd kill innocent civilians? Could you live with that?

And think about this - why did he lower the bar recently? We're seven years out from 9/11. It's not like the hunt for Al Qaeda has taken on some new urgency now. No, what has taken on urgency is Bush's legacy as he prepares to leave office. That's the only thing that has changed. There is an inescapable conclusion here - Bush has ordered more innocent people to their deaths so that he can try to salvage his reputation before he leaves office.

Maybe the man doesn't think Pakistani lives are worth the same as our lives. What's the big deal if you have the wrong people? They're all Muslims that live in that area anyway, right? I know some conservatives definitely feel this way. But a president should be smart enough and decent enough to understand that there are real families with real human beings who didn't do anything to us there. They didn't have it coming.

Earlier I mentioned a kitchen table. We're used to our own kitchen tables. We know how they look and it feels like home to us. It almost seems strange to think of a family sitting around a kitchen table in North Waziristan. But they do. The husband comes home from probably a back-breaking day of work. They have aspirations for their kids. They're worried about the violent jihadists that are rumored to be in the area (like we're worried about crime in our neighborhoods). The wife is making soup. The son has just come in from playing soccer. The dad is at least glad to see his only son come home. And then boom. Lights out. We just dropped a bomb on the wrong house. They're all dead...

For the closing, please Click Here.

2008-11-21T10:57:00.001-07:00

You can't make this stuff up:

Pictures That Make the Rude Pundit Feel Like He's Dropped Acid and Stepped into a Shark Tank

So there she was, the Future of the Republican Party, standing there yesterday like the spank-worthy centerfold of the LL Bean Christmas catalog, at a turkey farm, having just pardoned a fair fowl from becoming a crispy-skinned main course, as is the Chief Executive of a state's wont. And then she talked to the press. In front of a trough of blood and guts. While a farm worker was killing turkeys.

The Rude Pundit loves that worker - let's name him "Johnny Moustache" - for constantly looking at Palin and over to the side, where, one may assume, someone's telling him he needs to get to work, that the turkeys won't slaughter themselves. The Rude Pundit loves Johnny because the expression on his face says, "Are you really that fucking stupid? Are you really our fucking governor? Were you really almost the fucking vice president? Well, fuck me."

One could say that the media there set up Palin. And, goddamn, you gotta hope that's true, that some producer said, "Let's see if this bitch is as much of an idiot as everyone says she is," that the reporter intentionally asked if there were programs in Alaska "on the chopping block" and what Palin was going to cook at her family's Thanksgiving dinner. She's in charge of the turkey. No, really.

If you watch the un-blurred video of it, you will truly understand how hilarious it is. While Johnny offs the deliciously plump birds, Palin holds a cup of coffee and smilingly pontificates about life on the campaign trail, building up services in Alaska, the effect of oil prices on the state, how her kids are happy, how "neat" it was to come to the farm, how "You need a little bit of levity in this job," how she's there to "promote a local business" and not do something that "invites criticism." MSNBC reported that the photographer asked if she cared about the background; Palin said, "No worries."

And is there anything else you need to know about the end of the Republican Party than what's contained in this video? The disengagement from the reality that's right in their fucking faces?

(In case you don't watch it: what Johnny Moustache there is doing is sticking the thrashing bird into the funnel, cutting its throat, and letting blood drain out, occasionally pushing on the still kicking bird to squeeze more blood out, priming the pump, if you will. Welcome to the reality of Thanksgiving season. Gobble-gobble, motherfuckers.)

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/

2008-11-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

How the mighty do fall: Ann Coulter pitching right-wing stock-tip scams

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/how-mighty-do-f...

By David Neiwert Thursday Nov 20, 2008 4:00pm

I'm sure a lot of you were wondering what happened to Ann Coulter this election season. The right has trotted her out to wage culture wars reliably ever since 1998. But she hardly was visible at all this year.

Well, if you happen to be one of those lost souls who belongs to the Conservative Book Club, then you received one of these e-mails in your Inbox this week from Coulter.

Click here to see the full letter.

As you can see, it's a letter that starts out by teeing off the emerging right-wing meme attempting to blame Barack Obama for the current economic meltdown, mostly by noting that Wall Street firms donated more heavily to Obama's campaign than to John McCain's:

If you've been wondering why the financial industry is in meltdown -- and taking your 401(k) or investment portfolio down with it -- now you know.

Let's face it: The former frat boys who populate Wall Street today understand economics as well as the pinko professors whose courses they snored through.

Now, it's true that Democrats were heavily preferred by Wall Street campaign donors this year, but that has far more to do with their historic preference for lining up behind the perceived likely winners of a given election season. And even a blind pig -- or a right-wing pundit -- could sense before the season even started that the Republican brand was giving off the distinct odor of fetid slop.

But if those same Wall Street pinko-educated frat boys are as ignorant of economics this year as Coulter claims, then wouldn't they have been equally so in 2000 and 2004, when they gave heavily instead to Coulter's then-preferred candidate, George W. Bush? Something doesn't exactly add up here.

That's all just throat-clearing, though, for Coulter's main pitch: She's selling you a financial newsletter written by a fellow named Mark Skousen, whose PhD in economics seems to impress Coulter mightily (if only she gave as much credence to people who actually won the Nobel Prize in economics).

Three years ago, Skousen was selling the same scam through the Heritage Foundation, promising super-hot stock tips if only you subscribed to his pricey investment newsletter. No word on how that hot tech stock actually did -- but I'd wager it performed about as well the return on assisting former Nigerian prime ministers.

Skousen, however, is not just your average "conservative economist." He actually is an adherent of the same far-right school of "libertarian" economics as Ron Paul: he advocates a return to the gold standard, the dismantling of the IRS and the Federal Reserve, and most of the other conspiratorial nonsense that accompanies these theories. Like Paul, he's a devotee of the Ludwig Van Mises Institute, which promotes much of this malarkey, and he's likewise actually a Bircherite in libertarian clothing. Indeed, Paul was one of the headliners at Skousen's "FreedomFest" earlier this year in Las Vegas.

Like most of the Bircher wing of the libertarian movement, Skousen consistently takes a far-right political position on labor issues, too. He wrote a piece denouncing "card check" union organizing just last month.

Skousen is the nephew of the late noted John Birch/Mormon figure W. Cleon Skousen; his brother, Joel Skousen, is famous for promoting Patriot-style "New World Order" conspiracy theories. All three of them promote the far-right version of "constitutionalism," which is all about the belief that secret elites manipulate the economy and the political process, wield the IRS and Federal Reserve as political weapons along with a huge federal bureaucracy, all of which violates the original unamended (or "organic") Constitution.

So this is what Ann Coulter is reduced to these days: Shilling for Patriot-style right-wing moneymaking scams.

But then, I guess it isn't surprising that Coulter is heading down this same path. During the past campaign, she actually came out in support of Ron Paul.

Well, fools and their money are soon parted. And anyone foolish enough to take their investment advice from Ann Coulter will get everything they deserve.

But I'm wondering when we'll see Coulter turn up in late-night infomercials for gold Liberty Dollars with her own image stamped on them. Because that's the road -- the one leading to ignominious obscurity and irrelevance -- she's headed down.

And I can't think of a more deserved fate.

2008-11-20T08:29:00.000-07:00

This is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House
By Jeremy Scahill, AlterNet
Posted on November 20, 2008, Printed on November 20, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/107666 /

U.S. policy is not about one individual, and no matter how much faith people place in President-elect Barack Obama, the policies he enacts will be fruit of a tree with many roots. Among them: his personal politics and views, the disastrous realities his administration will inherit, and, of course, unpredictable future crises. But the best immediate indicator of what an Obama administration might look like can be found in the people he surrounds himself with and who he appoints to his Cabinet. And, frankly, when it comes to foreign policy, it is not looking good.

Obama has a momentous opportunity to do what he repeatedly promised over the course of his campaign: bring actual change. But the more we learn about who Obama is considering for top positions in his administration, the more his inner circle resembles a staff reunion of President Bill Clinton's White House. Although Obama brought some progressives on board early in his campaign, his foreign policy team is now dominated by the hawkish, old-guard Democrats of the 1990s. This has been particularly true since Hillary Clinton conceded defeat in the Democratic primary, freeing many of her top advisors to join Obama's team.

"What happened to all this talk about change?" a member of the Clinton foreign policy team recently asked the Washington Post. "This isn't lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time."

Amid the euphoria over Obama's election and the end of the Bush era, it is critical to recall what 1990s U.S. foreign policy actually looked like. Bill Clinton's boiled down to a one-two punch from the hidden hand of the free market, backed up by the iron fist of U.S. militarism. Clinton took office and almost immediately bombed Iraq (ostensibly in retaliation for an alleged plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush). He presided over a ruthless regime of economic sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and under the guise of the so-called No-Fly Zones in northern and southern Iraq, authorized the longest sustained U.S. bombing campaign since Vietnam.

Under Clinton, Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization that hurt U.S. workers and devastated developing countries. Clinton accelerated the militarization of the so-called War on Drugs in Central and Latin America and supported privatization of U.S. military operations, giving lucrative contracts to Halliburton and other war contractors. Meanwhile, U.S. weapons sales to countries like Turkey and Indonesia aided genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the East Timorese.

The prospect of Obama's foreign policy being, at least in part, an extension of the Clinton Doctrine is real. Even more disturbing, several of the individuals at the center of Obama's transition and emerging foreign policy teams were top players in creating and implementing foreign policies that would pave the way for projects eventually carried out under the Bush/Cheney administration. With their assistance, Obama has already charted out several hawkish stances. Among them:

http://www.alternet.org/audits/107666/this_is_change_20...

2008-11-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

Click on image to see enlarged version

2008-11-17T09:09:00.002-07:00

Bin Ladin was a useful tool to the Bush Administration; that combination of war-profiteers, Likudnik double agents & psychopathic nihilists.

There MUST be a historical reckoning for all this. There's no choice.

Monday, November 17, 2008
Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Persian Afghan press alleging that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so. It says that a forthcoming French documentary containing interviews with the French soldiers provides proof for the allegation. The argument is that the Bush administration needed Bin Ladin to be at large in order to justify its military expansionism.

Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney
Hasht-e-Sobh
Friday, October 3, 2008
Document Type: OSC Translated Text

Afghan article says US Bin-Ladin hunt phoney

Text of article, "Bin-Ladin on the run? The rumour which was fact", by Afghan independent secular daily newspaper Hasht-e Sobh on 29 September

So, the rumour was right: French soldiers trapped Usamah Bin-Ladin, but were not allowed by the Americans to arrest the apparent fugitive leader of Al-Qa`idah. A Bin-Ladin documentary just released by French documentary cinema examines this issue, an issue which has led to heated debate in the French media.

... Watching this revealing French documentary changes the rumours into disturbing facts."Bin Laden, the failings of a manhunt", produced by Emmanuel Razavi and Eric de Lavarene, two French filmmakers and reporters, assesses and confirms the claims of French soldiers that they could have killed Usamah within two operations, but the American forces prevented them. This film has not been broadcast publicly yet and is to be broadcast by Planet, a French network. ...

Facing the facts in this Usamah film is a bitter and disturbing experience and will make you nervous and wish that what it is that you are watching is just a baseless rumour, or a figment of Hollywood's imagination. But it is not. The pictures are real and you are facing a debate in documentary form. The only justification for the bloody presence of America in Afghanistan is the ambiguous existence of Usamah Bin-Ladin and the Al-Qa'idah terrorist network. ...

http://www.juancole.com/2008/11/afghan-article-says-us-...

2008-11-17T08:41:00.002-07:00

Dan Rather’s Lawsuit Shows Role of G.O.P. in Inquiry

When Dan Rather filed suit against CBS 14 months ago — claiming, among other things, that his former employer had commissioned a politically biased investigation into his work on a “60 Minutes” segment about President Bush’s National Guard service — the network predicted the quick and favorable dismissal of the case, which it derided as “old news.”

So far, Mr. Rather has spent more than $2 million of his own money on the suit. And according to documents filed recently in court, he may be getting something for his money.

Using tools unavailable to him as a reporter — including the power of subpoena and the threat of punishment against witnesses who lie under oath — he has unearthed evidence that would seem to support his assertion that CBS intended its investigation, at least in part, to quell Republican criticism of the network.

Among the materials that money has shaken free for Mr. Rather are internal CBS memorandums turned over to his lawyers, showing that network executives used Republican operatives to vet the names of potential members of a panel that had been billed as independent and charged with investigating the “60 Minutes” segment.

Mr. Rather attracted the ire of Republican bloggers and talk radio in particular after the segment, which was broadcast on a weekday edition of “60 Minutes” in September 2004. It purported to have unearthed evidence about favorable treatment extended to President Bush during his Vietnam-era service in the Texas Air National Guard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/17/business/media/17rath...
*
Gazillionaires own 'the media'. Gazillionaires love tax breaks. The media has a conservative bias.

D'uh.

On the other hand, reality has a liberal bias.

2008-11-16T17:07:00.003-07:00

The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla

(From Dick Cavett's Blog):

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn’t ailing. Three out of these five implements — answering machine, fax machine, printer, phone and electric can-opener — all dropped dead on me in the past few days.

Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will only get Sarah Palin.

I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.

There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying.

What have we done to deserve this, this media blitz that the astute Andrea Mitchell has labeled “The Victory Tour”?

I suppose it will be recorded as among political history’s ironies that Palin was brought in to help John McCain. I can’t blame feminists who might draw amusement from the fact that a woman managed to both cripple the male she was supposed to help while gleaning an almost Elvis-sized following for herself. Mac loses, Sarah wins big-time was the gist of headlines.

I feel a little sorry for John. He aimed low and missed.

What will ambitious politicos learn from this? That frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits?

And how much more of all that lies in our future if God points her to those open-a-crack doors she refers to? The ones she resolves to splinter and bulldoze her way through upon glimpsing the opportunities, revealed from on high.

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

(A cynic might wonder if Wasilla High School’s English and geography departments are draped in black.)

(How many contradictory and lying answers about The Empress’s New Clothes have you collected? I’ve got, so far, only four. Your additional ones welcome.)

Matt Lauer asked her about her daughter’s pregnancy and what went into the decision about how to handle it. Her “answer” did not contain the words “daughter,” “pregnancy,” “what to do about it” or, in fact, any two consecutive words related to Lauer’s query.

I saw this as a brief clip, so I don’t know whether Lauer recovered sufficiently to follow up, or could only sit there, covered in disbelief. If it happens again, Matt, I bequeath you what I heard myself say once to an elusive guest who stiffed me that way: “Were you able to hear any part of my question?”

At the risk of offending, well, you, for example, I worry about just what it is her hollering fans see in her that makes her the ideal choice to deal with the world’s problems: collapsed economies, global warming, hostile enemies and our current and far-flung twin battlefronts, either of which may prove to be the world’s second “30 Years’ War.”

Has there been a poll to see if the Sarah-ites are numbered among that baffling 26 percent of our population who, despite everything, still maintain that President George has done a heckuva job?

A woman in one of Palin’s crowds praised her for being “a mom like me … who thinks the way I do” and added, for ill measure, “That’s what I want in the White House.” Fine, but in what capacity?

Do this lady’s like-minded folk wonder how, say, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, et al (add your own favorites) managed so well without being soccer moms? Without being whizzes in the kitchen, whipping up moose soufflés? Without executing and wounding wolves from the air and without promoting that sad, threadbare hoax — sexual abstinence — as the answer to the sizzling loins of the young?

(In passing, has anyone observed that hunting animals with high-powered guns could only be defined as sport if both sides were equally armed?)

I’d love to hear what you think has caused such an alarming number of our fellow Americans to fall into the Sarah Swoon.

Could the willingness to crown one who seems to have no first language have anything to do with the oft-lamented fact that we seem to be alone among nations in having made the word “intellectual” an insult? (And yet…and yet…we did elect Obama. Surely not despite his brains.)

Sorry about all of the foregoing, as if you didn’t get enough of the lady every day in every medium but smoke signals.

I do not wish her ill. But I also don’t wish us ill. I hope she continues to find happiness in Alaska.

May I confess that upon first seeing her, I liked her looks? With the sound off, she presents a not uncomely frontal appearance.

But now, as the Brits say, “I’ll be glad to see the back of her.”

2008-11-16T09:01:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald
Sunday Nov. 16, 2008 06:39 EST
Marty Peretz's assistant is the latest to be elected spokesperson for the Moderate Americans

As we've seen many times and in many contexts, one of the most empty-headed, trite and deceitful pundit techniques is to take one's own viewpoint and, without an iota of polling data or other empirical support, attribute it to the "average/ordinary/moderate American" and then, with deep concern, warn political leaders that they will harm themselves politically -- will alienate the fair-minded moderate voters -- if they don't follow that view. Even for the most ideologically extreme pundits who rely on this tactic, it always just so happens that their own views -- magically -- are the same as the ones that just happen to be held by the majority of Good Centrist Voters as well.

There are few more mindless practitioners of this technique than Marty Peretz's assistant, Jamie Kirchick. In a New Republic article yesterday defending Joe Lieberman and urging that he keep his Homeland Security Chairmanship (TNR, of course, announced in 2004 that its editorial mission would be to ensure that the Democratic Party was led by Joe Lieberman's "principles"), Kirchick identified some of those who are advocating for Lieberman's removal -- Daily Kos, Joe Klein, Josh Marshall, Jane Hamsher -- and then declared:

"If Democrats follow the cues of this crowd, then the party will lose credibility among the moderate majority of the American electorate."

Indeed. It is Jamie Kirchick -- who spent the whole year embodying the most ludicrous extremes of neoconservatism, venerating John McCain and demonizing Barack Obama as a weak radical -- who, along with Kirchick's ideological comrade, Joe Lieberman, is the symbol for the "moderate majority of the American electorate." Therefore, any opposition to the Kirchicks and Liebermans will doom the Democratic Party...http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/11/16/kirch...

2008-11-13T19:34:00.002-07:00

Scary: The Far-Right's Crazy Attacks on Obama Are Just Getting Started

By Bob Cesca, Huffington Post
Posted on November 13, 2008, Printed on November 13, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.huffingtonpost.com//106926/

This item has been promoted to the front page from AlterNet's blog section, PEEK.

For the last eight years, we've observed Karl Rove's non-reality based universe in which logic was entirely abandoned in lieu of whatever reality the administration invented in order to serve its ridiculous policies and to mask its glaring nincompoopery. Intellectually dishonest at best -- destructive and criminal at worst.

This didn't end on Election Day.

Since their thumpin' last week, the far-right has pushed the crazy to eleven and snapped the knob clean off -- an opening salvo of twisted hackery portending an insane four-to-eight years of attacks on the Obama administration. If the last seven days have been any indication, the far-right is shaping up to make the 1990s seem quaint -- even erudite by comparison. That which used to be your basic, off-the-shelf intellectual dishonesty has grown into, as Digby pointed out recently, full-on intellectual violence.

Intellectual violence. While not a new term, it perfectly defines what we're seeing now: accusations and smears that so severely confound logic they literally attack -- violate -- reality and the human intellect. It's like a berzerker dervish of argumentative elbows and fists indiscriminately flailing around, thwacking anything in its orbit, so much so that constructing a counterpoint is literally painful, "Why the hell am I trying to debunk this?! Ow! My head. Aw hell, I need a drink."

The "Impeach Obama" Facebook groups, for example. No, I'm not making that up. They're real and there's a constant variety of disgruntled far-right Republicans joining up every day. And, to our total lack of surprise, they're not ashamed in the slightest to post comments like this one:

"Damn dems stole the election like they always do. GOD wanted McCain and Palin in the White House. That's why it's called THE WHITE HOUSE."

Apart from being a racist, this "Impeach Obama" Facebook member is clearly the most awesome pollster in the world if he was able to sample God. I tried to submit a friend request just so I could ask him if he perchance enlisted a room of undecided cherubim for a Frank Luntz dial group.

Shortly after discovering this, I was talking with a colleague and found myself instinctively trying to form a rational argument about why the Facebook members were wrong. It began with the obvious: "He's not even the president yet!" And then, after I segued into Article II and the constitutional grounds for impeachment, I stopped myself. What in name of Randall P. MacMurphy am I doing? Arguing against this crap is like explaining to a meth tweaker that the shadow people aren't real. That's when I decided that it'd be more fun to just infiltrate one of the groups and post comments like, "The moon landing was staged!" and, "Obama is a bionic -- just like his half-aunt! I have proof!"...MORE

2008-11-13T18:41:00.000-07:00

Influential Talk-Show Host Shifts Position: Cheney To The Hague

by: blueness

Thu Nov 13, 2008 at 03:56:00 AM EST

For 30 straight years KGO has been the most listened-to AM radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area. From dusk till dawn, it can also be heard throughout the entirety of the west coast, from Canada to Mexico. KGO pioneered the talk-radio format, long before it was seized and exploited by the rightwing noise machine. The station employs local, non-syndicated hosts, all of whom consistently rank first in their time slots. Hosts run the left-coast political gamut, from the vacuous, muddle-headed centrist Ronn Owens, to the fiery renegade Ray Taliaferro, who contends that a close reading of scripture discloses that Jesus was gay, and most commonly refers to George II as "that idiot out of Texas."

Occupying the 7-10 p.m. time slot is Gene Burns, who has been in radio for more than 40 years, the past 14 at KGO. Burns is a recently lapsed Libertarian; he sought the party's presidential nomination in 1984, but, after supporting John Kerry in 2004, this year he made the great leap, and registered as a Democrat. He is a pedant, and something of a blowhard, but is extremely influential with more moderate listeners put off by the station's fire-breathing lefties. Burns has consistently opposed impeachment proceedings against George II and Darth Cheney as frivolous and unwarranted: these men have not, to his mind, committed impeachable offenses. Challenged by callers contending that these men approved the torture of fellow human beings, Burns has maintained that the United States has not tortured; even waterboarding, to him, does not constitute torture.

Wednesday night, all this changed. After viewing on his local PBS affiliate the documentary Torturing Democracy, Burns told his listeners, he realized he had been wrong. The United States has tortured. It has also engaged in extraordinary renditions, for the purpose of torture. While Burns still believes impeachment to be a non-starter, he has concluded that, in the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in other sites overseas, Dick Cheney is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and should be brought to trial before an international tribunal at The Hague. With the expectation that, in the course of Cheney mounting his defense, he may implicate George II as equally culpable in the commission of the same crimes.

There's More...

2008-11-13T17:24:00.000-07:00

Did Republicans just admit that Katherine Harris stole 2000 election for Bush?
By John Amato Thursday Nov 13, 2008 4:00pm

This is too much. The Republicans are basically admitting that Katherine Harris stole the election for George Bush.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15490_Page2.h...

"Republicans are also questioning the credibility of Minnesota’s Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, the man tasked with overseeing the recount. A background document distributed by national Republicans portrays Ritchie as a far-left, Democratic version of Katherine Harris, the former Republican secretary of state whose actions helped decide the 2000 presidential election. The document accuses Ritchie, who was elected in 2006 with the assistance of a progressive-led group designed to elected Democratic election administrators, of having connections to the controversial voter registration group ACORN and the Communist Party of America."

As Al Franken gets closer to victory, the Republicans are unraveling. A recount is definitely on its way. Oh, what fun...

http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/did-republicans-ju...

2008-11-13T16:46:00.002-07:00

It's not just Limbaugh and Hannity

Beyond the echelon of widely known conservative radio hosts with national audiences lies a vast network of lesser-known syndicated and regional radio hosts who have become key components of an echo chamber for conservative talking points and falsehoods. Like their better-known counterparts, these syndicated and regional radio hosts have played active roles this election season in promoting falsehoods and smears in an all-out effort to foment hate and distrust among their listeners for the senator who is now president-elect.

Bill Cunningham
"Obama wants to gas the Jews."

Chris Baker
"I don't think homeless people should vote"; "I'm not that excited about women voting."

Quinn & Rose
"Gay sex produces AIDS."

Lee Rodgers
"With that screechy, fingernails-on-the-blackboard voice of hers, it is impossible for Hillary Clinton to deliver a great speech"

Mark Belling
"When you think of Hillary Clinton what do you think -- what word comes to mind? Yes, can I use that word here? All right, it's who bitches the most."

Neal Boortz
"Let's ask Obama how many prayer rugs he has."

Jon Caldara
On Hillary Clinton's performance in a debate: "This -- was it fair to say this woman got bitch-slapped tonight?"

Dan Caplis
On photo of Obama in African attire: "the kind of garb you often see Osama bin Laden in"

Mark Levin
"For now on, it's the National Organization of Really Ugly Women"

G. Gordon Liddy
"Obama is counting on the urban elites and the welfare class to win the state for him. But he's putting on a show for the rest of Pennsylvania."

"Gunny" Bob Newman
On Obama: "You're a far-left, terrorist-hugging politician, not the bad-boy gangsta you want people to believe you are."

Michael Savage
"I'll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it's a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out."

(Warning: there's pics of some these bloviating morons. Wow. I guess irrational hate makes one ugly. That makes sense.)

Read more

2008-11-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in the spirit of great satire, the Yes Men published a fake edition of The New York Times from the future, filled with stories that many of us would love to see in print. Friedman's resignation is one of the editorials. I urge you to check it out, and forward it to everyone you know. It's truly priceless. Even the ads are biting and hilarious.
http://www.nytimes-se.com/2009/07/04/the-fine-print

...................

The End of the Experts?
By Thomas J. Friedman
Published: July 4th, 2009

........

But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq — and ourselves — is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform.

In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it’s time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself.

...........

Now the simple fact is, an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state is a war crime, even when linked to grand ideas of the future of mankind. In fact, that’s exactly what Hitler did, for exactly the same reasons. The Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal called it the “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

What was I thinking? And more importantly, why didn’t anyone stop me?

more at:
http://www.nytimes-se.com/2009/07/04/the-end-of-the-exp... /

2008-11-13T08:11:00.002-07:00

Excellent article on the right wing bloviators & why not to believe & repeat what they say instead of thinking for yourself.

Secrets of Talk Radio

The former news director of WTMJ reveals how talk show hosts like Charlie Sykes and Jeff Wagner work to get us angry.

by Dan Shelley

Thursday 11/13/2008

I first got into journalism because I thought I could make a difference.

I wrote for the school newspaper and did “news” reports on a radio station a friend and I started at my high school in Springfield, Mo. I got my first professional job at age 20, while still in college, at a local radio station’s news department. Three years later, I became a news director, and 12 years after that, in 1995, I was recruited to move to Milwaukee to become news director at WTMJ, one of the largest and most successful news/talk radio stations in America.

... To begin with, talk show hosts such as Charlie Sykes – one of the best in the business – are popular and powerful because they appeal to a segment of the population that feels disenfranchised and even victimized by the media. These people believe the media are predominantly staffed by and consistently reflect the views of social liberals. This view is by now so long-held and deep-rooted, it has evolved into part of virtually every conservative’s DNA.

To succeed, a talk show host must perpetuate the notion that his or her listeners are victims, and the host is the vehicle by which they can become empowered. The host frames virtually every issue in us-versus-them terms. There has to be a bad guy against whom the host will emphatically defend those loyal listeners.

This enemy can be a politician – either a Democratic officeholder or, in rare cases where no Democrat is convenient to blame, it can be a “RINO” (a “Republican In Name Only,” who is deemed not conservative enough). It can be the cold, cruel government bureaucracy. More often than not, however, the enemy is the “mainstream media” – local or national, print or broadcast.

... Conservative talk show hosts would receive daily talking points e-mails from the Bush White House, the Republican National Committee and, during election years, GOP campaign operations. They’re not called talking points, but that’s what they are. I know, because I received them, too. During my time at WTMJ, Charlie would generally mine the e-mails, then couch the daily message in his own words. Midday talker Jeff Wagner would be more likely to rely on them verbatim. But neither used them in their entirety, or every single day...
http://www.milwaukeemagazine.com/currentIssue/full_feat...

2008-11-11T06:48:00.001-07:00

Click image to see enlarged version

2008-11-11T04:57:00.001-07:00

America the Illiterate
by Chris Hedges

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and clichés. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.

There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation’s population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.

The illiterate rarely vote, and when they do vote they do so without the ability to make decisions based on textual information. American political campaigns, which have learned to speak in the comforting epistemology of images, eschew real ideas and policy for cheap slogans and reassuring personal narratives. Political propaganda now masquerades as ideology. Political campaigns have become an experience. They do not require cognitive or self-critical skills. They are designed to ignite pseudo-religious feelings of euphoria, empowerment and collective salvation. Campaigns that succeed are carefully constructed psychological instruments that manipulate fickle public moods, emotions and impulses, many of which are subliminal. They create a public ecstasy that annuls individuality and fosters a state of mindlessness. They thrust us into an eternal present. They cater to a nation that now lives in a state of permanent amnesia. It is style and story, not content or history or reality, which inform our politics and our lives. We prefer happy illusions. And it works because so much of the American electorate, including those who should know better, blindly cast ballots for slogans, smiles, the cheerful family tableaux, narratives and the perceived sincerity and the attractiveness of candidates. We confuse how we feel with knowledge.

The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools. They still cannot understand predatory loan deals, the intricacies of mortgage papers, credit card agreements and equity lines of credit that drive them into foreclosures and bankruptcies. They still struggle with the most basic chores of daily life from reading instructions on medicine bottles to filling out bank forms, car loan documents and unemployment benefit and insurance papers. They watch helplessly and without comprehension as hundreds of thousands of jobs are shed. They are hostages to brands. Brands come with images and slogans. Images and slogans are all they understand. Many eat at fast food restaurants not only because it is cheap but because they can order from pictures rather than menus. And those who serve them, also semi-literate or illiterate, punch in orders on cash registers whose keys are marked with symbols and pictures. This is our brave new world. ...
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/11/10-6

2008-11-10T11:07:00.001-07:00

Poll: Bush disapproval ratings reach new record (76%)

WASHINGTON (CNN) – As President-elect Obama visits the White House, a new national poll suggests that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the most unpopular president in the six decades since presidential approval ratings were first measured.

Seventy-six percent of those questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Monday disapprove of how George W. Bush is handling his job as President. That's an all-time high in CNN polling, or in Gallup polling dating back to World War II.

"No other president's disapproval rating has gone higher than 70 percent. Bush has managed to do that three times so far this year," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "That means that Bush is now more unpopular than Richard Nixon was when he resigned from office during Watergate with a 66 percent disapproval rating."

Prior to President Bush, the record holder for presidential disapproval was Harry Truman, with a 67 percent disapproval rating in January of 1952, his last full year in office.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/10/bush-di... /

2008-11-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

NYT: Obama and the War on Brains
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 9, 2008

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual. Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth. Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.

Perhaps John Kennedy was the last president who was unapologetic about his intellect and about luring the best minds to his cabinet. More recently, we’ve had some smart and well-educated presidents who scrambled to hide it. Richard Nixon was a self-loathing intellectual, and Bill Clinton camouflaged a fulgent brain behind folksy Arkansas aphorisms about hogs.

As for President Bush, he adopted anti-intellectualism as administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists). Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever interviewed who appeared so uninterested in ideas.

At least since Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1950s, it’s been a disadvantage in American politics to seem too learned....

Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09kristof.htm...

2008-11-08T07:35:00.000-07:00

The Desperate Right's Five Biggest Flops of the 2008 Election

By Brad Reed, AlterNet
Posted on November 8, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106184/

After every election cycle, our national press corps likes to point out the so-called game-changing moments during the campaign that supposedly shifted momentum decisively toward one candidate. Classic examples include Gerald Ford freeing Poland, Ronald Reagan telling Jimmy Carter that he went again, Michael Dukakis appearing in a tank, Bush I looking at his watch, Al Gore sighing and John Kerry windsurfing. At their heart, these moments are superficial explanations for very complex processes and phenomena, which is the biggest reason why the media love to discuss them. After all, it beats talking about policy.

Over the past two decades, the Right has excelled at manipulating the media's love of shallow, scripted storylines to transform our national discourse into one long psychodrama in which Democratic candidates inevitably make some tragic gaffe that shows voters how truly out of touch they are with the Real Americans living in the heartland. These moments are usually dramatized by illustrations of blaring sirens on the Drudge Report accompanied by bold, red-lettered headlines that say things like, "SHOCK VIDEO: Kerry orders Swiss cheese on his cheesesteak." Our press corps then dutifully reports on how Kerry's disdain for traditional Cheez Wiz shows why Democrats are having trouble connecting with blue-collar voters who suspect that Democrats are all secretly Jesus-hating communists.

This election, however, none of the GOP's scripted game-changing moments were able to derail the Obama campaign. Indeed, it could be argued that many of the non-game-changers (See: Palin, Sarah) actually worked in Obama's favor. Here, then, are the five most uneventful events that did not decisively help McCain win the election:

Non-Game Changer #5: A crazed Obama supporter did not carve a backward "B" into a McCain staffer's face.

At first, the Ashley Todd saga seemed like the perfect way to shift the election momentum back to McCain. Here, after all, was a young white woman who had been robbed and assaulted by a crazed black Obama supporter who went so far as to mutilate her face when he learned she was working for McCain. Matt Drudge blared Todd's "shock" story at the top of his home page and showed a picture of the poor young conservative with a black eye and a backward "B" carved into her face. Some of the dimmer right-wing bloggers such as Red State's Erick Erickson jumped all over the story and proclaimed that the media were to blame for Todd's alleged assault because they had "cooked up tales about Republican verbal violence" at McCain rallies. Obama also took his share of the blame because he had urged his supporters to get in opponents' faces and aggressively defend their positions and beliefs.

Todd's story, of course, was such obvious bullshit that even Michelle Malkin expressed skepticism about it. While this didn't stop the McCain campaign from actively pushing it to the media, it did ensure that the non-story had a nonexistent shelf life...

http://www.alternet.org/election08/106184/the_desperate... /

2008-11-08T07:23:00.002-07:00

Watching Them Squirm: Is Fox News Abandoning the Mob It Created?

By Mark Ames, AlterNet
Posted on November 7, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106234/

The first polls had just closed when the Republican Right's "Agony of Defeat" moment arrived. It was just after 8 p.m. -- right as Fox's "America's Election HQ" show returned from a commercial break, and Brit Hume welcomed viewers back to his "Fair and Balanced" network.

But something wasn't right: There was a strange lack of background banter, none of the golf-buddy joshing that comes with overconfidence. There was just Bergman-esque silence between every one of Brit Hume's dramatic pauses. The Fox cameras wandered over an incredible scene: the cream of right-wing/neocon punditry -- William Kristol, Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke -- were caught slumped in their chairs during the commercial break, deep in a state of hopelessness and depression. They didn't see the camera train on them, or maybe they were incapable of faking it, as if they'd been on a three-day Ecstasy roll at Burning Man, and now they were paying the horrible serotonin-deprived price. Kristol looked like he was suffering the worst: He was slouched over the table, his grotesque Stewie-shaped head sulking down to his navel, his glazed eyes staring down at the floor. He strained to lift his head when Hume called on him to comment -- and when Kristol spoke, it was in a raspy, slow voice, not his usual smirking, energetic arrogance. To quote a sympathetic right-wing blogger, "Will Collier e-mails to tell me that he hasn't seen Bill Kristol look this bad since his man McCain get stomped in S.C. by Bush in 2000."

I started my Fox News Election Day Agony Watch at 6:30 a.m. I was expecting a lot of last-minute shrieking about voter fraud, ACORN and Barack Hussein Osama terrorist-mongering, the climax to a vicious campaign that Fox had been promoting over the previous month or two, but what was so strange that day was the relatively subdued, quasi-civil tone that Fox was taking. They pushed those buttons on Election Day, but only halfheartedly. You'd have to have watched a lot of Fox News -- which I have, out of morbid curiosity -- to detect the tonal shift on Nov. 4. It was as if they had decided to pull their punches. Before the polls opened, Ann Coulter appeared for a few minutes to riff against the liberals, but the 47-year-old MILF-wannabe looked oddly desperate in her mini-miniskirt and knee-high boots, as if she stole her imaginary teenage daughter's clubbing outfit and wanted to show it off. The effect was wrong, a desperate eccentricity, like a neocon Michael Jackson.

What was going on? It was as if the Fox News execs were nervous, so they came up with a Plan B approach. Gone was the usual mob-incitement chest-beating that has made Fox News such a hit in Middle America. It seems that the craftier vanguard of the Republican right-wing mob got together and decided that this was the craftiest position to adopt. Just before the elections, Kristol published a New York Times column that threw his entire 20-year divide-and-quagmire playbook out the window in favor of a new pseudo-gracious "hey, we're all friends, liberals and conservatives, and isn't it a wonderful country we live in?" mantra...

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/106234/watching_th... /

Read the rest. It's great. It talks about the nest ninnies at Free Republic. Pure stupidity combined with insanity. Tasty.

2008-11-06T14:12:00.001-07:00

What's next Grand Old Party: It's hard not to look at the map -- particularly in the House -- and not view the GOP as a regional party right now. If it weren’t for the party's relative strength in the South, the party would be in even worse shape...
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/11/05/16466...

2008-11-06T09:32:00.002-07:00

Tidbits from Newsweek & the NYT:

"NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family—clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books."
*

Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps

By ELISABETH BUMILLER

...The disputes between the campaigns centered in large part on the Republican National Committee’s $150,000 wardrobe for Ms. Palin and her family, but also on what McCain advisers considered Ms. Palin’s lack of preparation for her disastrous interview with Katie Couric of CBS News and her refusal to take advice from Mr. McCain’s campaign.

But behind those episodes may be a greater subtext: anger within the McCain camp that Ms. Palin harbored political ambitions beyond 2008.

As late as Tuesday night, a McCain adviser said, Ms. Palin was pushing to deliver her own speech just before Mr. McCain’s concession speech, even though vice-presidential nominees do not traditionally speak on election night. But Ms. Palin met up with Mr. McCain with text in hand. She was told no by Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, and Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist.

On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the officials said.

Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin’s image as an everywoman “hockey mom,” bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin’s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.

The advisers described the McCain campaign as incredulous about the shopping spree and said Republican National Committee lawyers were likely to go to Alaska to conduct an inventory and try to account for all that was spent...

...

Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.

As a result, two senior members of the McCain campaign said on Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had been fired from the campaign in its final days. But Rick Davis, the McCain campaign manager, and Mr. Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Wednesday that Mr. Scheunemann had in fact not been dismissed. Mr. Scheunemann, who picked up the phone in his office at McCain campaign headquarters on Wednesday afternoon, responded that “anybody who says I was fired is either lying or delusional or a whack job.”

Mr. Scheunemann was referring to widely disseminated criticism by Mr. McCain’s advisers in the final days of the campaign that Ms. Palin, as first reported in Politico, was a “whack job.”

Whatever the permutations, the advisers said they strongly believed that Mr. Scheunemann was disclosing, as one put it, “a constant stream of poison” to William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a columnist for The New York Times.

Mr. Kristol, who wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional,” said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the campaign advisers were paranoid. Mr. Kristol has been a strong supporter of Ms. Palin.

“I wasn’t writing poison,” Mr. Kristol said. He added: “Randy Scheunemann is a friend of mine and I think he did a good job. I talked to him, but I talked to a lot of people at the campaign.”...
*

So, neocon weasel Scheunemann was fired last week (!) for being a neocon/PNAC spy. Our ace media was on that one, huh?

The Israel-firsters wanted to save a few bucks on Sarah's 2012 campaignin' clothes. Who knew?

I admit it...more than Obama's victory I enjoy the right wing's defeat more.

If I wanted to rebuild the GOP I'd do everything I could to jettison the neocons.

But then they'll just try to reattach themselves to the establishment Dems. That's where they came from. The 'Scoop Jackson/Senator from Boeing' wing of the Dem faction of the War Party. There's really only one political party in this country; The War Party.

Now that this pesky presidential election is out of the way the real fight can begin. The fight between decency and the Military-Industrial-Media Complex. The fight between people who are citizens of the US and people who are citizens of the US/Israel/the multinational war machine and who knows what or where else.

The two-party dog and pony show is a distraction from the real fight. Very few people seem to get that. And believe me, the mainstream media isn't going to inform on itself.

GE doesn't even make appliances anymore. They make weapons systems and broadcast the 'news'. Yeah, right, the 'news'. The 'news' that isn't true because too much is left out.

2008-11-05T20:28:00.003-07:00

Fox’s Carl Cameron: Palin ‘didn’t understand that Africa was a continent.’»

Today, Fox News’ campaign reporter Carl Cameron unloaded some startling undisclosed reports of Sarah Palin’s incompetence that he had been given off-the-record on the condition they not be released until the conclusion of the campaign:

CAMERON: There was great concern in the McCain campaign that Sarah Palin lacked a degree of knowledgeability necessary to be a running mate, a vice president, and a heartbeat away from the presidency.

We are told by folks that she didn’t know what countries were in NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement. That’d be Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. We’re told that she didn’t understand that Africa was a continent, rather than a series — a country just in itself. A whole host of questions that caused serious problems about her knowledgeability.

Cameron also disclosed that Palin “didn’t accept preparation” for the Katie Couric interview. Watch it:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/05/palin-africa-contin... /

Do you realize what we dodged yesterday? At least for now.

The neocon/Israel-first cabal will hold on to Sarah, though. She's a better front-stooge than the 'chimperor' himself. Bush with boobs.

Here's the assignment: keep an eye on these people. Some are still out-front like Kristol, Max Boot, the Kagan boys but some have already run to ground. Almost disappeared. Very, very dangerous people.

2008-11-04T14:14:00.000-07:00

The End of Rove's Dream
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com

Tuesday, November 4, 2008; 12:43 PM

Karl Rove's dream was that George W. Bush's presidency would usher in a permanent Republican majority. But as with so many of the Bush White House's big ideas, things didn't exactly go according to plan. We'll know for sure by tomorrow, but it looks more and more like the end result of eight years of Bush has been the discrediting of his party and the loss of its commanding position in American politics.

Turning the executive branch into a political arm of the Republican Party, stoking fear and division amid the electorate, trashing opponents without mercy, and casting national security as a wedge issue -- all these tactics had short-term benefits, and indeed won Bush a second term. But ultimately, they seem to have lost America.

As John Harwood wrote in the New York Times last week: "In 2004, after President Bush won re-election with expanded Republican majorities in Congress, academics, journalists and party strategists wondered whether his blend of free-market economics, cultural conservatism and hawkishness on national security might create long-lasting Republican rule.

"'Something fundamental and significant happened,' said Ken Mehlman, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. On the eve of a second Bush term, he said, the Republican Party was 'in a stronger position than at any time since the Great Depression.'

"Today that Republican dream appears in shambles. The twin burdens of an economic crisis and an unpopular war have left Mr. Bush with, at 71 percent, the highest level of public disapproval for a president in the history of the Gallup Poll. Democrats see the chance on Nov. 4 to elect not just Senator Barack Obama but also House and Senate majorities large enough to enact his ambitious agenda."

Sidney Blumenthal writes in a Guardian opinion piece: "Today's election is poised to end the Republican era in American politics - an era that began in reaction to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the Vietnam war and the civil rights revolution, was pioneered by Richard Nixon, consolidated by Ronald Reagan, and wrecked by George W Bush.

"Almost every aspect of the Republican ascendancy has been discredited and lies in tatters - its policies, politics, and even its version of patriotism. . . .

"Now, certain factors that have dominated US politics for 40 years seem destined to recede to the far corners. In economics, supply-side panaceas and deregulation created the worst crisis since the Great Depression, requiring a conservative Republican administration to part-nationalise banks, something unimaginable under any Democratic administration. In foreign policy, neoconservatism led to the morass in Iraq and Afghanistan while undermining the western alliance. In social policy, the evangelical right battered science, the separation of church and state, and the right to privacy. Finally, the conservative principle of limited government has become a watchword for incompetence, cronyism, corruption, hypocrisy, and contempt for the rule of law."...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2008/...

2008-11-03T21:21:00.001-07:00

Nowhere Man

A Farewell to Dubya, All-Time Loser in Presidential History

By Simon Schama

November 3, 2008
The Guardian

"Forgotten but not gone" was the way in which the supremo of Boston politics, Billy Bulger, liked to dismiss the human irritants he had crushed beneath his trim boot. The same could now be said for the hapless 43rd President of the United States as the daylight draws mercifully in on his reign of misfortune and calamity. How is he bearing up, one wonders, as the candidate from his own party treats him as the carrier of some sort of infectious political disease? How telling was it that the most impassioned moment in John McCain's performance in the final debate was when he declared: "I am not George Bush."

Where, O where are you, Dubya, as the action passes you by like a jet skirting dirty weather? Are you roaming the lonely corridors of the White House in search of a friendly shoulder around which to clap your affable arm? Are you sweating it out on the treadmill, hurt and confused as to why the man everyone wanted to have a beer (or Coke) with, who swept to re-election four years ago, has been downgraded to all-time loser in presidential history, stuck there in the bush leagues along with the likes of James Buchanan and Warren Harding? Or are you whacking brush in Crawford, where the locals now make a point of telling visitors that George W never really was from hereabouts anyroad.

Whatever else his legacy, the man who called himself "the decider" has left some gripping history. The last eight years have been so rich in epic imperial hubris that it would take a reborn Gibbon to do justice to the fall. It should be said right away that amid the landscape of smoking craters there are one or two sprigs of decency that have been planted: record amounts of financial help given to Aids-blighted countries of Africa; immigration reform that would have offered an amnesty to illegals and given them a secure path to citizenship, had not those efforts hit the reef of intransigence in Bush's own party. And no one can argue with the fact that since 9/11 the United States has not been attacked on its home territory by jihadi terrorists; though whether or not that security is more illusory than real is, to put it mildly, open to debate.

Bet against that there is the matter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian casualties, more than 4,000 American troops dead, many times that gravely injured, not to mention the puncture wounds and mutilations inflicted on internationally agreed standards of humane conduct for prisoners - and on the protection of domestic liberties enshrined in the American constitution. If the Statue of Liberty were alive, she would be weeping tears of blood.

If Bush himself has been largely kept out of sight, his baleful legacy has been visible in the McCain campaign. McCain has made much of his credentials for independence of mind, a claim which once was credible given his support for immigration reform and opposition to Bush's tax cuts. But somewhere along the road to the Republican nomination, all of this became less important than the lessons of the Reagan-Bush-Rove political playbook which, with the exception of the Clinton election of 1992, seemed to have a track record of unbroken success.

McCain knew this from bitter personal experience, having been on the receiving end of Bush lowball politics in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Coming out of a convincing win against George Bush in New Hampshire he was stopped in his tracks by a smear campaign conducted through push-poll phone calls in which people were asked whether they knew that the daughter McCain had adopted from Sri Lanka was in fact the illegitimate child of an affair with a woman of colour. Now you would think McCain could never reconcile himself to a politician capable of those kinds of tactics. But there he was in the campaign of 2004, stumping the country for the incumbent, ingratiating himself with the conservative base he knew he would need, even as his old Vietnam buddy, John Kerry, was being coated in slime by the Swift Boaters...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/03/geo...

2008-11-02T18:40:00.001-07:00

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

By FRANK RICH

AND so: just how far have we come?

As a rough gauge last week, I watched a movie I hadn’t seen since it came out when I was a teenager in 1967. Back then “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was Hollywood’s idea of a stirring call for racial justice. The premise: A young white woman falls madly in love with a black man while visiting the University of Hawaii and brings him home to San Francisco to get her parents’ blessing. Dad, a crusading newspaper publisher, and Mom, a modern art dealer, are wealthy white liberals — Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, no less — so surely there can be no problem. Complications ensue before everyone does the right thing.

Though the film was a box-office smash and received 10 Oscar nominations, even four decades ago it was widely ridiculed as dated by liberal critics. The hero, played by the first black Hollywood superstar, Sidney Poitier, was seen as too perfect and too “white” — an impossibly handsome doctor with Johns Hopkins and Yale on his résumé and a Nobel-worthy career fighting tropical diseases in Africa for the World Health Organization. What couple would not want him as a son-in-law? “He’s so calm and sure of everything,” says his fiancée. “He doesn’t have any tensions in him.” She is confident that every single one of their biracial children will grow up to “be president of the United States and they’ll all have colorful administrations.”

What a strange movie to confront in 2008. As the world knows, Barack Obama’s own white mother and African father met at the University of Hawaii. In “Dreams From My Father,” he even imagines the awkward dinner where his mother introduced her liberal-ish parents to her intended in 1959. But what’s most startling about this archaic film is the sole element in it that proves inadvertently contemporary. Faced with a black man in the mold of the Poitier character — one who appears “so calm” and without “tensions” — white liberals can make utter fools of themselves. When Joe Biden spoke of Obama being “clean” and “articulate,” he might have been recycling Spencer Tracy’s lines of 41 years ago.

Biden’s gaffe, though particularly naked, prefigured a larger pattern in the extraordinary election campaign that has brought an African-American to the brink of the presidency. Our political and news media establishments — fixated for months on tracking down every unreconstructed bigot in blue-collar America — have their own conspicuous racial myopia, with its own set of stereotypes and clichés. They consistently underestimated Obama’s candidacy because they often saw him as a stand-in for the two-dimensional character Poitier had to shoulder in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” It’s why so many got this election wrong so often.

There were countless ruminations, in print and on television, asking the same two rhetorical questions: “Is He Black Enough?” and “Is He Tough Enough?” The implied answer to both was usually, “No.” The brown-skinned child of biracial parents wasn’t really “black” and wouldn’t appeal to black voters who were overwhelmingly loyal to the wife of America’s first “black” president. And as a former constitutional law professor, Obama was undoubtedly too lofty an intellectual to be a political street fighter, too much of a wuss to land a punch in a debate, too ethereal to connect to “real” Americans. He was Adlai Stevenson, Michael Dukakis or Bill Bradley in dark face — no populist pugilist like John Edwards.

The list of mistaken prognostications that grew from these flawed premises is long. As primary season began, we were repeatedly told that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the most battle-tested and disciplined, with an invincible organization and an unbeatable donors’ network. Poor Obama had to settle for the ineffectual passion of the starry-eyed, Internet-fixated college kids who failed to elect Howard Dean in 2004. When Clinton lost in Iowa, no matter; Obama could never breach the “firewalls” that would wrap up her nomination by Super Tuesday. Neither the Clinton campaign nor the many who bought its spin noticed the take-no-prisoners political insurgency that Obama had built throughout the caucus states and that serves him to this day.

Once Obama wrested the nomination from Clinton by surpassing her in organization, cash and black votes, he was still often seen as too wimpy to take on the Republicans. This prognosis was codified by Karl Rove, whose punditry for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek has been second only to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as a reliable source of laughs this year. Rove called Obama “lazy,” and over the summer he predicted that his fund-raising had peaked in February and that he’d have a “serious problem” winning over Hispanics. Well, Obama was lazy like a fox, and is leading John McCain among Hispanics by 2 to 1. Obama has also pulled ahead among white women despite the widespread predictions that he’d never bring furious Hillary supporters into the fold.

But certainly the single most revelatory moment of the campaign — about the political establishment, not Obama — arrived in June when he reversed his position on taking public financing. This was a huge flip-flop (if no bigger than McCain’s on the Bush tax cuts). But the reaction was priceless. Suddenly the political world discovered that far from being some exotic hothouse flower, Obama was a pol from Chicago. Up until then it rarely occurred to anyone that he had to be a ruthless competitor, not merely a sweet-talking orator, to reach the top of a political machine even rougher than the Clinton machine he had brought down. Whether that makes him more black or more white remains unresolved.

Early in the campaign, the black commentator Tavis Smiley took a lot of heat when he questioned all the rhetoric, much of it from white liberals, about Obama being “post-racial.” Smiley pointed out that there is “no such thing in America as race transcendence.” He is right of course. America can no sooner disown its racial legacy, starting with the original sin of slavery, than it can disown its flag; it’s built into our DNA. Obama acknowledged as much in his landmark speech on race in Philadelphia in March.

Yet much has changed for the better since the era of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” thanks to the epic battles of the civil-rights movement that have made the Obama phenomenon possible. As Mark Harris reminds us in his recent book about late 1960s Hollywood, “Pictures at a Revolution,” it was not until the year of the movie’s release that the Warren Court handed down the Loving decision overturning laws that forbade interracial marriage in 16 states; in the film’s final cut there’s still an outdated line referring to the possibility that the young couple’s nuptials could be illegal (as Obama’s parents’ marriage would have been in, say, Virginia). In that same year of 1967, L.B.J.’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, offered his resignation when his daughter, a Stanford student, announced her engagement to a black Georgetown grad working at NASA. (Johnson didn’t accept it.)

Obama’s message and genealogy alike embody what has changed in the decades since. When he speaks of red and blue America being seamlessly woven into the United States of America, it is always shorthand for the reconciliation of black and white and brown and yellow America as well. Demographically, that’s where America is heading in the new century, and that will be its destiny no matter who wins the election this year.

Still, the country isn’t there yet, and should Obama be elected, America will not be cleansed of its racial history or conflicts. It will still have a virtually all-white party as one of its two most powerful political organizations. There will still be white liberals who look at Obama and can’t quite figure out what to make of his complex mixture of idealism and hard-knuckled political cunning, of his twin identities of international sojourner and conventional middle-class overachiever.

After some 20 months, we’re all still getting used to Obama and still, for that matter, trying to read his sometimes ambiguous takes on both economic and foreign affairs. What we have learned definitively about him so far — and what may most account for his victory, should he achieve it — is that he had both the brains and the muscle to outsmart, outmaneuver and outlast some of the smartest people in the country, starting with the Clintons. We know that he ran a brilliant campaign that remained sane and kept to its initial plan even when his Republican opponent and his own allies were panicking all around him. We know that that plan was based on the premise that Americans actually are sick of the divisive wedge issues that have defined the past couple of decades, of which race is the most divisive of all.

Obama doesn’t transcend race. He isn’t post-race. He is the latest chapter in the ever-unfurling American racial saga. It is an astonishing chapter. For most Americans, it seems as if Obama first came to dinner only yesterday. Should he win the White House on Tuesday, many will cheer and more than a few will cry as history moves inexorably forward.

But we are a people as practical as we are dreamy. We’ll soon remember that the country is in a deep ditch, and that we turned to the black guy not only because we hoped he would lift us up but because he looked like the strongest leader to dig us out.

2008-10-31T08:42:00.001-06:00

White Supremacists Fantasize That Obama Will Help Them Recruit

By Max Blumenthal, The Daily Beast. Posted October 31, 2008.

David Duke and white supremacists are grappling with arrests for an Obama murder plot, while hoping an Obama presidency will be good for them.

On October 27, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms announced the arrest of two young neo-Nazis, Daniel Cowart and Paul Schlesselman, who allegedly plotted to assassinate Barack Obama. The strange event suggests that a criminal element within the white supremacist movement is hell-bent on racial violence if Obama becomes president.

On the other hand, key leaders of the movement's organized front see a potential Obama administration as a rising tide that will lift their sagging boats. They hope to leverage white resentment against Obama's presidency to generate unprecedented funding, bolster membership rolls, and influence the political mainstream.

According to the ATF, Cowart and Schlesselman planned to suit up in white tuxedoes and top hats and then massacre 88 black people, 14 by decapitation, including Obama among their targets. The numbers 88 and 14 are signifiant in neo-Nazi culture: "H" is the 8th letter of the alphabet; "HH" stands for "Heil Hitler." Fourteen symbolizes the 14-word pledge of the neo-Nazi group, The Order.

Initially portrayed in media accounts as "lone wolves" without institutional affiliations, new information about the would-be assassins suggests deeper connections into the subculture of neo-Nazi thugs united by an adulation of Adolf Hitler and desire for vigilante violence. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the would-be assassins, Daniel Cowart, was a "probate member" of an incipient youth group of the neo-Nazi movement, Supreme White Alliance...

2008-10-31T08:35:00.003-06:00

The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
Posted on October 31, 2008, Printed on October 31, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/105447/

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the United States come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on this side of the Atlantic, I have spent my adult life mystified by American politics. The United States has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived; but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter -- stumbling a little, using long words -- carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan smiled and said, "There you go again." His own health program would have appalled most Americans, had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic -- men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton -- were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level, this is easy to answer: Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. U.S. education, like the U.S. health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on Earth, 1 adult in 5 believes the sun revolves around the Earth; only 26 percent accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of U.S. voters cannot name the three branches of government; and the math skills of 15-year-olds in the United States are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development...

http://www.alternet.org/story/105447/the_triumph_of_ign...

2008-10-31T07:13:00.001-06:00

Who Has John McCain Been Palling Around With?
Don't tell my mother I work at the White House. She thinks I play the piano in a whore house.

By William Blum

October 30, 2008 "Information Clearinghouse" -- The Republican presidential campaign has tried to make a big issue of Barack Obama at one time associating with Bill Ayers, a member of the 1960s Weathermen who engaged in political bombings. Governor Palin has accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists”, although Ayers' association with the Weathermen during their period of carrying out anti-Vietnam War bombings in the United States took place when Obama was around 8-years-old. Contrast this with who President Ronald Reagan, so beloved by the Republican candidates, associated with. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was an Afghan warlord whose followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. This is how they spent their time when they were not screaming "Death to America". CIA and State Department officials called Hekmatyar "scary," "vicious," "a fascist," "definite dictatorship material".1 None of this prevented the Reagan administration from inviting the man to the White House to meet with Reagan, and showering him with large amounts of aid to fight against the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan.

Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, palled around with characters almost as unsavory during his first campaign for the presidency in 1988. His campaign staff included a number of genuine pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic types from Eastern and Central Europe. Several of these worthies were leaders of the Republican campaign’s ethnic outreach arm, the Coalition of American Nationalities, despite the fact that their checkered past was not a big secret. One of them, Laszlo Pasztor (or Pastor) had served in the pro-Nazi Hungarian government’s embassy in Berlin during the Second World War. This had been revealed in a 1971 page-one story in the Washington Post.2 When this past was again brought up in September 1988, the Republicans were obliged to dump Pasztor and four others of his ilk from Bush’s campaign.3

And who has John McCain been palling around with? Who has been co-chair of McCain's New York campaign and a foreign policy adviser to McCain himself? None other than the illustrious unindicted war criminal and mass murderer Henry Kissinger, who must be very careful when he travels to Europe for there are committed and serious people in several countries there who will again try to have him arrested for the crimes against humanity he's responsible for ... Chile ... Angola ... East Timor ... Vietnam ... Laos ... Cambodia ...

By contrast, there is no evidence that Bill Ayers was involved in any Weathermen bombing that killed anyone; nor have I seen any evidence that on the very rare occasion that an anti-Vietnam War bombing in the United States resulted in a casualty that it could be ascribed to the Weathermen.

John McCain's bombings certainly killed – some two dozen aerial attacks upon the people of Vietnam, people who had neither done nor threatened any harm to him or his country. What label do we give to such acts, to such a man? His level of violence is matched by his degree of hypocrisy. Speaking of Ayers, McCain asked: “How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?”4

In his 2001 memoir, “Fugitive Days,” Ayers writes: “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” This is something very few Americans can accept, and I wouldn't even make the attempt to persuade them. But I personally didn't blame the Weathermen then, and I don't blame them now. The Vietnam War was in its eighth year of barbarity. I and the rest of the army of the powerless needed a few points up there on the scoreboard against the lords of the national-security corporate state. A bombing, with a suitably war-criminal target – like the State Department or the Pentagon – and taking care to prevent any casualties, told the bastards that we were still out there, that their impunity was not total, that this is how it feels to be bombed. Armed propaganda. It told the public that there was something more serious going on than a town-hall difference of opinion that could be reasonably resolved by reasonable people discussing things in a reasonable manner. And like an unhappy child having a temper tantrum, we needed some instant gratification. We were struggling against the most powerful force in the world...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21121.h...

2008-10-31T07:08:00.000-06:00

An 'Idiot Wind'
John McCain's latest attempt to link Barack Obama to extremism

Friday, October 31, 2008; Page A18

WITH THE presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him "a PLO spokesman"; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers -- a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance -- was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don't agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn't, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis -- or even to Mr. Ayers -- is a vile smear.

Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. In an article published this year in the Nation magazine, he scathingly denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Mr. Obama) was "deeply flawed" but conceded there were also "flaws in the alternatives." Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging -- as Mr. Obama put it in the dinner toast recorded on the 2003 tape and reported by the Times in a detailed account of the event last April, he "offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

It's fair to question why Mr. Obama felt as comfortable as he apparently did during his Chicago days in the company of men whose views diverge sharply from what the presidential candidate espouses. Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable -- especially during a campaign in which Arab ancestry has been the subject of insults. To further argue that the Times, which obtained the tape from a source in exchange for a promise not to publicly release it, is trying to hide something is simply ludicrous, as Mr. McCain surely knows.

Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that "I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over." That's good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign's increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

2008-10-30T11:00:00.003-06:00

Neocon weasels heart Sarah...

The Insiders

How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin.

by Jane Mayer

“Here’s a little news flash,” Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced in September, during her début at the Party’s Convention, in St. Paul. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly these past few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington élite then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.” But, she added, “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion.”

In subsequent speeches, Palin has cast herself as an antidote to the élitist culture inside the Beltway. “I’m certainly a Washington outsider, and I’m proud of that, because I think that that is what we need,” she recently told Fox News. During her first interview as John McCain’s running mate, with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, Palin was asked about her lack of experience in foreign policy. She replied, “We’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody’s big fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in the Washington establishment . . . Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing, and kind of that closed-door, good-ol’-boy network that has been the Washington élite.”

Palin’s sudden rise to prominence, however, owes more to members of the Washington élite than her rhetoric has suggested. Paulette Simpson, the head of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, who has known Palin since 2002, said, “From the beginning, she’s been underestimated. She’s very smart. She’s ambitious.” John Bitney, a top policy adviser on Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, said, “Sarah’s very conscientious about crafting the story of Sarah. She’s all about the hockey mom and Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington—the anti-politician politician.” Bitney is from Wasilla, Palin’s home town, and has known her since junior high school, where they both played in the band. He considers Palin a friend, even though after becoming governor, in December, 2006, she dismissed him. He is now the chief of staff to the speaker of the Alaska House.

Upon being elected governor, Palin began developing relationships with Washington insiders, who later championed the idea of putting her on the 2008 ticket. “There’s some political opportunism on her part,” Bitney said. For years, “she’s had D.C. in mind.” He added, “She’s not interested in being on the junior-varsity team.”

During her gubernatorial campaign, Bitney said, he began predicting to Palin that she would make the short list of Republican Vice-Presidential prospects. “She had the biography, I told her, to be a contender,” he recalled. At first, Palin only laughed. But within a few months of being sworn in she and others in her circle noticed that a blogger named Adam Brickley had started a movement to draft her as Vice-President. Palin also learned that a number of prominent conservative pundits would soon be passing through Juneau, on cruises sponsored by right-leaning political magazines. She invited these insiders to the governor’s mansion, and even led some of them on a helicopter tour...

Jane Mayer on “The Insiders: How John McCain Came to Pick Sarah Palin”

...Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jane.

JANE MAYER: Hi, thanks. Good to be with you.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Why don’t you tell us the story of the cruises to Alaska?

JANE MAYER: The cruises. Well, Juneau, Alaska turns out to be a major stop for cruise ships that come through Alaska, and there are political cruises, in particular, that are run by the conservative political magazines that stop there. And so, when Sarah Palin was elected governor, she learned that a number of those Washington insider elite members of the media would be trooping through Juneau. And despite the rhetoric that she’s got that is about, you know, sort of deriding them and saying she doesn’t, you know, seek their approval, in fact, she invited most of them to lunch and to other receptions that she threw. She even brought some up on a helicopter ride to go see a couple sites in Alaska.

So, she was courting some of those Washington insiders. In particular, they were the pundits that work for the Weekly Standard magazine, which is Rupert Murdoch’s conservative political magazine, and the National Review, the old conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley. So she made a great impression on some of these pundits when they came through. They enjoyed their lunches and receptions and went back and wrote fabulous stories about her, and this was one of the things that really got the ball rolling for her.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, you know, Jane, if you could actually tell us the story—for example, first, I mean, you had the two magazines, the Weekly Standard had one cruise, and the National Review, Buckley’s publication, had the other. William—Bill Kristol and his crew came into town for the first lunch. Just describe it for us and their impressions, as you understood them from your sources.

JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, I interviewed many of them. They described her as completely charming. And an unusual dish was served, an Alaska dish, halibut cheeks, in the governor’s mansion. And she was—her little girl Piper popped in and asked about dessert. And Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes, who is a regular on a show called The Beltway Boys and writes for the Weekly Standard, and Michael Gerson, who was a former speech—top speech writer for President Bush and writes a column in the Washington Post, were all there with various family members of theirs. And they were smitten by her, especially Bill Kristol, who has really been beating the drums for Sarah Palin, pretty much ever since.

And then, the second group came in several weeks later. They were the National Review crowd, and it was a much bigger group. One of the things that interested me about that group was, among the dignitaries was Dick Morris, who is a political consultant and a very sort of cynical, savvy player in politics, the ultimate, really, Washington insider, in a way. All the kinds of people that Sarah Palin has said that she—you know, she’s such an outsider to, well, they were all at a reception for her there. And, in fact, Dick Morris sort of pulled her aside for a private conversation, which she then revealed later to the group, in which he said, “If you want to be successful politically, you’ve got to continue to hold onto your image as an outsider. Play up that outsider thing.” And obviously, she has. But it’s just so interesting to hear that really it’s a calculated strategy. It’s not just because she is an outsider; it’s a—you know, it’s a ploy, to some extent.

2008-10-30T09:26:00.001-06:00

Evangelicals and Rural Americans Are Breaking Big for Obama
By Robert S. Eshelman, Tomdispatch.com.

There's clearly a new political landscape forming in the U.S. That's what the polls are telling us. It's not just that the first major-party black candidate for President is leading by significant margins in the national polls; it's not just that North Dakota, a state George W. Bush won in 2004 by 64%, is believed to be "in play"; it's not just that Virginia which, like North Dakota, was last carried by a Democrat in the sweep year of 1964, is, according to the most recent Washington Post poll and others, in the Obama camp by at least 8 points, or that he's leading in a remarkable number of states Bush took in 2004, or even that Democratic Senate and House candidates are making a run of it in previously ridiculous places.

Consider, instead, three recent polls in the context of the Bush years. Obama and McCain are now in a "statistical dead heat" among born-again evangelicals, those Rovian foot soldiers of two successful Bush elections, according to a recent survey; and the same seems to be true in Sarah Palin's "real America," those rural and small town areas she's praised to the skies. According to a poll commissioned by the Center for Rural Strategies, in those areas which Bush won in 2004 by 53%-41%, Obama now holds a statistically insignificant one point lead. To complete this little trifecta, Gallup has just released a poll showing that Jews are now likely to vote for Obama by a more than 3 to 1 majority (74% to 22%).

If present projections come close to holding, this could prove to be a rare reconfiguring or turning-point election -- as Wall Street expert Steve Fraser first suggested might be possible at TomDispatch way back in February 2007. If so, the Republican Party, only recently besotted by dreams of a generational Pax Republicana, might find itself driven back into the deep South and deep West for who knows how long, "an extremist rump, reduced to a few stronghold states and obsessed with causes that seem not to matter to the general public."

http://www.alternet.org/election08/105261/evangelicals_...

2008-10-29T19:05:00.000-06:00

Even in the rural heartland, Obama has sparked an explosive conversation
In this weathervane state they love God and guns. But they also see the long shadows of slavery and discrimination

Timothy Garton Ash in Missouri
The Guardian, Thursday October 30 2008

In Warsaw, Missouri, there's a ghost who keeps talking to me through the mouths of strangers. He is the ghost of slavery past, and he casts a long shadow, even across the streets of this cheerful little lakeside town on a sunny autumn day. A local Obama campaign volunteer tells me about a woman she had canvassed who said she personally would vote for Barack but that her daughter wouldn't - and then the mother lowered her voice - "because he's black". Nor would her son: "he's even more racist". How horrible to feel impelled to say that of your own children. The jokey-scary commercial paraphernalia of Halloween is all around, but here are America's real ghosts and witches.

Missouri matters. It is a national weathervane. Located bang in the middle of the American heartland, where east meets west and north meets south, over the past hundred years it has chosen the winner in every presidential race except one. In the opinion polls, it's among the few states that are still too close to call. That's why Obama was here speaking to massive rallies a fortnight ago, and why both he and Joe Biden are back here again this Thursday. That's why the Obama organisation in Missouri plans to use its 25,000 volunteers to knock on some 1.3m doors during the last four days of the campaign.

Most of those key swing voters are in the sprawling, laundered suburbs of St Louis and Kansas City, but every vote from these rural areas, whose native sons include one of the greatest Democratic presidents, Harry Truman, will count too. And I'm in the heart of the rural heartland: beautiful, gently rolling country, with dawn mist rising from cattle ponds, trees turning every impressionist's shade of autumn russet, yellow and red, cows picturesquely munching lush grass, and roadside signs proclaiming Dirt For Sale, and Jesus Is Lord.

On the corner of Van Buren and Kosciusko street (Tadeusz Kosciuszko, that is, the Polish freedom fighter who inspired the town's name), I notice a neat, white-painted house with a sign in the window saying "This House Protected by God". Out front, a guard dog barks. (A dog called God?) And there's another sign on the lawn: For Sale. The Lord may provide, but people have housing and money worries here as everywhere. And they don't just hunt for the sport. A good shot can put a nourishing turkey or quail on the table for dinner. So the Republicans claim Obama wants to take away your gun. A McCain advertisement on the local country music radio station declares, in a deep countryman's voice, "We love our God and we love our guns" - and you can almost hear a second capital G. And, it goes on, "liberals" want to take them away, being "out of touch with our America". ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/30/us-...

2008-10-29T19:02:00.000-06:00

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: As the US right disintegrates, only one result seems possible
Obama has simply waited for his opponent to self-destruct
Thursday, 30 October 2008

... Large political parties, especially under the American (as the British) electoral system are bound to be coalitions, often of highly disparate elements. That was true of the Democrats in their heyday under Roosevelt to which many are now harking back, a weird alliance of organised labour, city bosses, intellectual progressives and Southern segregationists.

But the Republicans have become an equally improbable mixture of fiscal conservatives, religious reactionaries and neocons, who really have little in common beyond a shared enemy in the form of "liberalism" or what passes for such in America. The nomination of McCain himself was a sign of the conservatives' difficulties. He defeated his rivals because of his seeming authenticity and decency, but many on the Right greatly dislike him as ideologically unsound.

Then came the anointing of Palin, which may prove to have been a decisive moment. In a most entertaining article in The New Yorker, Jane Mayer describes not one but two sea cruises to Alaska in the summer of last year arranged by right-wing magazines of different hues, National Review and Weekly Standard. There they met Palin and fell for her – "my heartthrob," says William Kristol – even though the advocacy of this gormless backwoodswoman by clever rightist intellectuals was the height of cynicism.

It was also a mark of despair. "Nothing is inevitable,"McCain said on Tuesday, but a victory for Obama now looks very likely indeed, and if the turnout of younger voters rises sharply it could be a landslide. We may all yet be disappointed by President Obama, but this election will still be a thrashing from which the Right will take a long time to recover.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/geoff...

2008-10-29T17:07:00.001-06:00

Blessed Are the Persecuted
How Joe the Plumber fits the GOP narrative.
By THOMAS FRANK

Historically speaking, conservatism is a movement organized and funded by society's most powerful members; politically speaking, it lusts for tax cuts and government rollbacks that will benefit those same fortunate folks at the top.

But what it really is, in its own mind, is a crusade on behalf of society's most abject members: the true Americans who are victimized, sneered at and persecuted for their faithfulness.

Who persecutes them? Well, the mainstream media, to begin with, which supposedly chuckles at their unadorned heartland ways from its lofty perches in New York and Washington. Academics, for another, with their fancy rhetoric and their bottomless contempt for the red, white and blue. And the ACLU, for a third, with its unceasing war on Ten Commandments monuments and Nativity scenes.

Then there is "the culture." Who is the butt of every joke you see on TV? Oafish Middle Americans. From sitcoms to Hollywood blockbusters to ads, their customs are disrespected in a thousand ways. Bestselling conservative books remind average citizens, in fantastic detail, the slanders and slights the world heaps upon them.

Apply this way of thinking to politics and every part of the conversation comes unmoored from reality, drifting off into an endless metaconversation about who's disrespecting whom.

All these attacks on the good people of the trans-Beltway region, and yet no actual, physical attacks to speak of! The need for such a manifestation was clear, and last week a College Republican volunteer in Pennsylvania stepped forward to reveal to the world the stigmata of Middle America's persecution. She was robbed and beaten, she told Pittsburgh police, by a tall mysterious black man who, upon discovering her Republican affiliation, proceeded to carve a backward "B" onto her cheek -- a "B" as in Barack Obama, that tormenter of average Joes everywhere. The next day, of course, the victim recanted her tale and the whole thing fell apart.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122523858126178227.html...

2008-10-23T21:13:00.004-06:00

"Politically Motivated" Mutilation - Real or Hoax?

Pittsburgh law enforcement sources tell TMZ they have serious questions about the authenticity of the alleged victim who says she had her face cut by a politically-motivated attacker.

We're told there are several things about the alleged attack that don't add up. A Pittsburgh PD official says they are conducting a "thorough investigation" and have not determined if the alleged attack is real or a hoax. But we're told there is definitely a level of skepticism.

As we reported, the alleged victim claims she went to an ATM and when she turned around, a large dark-skinned man took the money she withdrew. She says when he noticed she had a McCain/Palin bumper sticker on her car, he became enraged, knocked her down and cut a "B" in her face.

We're told the woman refused medical assistance at the scene and said she would go to the hospital the next day.

The investigation continues.

Hey look! Morton Downey Jr. is back!

2008-10-23T16:41:00.000-06:00

GOP 'goner' list warns of House rout

10/23/08 5:34 PM EDT An internal document circulating among House Republicans warns of an impending congressional bloodbath, listing 58 Republican-held House seats being at risk, and 11 already considered as good as gone. As many as 34 GOP-held seats are in serious jeopardy of swinging to Democrats, the assessment shows.

The state-of-the-race update, first reported on by U.S. News’ Paul Bedard, shows the GOP already writing off the seats of Reps. Tom Feeney (R-Fla.), John R. Kuhl (R-N.Y.), Don Young (R-Alaska) and Tim Walberg (R-Mich.). It also expects losses in the seats of retiring GOP Reps. Rick Renzi of Arizona, Jerry Weller of Illinois, Jim Saxton of New Jersey, Mike Ferguson of New Jersey, Vito Fossella of New York, James Walsh of New York and Tom Davis of Virginia.

Drafted by a Republican consultant, the document ranks seats on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the most likely for a Democratic takeover. Eleven members received a 5, meaning the seat is gone unless “a significant turn of events” changes things in the final two weeks. An additional seven seats are ranked as a 4, in the leaning Democratic category, and 16 seats are in the tossup category.

One well-connected Republican operative told Politico that the list, if anything, understated the number of members needing a political lifeline. The operative also said the GOP is all but writing off the seats of Reps. Marilyn Musgrave (R-Colo.), Joseph Knollenberg (R-Mich.), Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Phil English (R-Pa.), and the open New Mexico House seat of retiring Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.), who is running for the Senate. . . .
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14885.html

2008-10-22T18:05:00.001-06:00

Joe the Plumber and GOP 'Authenticity'

It's hard to reach out to workers while cracking down on unions.

By THOMAS FRANK

The conservative movement made its name battling moral relativists on campus, bellowing for a "strict construction" of our nation's founding documents, and pandering to people who believe that the Book of Genesis literally records the origins of human existence.

And yet here are the words of Ronald Reagan's pollster, Richard Wirthlin, as recorded in one of the main Reagan strategy documents from 1980: "People act on the basis of their perception of reality; there is, in fact, no political reality beyond what is perceived by the voters."

The context of Wirthlin's reality-denial, according to the historian Kim Phillips-Fein, who unearths his statement in her forthcoming book, "Invisible Hands," was the larger Republican plan to woo blue-collar voters.

The mission was a success. It worked because Republicans wholeheartedly adopted Wirthlin's dictum. Reality is a terrible impediment when you're reaching out to workers while simultaneously cracking down on unions and scheming to privatize Social Security. Leave that reality to the "reality-based community," to use the put-down coined by an aide to George W. Bush.

The "perception of reality," on the other hand, is an amazing political tonic, and with it conservatives have cemented a factproof worldview of lasting power. It is simply this: Conservatives are authentic and liberals are not. The country is divided into a land of the soulful, hard-working producers and a land of the paper-pushing parasites; a plain-spoken heartland and the sinister big cities, where they breed tricky characters like Barack Obama, all "eloquence," as John McCain sneered in last week's presidential debate, but hard to pin down.

"There are Americans and there are liberals," proclaims a bumper sticker that adorns my office. "Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God," proclaimed Rep. Robin Hayes (R., N.C.) on Saturday at a rally in North Carolina. Speaking of Mr. Obama on the day before that, Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R., Minn.) expressed deep concern on MSNBC "that he may have anti-American views." And on the day before that, GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin saluted "these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working, very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation."

Foursquare fans of perceived reality must have rejoiced when they beheld, on the hard streets of suburban Toledo, Ohio, that most authentic of men, Joe the Plumber: "the average citizen" in the flesh, according to Mr. McCain; "a real person," according to Mrs. Palin, who deftly ruined Mr. Obama's "staged photo op there" -- a subject on which Mrs. Palin can surely count herself an authority.

Joe the Plumber -- along with his just-discovered supporter, Tito the Builder -- has brought to the GOP what Richard Wirthlin went looking for so long ago: blue-collar affirmation. But consider the degree of reality-blindness it takes to kick out the authenticity like Joe does. The rust-belt metro area in which he lives has been in decline for decades. In 2007, the Bureau of Labor Statistics ranked it 335 out of 369 small metropolitan areas for unemployment; for home foreclosures, according to a 2007 article in the Toledo Blade, it is the 30 worst of all cities in the nation. According to Census numbers, median household income in the Toledo area, measured in constant dollars, has actually decreased since the late 1970s.

Joe's town may be circling the drain, but Joe's real concern, as the world knows, is that he might have to pay more taxes when his ship finally comes in. For good measure, Joe also declares Social Security "a joke": "I've never believed in it," he told reporters last week. Maybe that's because this realest of men knows that Social Security is just a hippie dream, despite the Census's insistence that 28% of his city's households received income from that source in 2003. Maybe all those people would be better off if we had invested Social Security's trust fund in WaMu and Wachovia -- you know, the real deal.

Here is the key to this whole strange episode: Government is artifice and imposition, a place of sexless bureaucrats and brie-eating liberals whose every touch contaminates God's work. Markets, by contrast, are natural, the arena in which real people prove their mettle. After all, as Mr. McCain said on Monday, small businessmen are just "Joe the Plumbers, writ large." Markets carry a form of organic authenticity that mere reality has no hope of touching.

This is not a good time for market-based authenticity, however. It now seems that those real, natural Americans who make markets go also cook the books, and cheat the shareholders, and hire lobbyists to get their way in Washington. They invent incomprehensible financial instruments and have now sent us into a crisis that none of them has any idea how to solve.

If that's nature, I'm ready for civilization.

2008-10-22T00:23:00.002-06:00

Drudge is fudge. It couldn't happen to a fruitier little fruitfly.

Drudge unplugged: How his campaign influence has collapsed

by Eric Boehlert

I'm not saying that given the choice I wouldn't pick a robust economy and a worry-free global outlook. But circumstances being what they are, I have to say that as the White House campaign hits its final stride under the ominous shadow of the Wall Street meltdown and the deep recession that's hurtling this way, perhaps the only silver lining -- the one unexpected pleasure -- has been watching the Drudge Report be completely neutered by current events.

Matt Drudge is still doing his loyal best to boost the chances of the GOP down the homestretch in the form of a blizzard of anti-Obama and pro-McCain links on his site. (Last week, it was the half-baked McCain "comeback" that Drudge hyped relentlessly.)

And there's no question that Drudge's Web traffic remains strong and continues to grow, thanks to a burgeoning international audience. But in terms of setting the ground rules -- in terms of setting the campaign agenda -- Drudge has been AWOL since mid-September when the credit crisis erupted.

His current spectator status mirrors that of the low-flying right-wing bloggers. Just as the bloggers were hailed for their (pseudo) detective work in undermining CBS' Dan Rather in 2004, Drudge was credited for the way he used his widely read platform to push the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth story into the mainstream press, which helped derail John Kerry's campaign.

Four years ago, Drudge and the right-wing bloggers were at the peak of their political power. Today, they're pretty much watching the election pass them by, reduced to the role of frustrated sideline hecklers...

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200810210005

2008-10-21T07:51:00.001-06:00

Click to enlarge image.

2008-10-20T12:06:00.000-06:00

The Republicans have lifted the lid off their rightwing id
Now McCain's supporters are casting Obama as anti-American. This may well scare voters, but not the way they mean to

Michael Tomasky
The Guardian,
Monday October 20 2008

...This point was proved most dramatically by a woman named Michele Bachmann, a member of Congress from Minnesota. In an interview last Friday on Hardball, a leading US cable talk show, host Chris Matthews asked Bachmann whether Obama worried her. "Absolutely. I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views," she said. He asked her what she thought distinguished liberal from hard left from anti-American. If she maintains such distinctions in her mind, she refused to acknowledge them. Then, finally, Matthews - who deftly fed her the rope to hang herself - asked her how many members of the US Congress held, in her view, anti-American views.

It's been almost a two-year campaign. There have been moments we've thought of as memorable, only to see the tide of events erase their mark from the sand. Bachmann's answer, however, will live imperishably: "What I would say - what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would love to see an exposé like that."

Before we go any further - who is this Bachmann? She's a first-term backbencher from exurban Minneapolis who says the Lord told her to run for Congress. She declared herself "a fool for Christ" in 2006 when she announced her candidacy. By all accounts she's down with the whole rightwing Christian package: immigrants bring disease and pestilence, homosexuals want to indoctrinate straight children, and so on. Republican leadership undoubtedly pushed her out on to television because she is, as you Brits say, a looker - at least by the standards of Congress.

The call for an investigation into the beliefs of every federal lawmaker, and an exposé of those found wanting in their patriotism, certainly takes us into deeply creepy territory. I would not call Bachmann herself a fascist. Odd as it sounds, to do so would be to grant her far too much credit. For one to embrace an -ism, even a repugnant one, one needs to have read a certain amount of history and political philosophy. Bachmann is just an idiot. She wouldn't know Edmund Burke from Billie Burke (she played the good witch in the Wizard of Oz), and she obviously has no idea that, in her rejection of the two bedrock American principles of separation of church and state and freedom of thought, she is the one who is as anti-American as they come.

But friends, all is not darkness. Bachmann's appearance caused a national uproar. Colin Powell, in endorsing Obama yesterday, said of Bachmann's comments that "we have got to stop this kind of nonsense and pull ourselves together". Her Democratic opponent raised nearly half a million dollars from around the country in just 24 hours, and he now has a chance of beating her.

That would be nice. But let's go back to the big contest. With Bachmann, the lid came off the rightwing id. It will happen many more times over these next two weeks. McCain, now openly using the word "socialist" to describe Obama's proposals (the week after his friend George W Bush took federal control of nine major banks!), and especially Palin have shown every sign of encouraging it. Their goal is to scare Americans about Obama, but moderate, independent voters might well decide that Obama looks a lot less scary than they do.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/20/com...

2008-10-19T19:13:00.002-06:00

The divided GOP. They all suck, just in different ways. Left out of this graphic illustration are the hard, right Zionist neocon cabal...Kristol, Gaffney, Pipes, Wolfowitz, etc...

2008-10-19T03:27:00.003-06:00

Waiting for the Barbarians

Comment

By Richard Kim

This article appeared in the November 3, 2008 edition of The Nation.

October 16, 2008

In case you haven't heard, there's a guy running for president named Barack Hussein Osama Nobama. This Nobama was born outside America and secretly schooled in Islamic terrorism at a Wahhabi madrassa. He then moved to the United States to take up the radical '60s teachings of the Weather Underground's Bill Ayers, while also organizing for ACORN, a subprime-lending, voter fraud-committing collective of affirmative-action welfare queens. All this happened before he became an elitist celebrity advocate of socialism, infanticide, the sexual abuse of children and treason.

Suffice it to say, this caricature stretches even the limits of comic imagination. The real Obama's Christianity, his patriotism, moderation and commitment to capitalism, law and order, and national security are matters of abundant public record--some of which displeases the left wing of his party. But this is of little import to the Republican rank and file. For them, the fallaciousness of the whole counts for less than the suggestive appeal of the parts. All John McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates need to do is raise the insidious question--"Who is the real Barack Obama?"--and the zealots conjure the rest, along with cries of "Treason!" "Kill him!" and "Off with his head!" The virulence of such rhetoric makes even Palin seem thoughtful; she at least inserts whole verb phrases like "palling around with" in between nouns like "Barack Obama" and "terrorists."

Such scenes are alarming not only because of the McCain campaign's willingness to stoke such murderous mania but also because of its apparent inability to control the madness once it has been unleashed. At more than one rally, McCain has been booed by the audience for attempting to interrupt panicked rants about the impending socialist or terrorist takeover of America. The crowd's immediate anger is directed not at Obama and the Democrats but at their own party's standard-bearers, who should be "representing us" but have so far refused to "take the gloves off" and "take it to Obama" and "hit him" in "a soft spot." If the GOP leaders don't give these folks what they want, they had best watch their own soft spots, for there is no shortage of backbenchers ready to seize the helm. Take Jeffrey Frederick, the 33-year-old chair of the Virginia Republican Party, who said that Obama and Osama bin Laden "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon." Denounced by the McCain campaign, Frederick has defiantly refused to apologize for his remark.

Perhaps he knows which way the wind blows: the Republican Party's electoral strategy of sowing resentment and fear--sprung from Nixon and nurtured by admen like Lee Atwater, Floyd Brown and the Swiftboaters--has finally taken on a life of its own. It thrives as a postmodern pastiche of conservative hate speech that no longer requires a master--a Frankenstein monster freed from his creator. What holds this beast together is not the fear and loathing of any particular despised identity so much as the idea that America is under siege, disordered, on the cusp of imminent and total collapse, threatened by terrorists abroad and undermined by enemies at home.

Of course, certain pariahs are useful in certain times. In the old lexicon it was Communists, feminists and gays who peopled the right wing's paranoid imagination, and if the sheer breadth of the slander by association against Obama is any indication, these bugaboos are still of value. But this time around the terror has been most sharply drawn along the lines of xenophobia and racism, a potent combination of hostile drives of which trolls like Andy Martin, the anti-Semite behind the "Obama is a Muslim" e-mails, are but minor instigators. The real enablers are demagogues like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck, who have made careers out of inciting frenzied aggression at anyone to the left of Joe McCarthy. Only now it seems that even these right-wing pundits have been outdone by their formerly loyal listeners. Coulter, whose contempt for Muslims ("invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity") is surpassed only by her scorn for liberals ("even Islamic terrorists don't hate America like liberals do"), has yet to call for the assassination of Barack Obama. But if she genuinely believes that liberals are more dangerous than Islamic terrorists, she should follow the courage of her convictions and do so.

To pre-empt such embarrassing displays of weakness, softer propagandists like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens--who once brayed on and on about the left's "hatred of the United States" and its role as a "fifth column" "in favor of surrender and defeat"--have declared their support for Obama. But as Hitchens's recent endorsement in Slate amply demonstrates, he is not quite ready to give up the poisoned sword. Obama, he writes, is not a "capitulationist," even if he does "accept the support of the surrender faction."

If the polls are any indication, Obama will endure this smear campaign just fine, with or without the backhanded compliments of apologetic neocons. And if his election is not quite the ringing victory for civil rights and liberties, diplomacy and cosmopolitanism that we might like, it will at least beat back for a while the idea that defaming these values as traitorous constitutes sound electoral strategy. If Obama wins, and the barbarians do not show up to rattle the gates, what will the conservatives do next? For them, the barbarians were a solution, of sorts.

2008-10-18T12:34:00.002-06:00

Here's what her state paper of record says about nutjob Michelle Bachmann.

It's interesting to find out she has a 'law' degree from one of those fake Christian schools, Oral Roberts.
This election has been something else. It's deeply sad-making that there are so many morons in this country.

Bachmann on TV questions Obama's patriotism

By PAT DOYLE and MITCH ANDERSON, Star Tribune staff writers

October 18, 2008

Defending the McCain campaign's automated phone calls attacking Barack Obama's judgment and character, Rep. Michele Bachmann on Friday said Obama "may have anti-American views" and called for a news media "exposé" of the views of members of Congress.

Bachmann's comments came in a 13-minute interview on MSNBC, during which she asserted that Obama has a close connection to 1960s radical William Ayers, a theme of the phone calls and recent remarks by McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin.

"Barack Obama didn't have a mild association with Bill Ayers," Bachmann, a Republican, said. "He had a very strong association with Bill Ayers."

Later, when asked by Chris Matthews whether she believes that Obama may have anti-American views, Bachmann replied, "Absolutely. I'm very concerned that he may have anti-American views."

Bachmann also said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, both Democrats, have "far-leftist views." When asked whether she considered members of Congress anti-American, she said, "The news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out are they pro-America or anti-America."

On Friday, Bachmann's DFL opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, said Bachmann's comments "undermines our political process. Instead of being able to disagree respectfully, it turns it into this kind of vilification. You're just not disagreeing. The other person is un-American."

But a spokeswoman for Bachmann denied that the congresswoman had portrayed all liberals as anti-American.

The controversy arose on a day when Palin was quoted by Time magazine online saying, "I don't question at all Barack Obama's love for the great country."

Increasing prominence

Bachmann's interview is the latest in a series of national television appearances by her in recent months. In the midst of a reelection campaign that Democrats say is growing more competitive, she has become an increasingly prominent spokeswoman for conservative causes ranging from defending the choice of Palin for vice president to demanding more oil drilling.

"For a long time, Republican congresswomen were not the best spokespeople for the party simply because they tended to be more liberal than the Republican Party," said Kathryn Pearson, a University of Minnesota assistant professor of political science. "If anything, [Bachmann] is to the right of the Republican Party median in the House of Representatives."

Since August, Bachmann has made dozens of TV appearances on CNN's "Larry King Live," and on MSNBC, Bloomberg and Fox. She was on "Larry King" Friday night.

It's unclear what impact, if any, Bachmann's increasing national exposure will have on her campaign for reelection to Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District. National Democratic groups recently targeted the race for increased attention and spending.

Tinklenberg has criticized Bachmann's national media appearances as coming at the expense of time spent with her constituents.

In a rally for his supporters several weeks ago, Tinklenberg said, "She doesn't want to be in the district. She wants to be on 'Larry King.'"

He also said at the time that Bachmann's comments show that she espouses "a narrow ideological approach" to governing.

Regarding Bachmann's call for a media "exposé" of Congress, Tinklenberg said, "Is this the revisiting of a McCarthy era where we start investigating who's American and who's un-American?"

Bachmann's spokeswoman, Michelle Marston, issued a statement after the MSNBC interview that said in part:

"There's no question that Barack Obama has many relationships ... with people who hold views far out of the mainstream. It's perfectly legitimate for the American people to want to know how all this informs his policy positions and what direction an Obama administration would want to lead the nation. This is particularly true given that the Senate and House are likely to remain in Democrat hands, possibly with a margin wide enough in the Senate to prevent the traditional minority right to filibuster."

Marston said MSNBC attempted to "paint Congresswoman Bachmann into a corner," but that "she never said that all liberals are anti-American and she never asked for an investigation of members of Congress."

2008-10-18T05:20:00.005-06:00

GOP Rep. Channels McCarthy: Obama "Very Anti-American," Congressional Witch Hunt Needed

Update: A campaign to censure Rep. Michelle Bachmann over her remarks has been launched.

* * *

In a television appearance that outraged Democrats are already describing as Joseph McCarthy politics, Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann claimed on Friday that Barack Obama and his wife Michelle held anti-American views and couldn't be trusted in the White House. She even called for the major newspapers of the country to investigate other members of Congress to "find out if they are pro-America or anti-America."

Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball, Bachmann went well off the reservation when it comes to leveling political charges against the Democratic nominee.

"If we look at the collection of friends that Barack Obama has had in his life," she said, "it calls into question what Barack Obama's true beliefs and values and thoughts are. His attitudes, values, and beliefs with Jeremiah Wright on his view of the United States...is negative; Bill Ayers, his negative view of the United States. We have seen one friend after another call into question his judgment -- but also, what it is that Barack Obama really believes?"

Goaded by a Chris Matthews to explain exactly what she was talking about (at one point Bachmann seemed to imply that liberalism was anti-Americanism), the congresswoman waded deeper into the mud.

"Remember it was Michele Obama who said she is only recently proud of her country and so these are very anti-American views," she said. "That's not the way that most Americans feel about our country. Most Americans are wild about America and they are very concerned to have a president who doesn't share those values."

Matthews later pressed her to name a single member of Congress other than Obama who she thought was anti-American. Bachmann, who initially wouldn't budge, called for a major "expose" into the matter.

"What I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America," she said.

There were additional nuggets here and there. But the whole episode was a sight to behold. It is hard to imagine how this type of message actually helps the McCain campaign. For starters, there has been a relatively respected rule to leave candidate's wives out of campaign attacks. Moreover, there is already a deep resentment towards the severity of the political attacks McCain and his surrogates have launched against Barack Obama. Having a like-minded member of Congress essentially call for a witch hunt within Congress isn't the practical-minded message that the Arizona Republican wants out there.

What makes the incident even more bizarre is that Bachmann is in a close congressional race and just this past week offered warm words to the Illinois Democrat. "If the presidency would somehow go to Barack Obama, I would welcome him to the 6th District as well," she said after a debate. "As a matter of fact, I would put my hand on his shoulder and give him a kiss if he wanted to."

A Democratic campaign official emailed that Bachmann's Democratic opponent has raised at least $23,000 online since the Hardball segment aired.

After Bachmann's appearance, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel labeled the comments McCarthyist.

*

Michelle Bachman Calls for Media Investigation of Anti-American Members of Congress»

This rant from Rep. Michelle Bachman on Hardball that starts out criticizing Barack Obama and winds up claiming that there’s a vast nest of anti-American activity in the congress (I have expected her to start claiming to be in possession of a list of Communists) that the press needs to investigate really needs to be seen to be believed:

(Vid clip @ link)

I think this is the “second time as farce” repetition of the Joe McCarthy era. Alternatively, maybe she’s auditioning for a spot as a Corner blogger.

I find it amazing that far, far right insanity like this still exists.

It was 'fringe' when I was a young person, now it's the Republican mainstream.

I certainly blame the Reaganite/neocon cabal for that.

2008-10-17T07:03:00.002-06:00

OK. This is weird. This photo is NOT doctored.

I don't know what's going on here; some unholy tranformation.

Just too weird...

2008-10-17T06:22:00.000-06:00

Robert L. Borosage
Posted October 17, 2008 | 07:47 AM (EST)
The Horror, The Horror Yet To Come

The Wall Street Journal editors peer fearlessly into the increasingly likely terror of an election that produces a Democratic President with larger Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. Disregarding the delicate sensibilities of women and children, the editors expose to all the stark horrors that could ensue:

Voters will be registered. Workers organized. Banks regulated. Health care provided for all. Government investment will drive a green revolution that generates millions of jobs. The wealthy will pay more in taxes. Guantanamo will be shut down; torture will end. Net neutrality will be mandated. Citizens may even be able to sue corporations that negligently do them harm. And that doesn't even mention ending the war in Iraq.

The horror of it all. Can the Republic survive? The editors hold out one slim hope. Perhaps Democrats will divide. Perhaps the entrenched lobbies, the interest of the corporations and the wealthy will buy enough support to stand in the way of the tumbrels.

And that defines our job pretty clearly: to organize engaged citizens to hold Democrats accountable to the promises that have been made and the agenda the country needs. If we do that well, just maybe we can deepen the Wall Street Journal's lamentations. Cut the military budget. Forge a national strategy for the global economy. Make college affordable for all. Provide the basics in education, from pre-school to small classes, to lifelong learning. Revive national service. Rebuild trust in government. Launch the unspeakable - a true war on poverty.

The horror, the stark horror of it all. Can Americans - after Iraq, Katrina, bankers run amok, gilded age inequality, Robber Baron corruption - actually have the gall to vote the bums out? Say it ain't so, Joe the plumber, say it ain't so.

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/the-hor...

2008-10-16T20:11:00.001-06:00

10 years of the Pinochet principle

The arrest warrant served on the Chilean head of state in 1998 changed history and has implications for the US government now

Philippe Sands

guardian.co.uk, Thursday October 16 2008

On October 16 1998, a magistrate signed a warrant for the arrest of Senator Augusto Pinochet and changed the course of history. The former Chilean head of state was arrested a few hours later, at the request of a Spanish prosecutor who charged him with a raft of international crimes, some dating back to the early 1970s. Over the next 18 months, one dramatic development followed another. The House of Lords rendered three landmark judgments in the space of five months; home secretary Jack Straw defied expectations by giving a green light to the continuation of proceedings that could lead to Pinochet's removal to Madrid; Pinochet made a dramatic appearance in the dock at Belmarsh magistrate's court; and eventually Straw decided that Pinochet was too unhealthy to stand trial and he was returned to Chile in April 2000. For the rest of his life he was dogged by legal proceedings.

One central question lay at the heart of the whole affair: was a former head of state entitled to claim immunity before the English courts, where it was alleged that he had participated in crimes, in violation of international conventions, such as torture? This question had never before been decided. It pitted two competing views of international relations against each other: traditionalists argued that the maintenance of serene relations between states required the courts of one state to refrain from sitting in judgment over the highest officials of another; the modernists argued that no person was above the law where the most serious international crimes were involved, and that the system of human rights laws put in place after the second world war substituted a rule of immunity with a new rule against impunity.

In March 1999, the House of Lords came down strongly in favour of the modernist view. It did so carefully, and in a way that was both reasonable and sustainable. The majority ruled that Pinochet's loss of immunity arose not from some unstated general rule of international law, but rather from the terms of a treaty to which Britain, Chile and Spain were party – the 1984 convention outlawing torture – the terms of which were inconsistent with immunity for a former head of state. It is impossible to overstate the significance of that ruling, which reflected a new balance of global priorities, a shift in favour of principle over pragmatism. It has been followed by international indictments against other former heads of state – Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor – and the coming into force of the international criminal court and possible proceedings against the serving president of Sudan. It has also given rise to criminal proceedings before national courts in other parts of the world. The Pinochet judgment has withstood the test of time. It has not been overruled in the court of international opinion, and it has not brought international relations to a grinding halt.

Nevertheless, it seems that Pinochet's case caused concerns at the highest levels of the Bush administration, as described in a revealing account by a former lawyer in the Bush administration, Jack Goldsmith. He describes how, during 2002, Henry Kissinger found himself on the sharp end of the Pinochet case. Reportedly livid, a rattled Kissinger complained to his old chum Donald Rumsfeld, who was already worrying about "lawfare" (the use of law to achieve operational objectives). Rumsfeld instructed the chief lawyer at the Pentagon, Jim Haynes, to address the problems posed by this "judicialisation of international politics". Haynes passed the assignment on to Goldsmith, whose memo reached the National Security Council, which also worried about the threat of foreign judges. According to Goldsmith, the NSC couldn't work out what to do about the problem.

We now know that while this was going on, Rumsfeld and Haynes and others at the Pentagon were secretly circumventing international laws like the Geneva conventions and the torture convention and removing international constraints on the interrogation of detainees at Guantánamo and in Iraq. Torture and other international crimes followed. So did the Abu Ghraib photos. Amid the welter of legal opinions received by the administration none, it seems, bothered to examine the consequences of the House of Lords judgment for senior US officials.

The legacy of the arrest warrant signed in Hampstead 10 years today, is the Pinochet principle, that no one is above the law. It may one day come to haunt the very people who sought to set it aside. If, that is, they ever dare to set foot outside the United States.

2008-10-15T01:47:00.001-06:00

My Friend Bill Ayers

Once wanted by the FBI, he's since become a model citizen.

By THOMAS FRANK

"Waving the bloody shirt" was the phrase once used to describe the standard demagogic tactic of the late 19th century, when memories of the Civil War were still vivid and loyalists of both parties could be moved to "vote as they shot." As the years passed and the memories faded, the shirt got gorier, the waving more frantic.

In 1896 the Democrats chose William Jennings Bryan as their leader, a man who was born in 1860 and had thus missed the Civil War, but who seemed to threaten the consensus politics of the time. In response, Republican campaign masterminds organized a speaking tour of the Midwest by a handful of surviving Union generals. The veterans advanced through the battleground states in a special train adorned with patriotic bunting, pictures of their candidate, William McKinley, and a sign declaring, "We are Opposed to Anarchy and Repudiation."

The culture wars are the familiar demagogic tactic of our own time, building monstrous offenses out of the tiniest slights. The fading rancor that each grievance is meant to revive, of course, dates to the 1960s and the antiwar protests, urban riots and annoying youth culture that originally triggered our great turn to the right.

This year the Democrats chose Barack Obama as their leader, a man who was born in 1961 and who largely missed our cultural civil war. In response, Republican campaign masterminds have sought to plunge him back into it in the most desperate and grotesque manner yet.

For days on end, the Republican presidential campaign has put nearly all of its remaining political capital on emphasizing Mr. Obama's time on various foundation boards with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weathermen, which planted bombs and issued preposterous statements in the Vietnam era. Some on the right seem to believe Mr. Ayers is Mr. Obama's puppet-master, while others are content merely to insist that the association proves Mr. Obama to be soft on terrorism. Maybe he's soft on anarchy and repudiation, too.

I can personally attest to the idiocy of it all because I am a friend of Mr. Ayers. In fact, I met him in the same way Mr. Obama says he did: 10 years ago, Mr. Ayers was a guy in my neighborhood in Chicago who knew something about fundraising. I knew nothing about it, I needed to learn, and a friend referred me to Bill.

Bill's got lots of friends, and that's because he is today a dedicated servant of those less fortunate than himself; because he is unfailingly generous to people who ask for his help; and because he is kind and affable and even humble. Moral qualities which, by the way, were celebrated boisterously on day one of the GOP convention in September.

Mr. Ayers is a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where his work is esteemed by colleagues of different political viewpoints. Herbert Walberg, an advocate of school vouchers who is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, told me he remembers Mr. Ayers as "a responsible colleague, in the professional sense of the word." Bill Schubert, who served as the chairman of UIC's Department of Curriculum and Instruction for many years, thinks so highly of Mr. Ayers that, in response to the current allegations, he compiled a lengthy résumé of the man's books, journal articles, guest lectures and keynote speeches. Mr. Ayers has been involved with countless foundation efforts and has received various awards. He volunteers for everything. He may once have been wanted by the FBI, but in the intervening years the man has become such a good citizen he ought to be an honorary Eagle Scout.

I do not defend the things Mr. Ayers did in his Weatherman days. Nor will I quibble with those who find Mr. Ayers wanting in contrition. His 2001 memoir is shot through with regret, but it lacks the abject style our culture prefers.

Instead I want to note that, in its haste to convict a man merely for associating with Mr. Ayers, the GOP is effectively proposing to make the upcoming election into the largest mass trial in history, with all those professors and all those do-gooders on the hook for someone else's deeds four decades ago. Also in the dock: the demonic city (Chicago) that once named Mr. Ayers its "Citizen of the Year." Fire up Hurricane Katrina and point it toward Lake Michigan!

The McCain campaign has made much of its leader's honor and bravery, but now it has chosen to mount its greatest attack against a man who poses no conceivable threat to the country, who has nothing to do with this year's issues, and who cannot or will not defend himself. Apparently this makes him an irresistible target.

There are a lot of things to call this tactic, but "country first" isn't one of them. The nation wants its hope and confidence restored, and Republican leaders have chosen instead to wave the bloody shirt. This is their vilest hour...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122402888900234543.html...

2008-10-13T07:51:00.002-06:00

Well, here we are folks...Nazis by any other name...on FOX 'NEWS'...right here in River City...we got trouble...yes we got trouble...

This has been true for a long time. Maybe it's time for the average stupid American to be a little concerned about how the average stupid American forms their 'opinion'.
Here's how: THEY LISTEN TO NAZIS ON TV & RADIO & REPEAT IT.
Bring back the fairness doctrine that Nazi-lovin' Reagan took away. For every minute of idiocy on the public airwaves there should be a minute of non-idiocy. They'd give up. No more bloviating idiots...
(Then we could get rid of tax-exempt status for fake churches like Dobson's. )

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama

By JIM RUTENBERG

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”

That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.

The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background...

...Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases...

...

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/us/politics/13martin....

2008-10-11T21:23:00.000-06:00

The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama

By FRANK RICH
Published: October 11, 2008
IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/opinion/12rich.html

2008-10-11T14:32:00.003-06:00

Have you ever visited Free Republic? It's a completely nutlog site based in Fresno or some shithole like that. Don't go. But if you must (like me), be prepared for some very 'special' forms of thinking:

The Obama/ACORN/Gallup/MSM Kenyan 2-Step Campaign Strategy
Vanity | 10/11/2008 | EarlyBird

Posted on 10/11/2008 5:33:46 AM PDT by EarlyBird

Here's how this strategy works:

Obama knows he's can't win the election with his current support base: racist blacks and some naive guilty whites who are voting for him only becuase of his skin color, loony left wingnuts who are drooling at the chance Obama offers to "re-educate conservatives", and the elite limousine liberal MSM wolfpack, whose inevitable demise can only be averted if Obama wins and they become the official state propoganda organ.

Obama and his coterie know he cannot possibly win because he can't close the deal with his party base. They all know that the Democrat party is now hopelessly divided because of the still seething anger of the multitudes of former Hillary supporters and because of the large numbers of Reagan Democrats, none of whom will ever vote for Obama. On the other hand, they can clearly see that the Republican base is motivated as never before.

So the Obama cabal turns to their long-time ally, ACORN, and directs them to step up their cynical efforts to submit fraudulent Dem voter registrations. ACORN, who has been at this for over a year already, suddenly goes into a frenzy and brazenly submits millions of fake registrations. ACORN doesn't care that many of these registrations will be caught and discarded by the authorities -- they know many of them will get through to be counted. And in this case, it's not fraudulent votes that ACORN wants counted, it's the fake registrations themselves. You see, the idea is simply to inflate the number of Democrat voter registrations.

Next, the pollsters say, Wow, look at all these new Dem registrations -- there's obviously going to be a lot more Democrats than Republicans voting this time! We better re-weight our polling samples to compensate. They do so, and the re-weighted polls then naturally show Obama ahead, some more than others. Newsweek's latest poll, for example, has a full 11% difference favoring Democrats in their weighting. Coincidently, the same Newsweek poll shows Obama winning by 11 percent. The actual difference recorded in 2004 was zero -- 39% Democrat, 39% Republican.

Carville, Mathews, Oberman, and the rest of the MSM report on these polls and then start saying, Jeez, if Obama loses the election while the polls show him winning by this much, there's gonna be riots! Why would they say this? Could it be that they know Obama is going to lose?

Meanwhile, at McCain/Palin rallies, where each crowd is more huge than the last, Obama and the MSM plant fake agitators to shout violent, anti-Obama soundbites. Or not. Whether or not the soundbites are really heard at the McCain/Palin rallies is irrelevant, the MSM is nevertheless directed by Obama to report that McCain supporters are losing control and calling for violence against Obama.

Obama and the MSM then lambast the McCain/Palin campaign for the increasingly violent nature of their supporters -- these Republicans are really getting more and more desperate because the polls show McCain is losing badly, the MSM reports. At Obama rallies, where the crowds are steadily dwindling, Obama gets what's left of his supporters all worked up about these reported threats to his Oneness, and his followers come away ready for a fight.

On November 4, Obama badly loses the election as he, ACORN, Gallup, and the MSM all expect... Shazam! Obama supporters begin to riot that night and the next day, carrying professionally made placards reading something like, "How Can All the Polls be Wrong? McCain Stole the Election!"

What's the Kenyan connection to this 2-step? Obama advised his cousin Odinga to use this same strategy during the recent election aftermath in Kenya when Odinga lost by 200,000 votes. I think we're all familiar with what happened there. Will there be as much murder and mayhem here as there was in Kenya? Will Obama be able to wrest control of the U.S. government through this strategy like Odinga did in Kenya? That remains to be seen...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2103037/posts

2008-10-11T04:52:00.002-06:00

Larisa Alexandrovna

Posted October 10, 2008 | 09:39 PM (EST)

Hate as a political strategy...

McCain-Palin have been rather busy this week endorsing the view of some of their psychotic supporters who chanted "Obama is a traitor," among the other hate-filled rants. Well, DU blogger Heather located this document - a political ad that ran in Dallas the day before John F. Kennedy was assassinated - from the national archives:

How far will McCain and Palin go to get what they want? Are they willing to incite violent behavior? The fringe of the right-wing does not need to be encouraged or supported. They simply need to be pushed to the outskirts of civilized society. Sure they can vote, but KKK members can vote too. Best not to pander to hate in a country where hate has already caused so much horror.

2008-10-11T04:23:00.002-06:00

Here's a slippery little rat deserting the sinking ship while pretending he didn't love it while it was sailing on & on & on ... Nice try, no sale.

The Class War Before Palin
By DAVID BROOKS
October 9, 2008

Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals....Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind....

(F)or a time, it seemed the Republican Party would be a broad coalition — small-town values with coastal reach....But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.

Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts. What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole....

***

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community. Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment....

***

(N)o American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as (Sarah) Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite....

The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html...

2008-10-10T21:47:00.003-06:00

From Greeley, CO:

Arrest for political sign thefts

As the election season continues to heat up, a Greeley man was jailed overnight Thursday, accused of stealing dozens of election signs of “people I disagree with.”

The suspect, in the Weld County Jail this morning on $2,000 bond, is Matthew Grieser, 32, and is accused of stealing 28 Democratic yard signs along West 4th Street. He also told police the signs were on city property, so he felt he had the right to remove them.

A Greeley police officer on patrol about 11:30 p.m. Thursday, saw a pickup parked in the 3700 block of 4th Street. That area has a greenbelt separated a fence along some gravel pits. The greenbelt has been a popular place, with both parties using it to display yard signs.

The police officer reported she saw a man running from the roadside to the pickup, and she stopped the vehicle from leaving. She contacted Grieser and found 28 yard signs in the back of his pickup.

Greeley police spokesman Sgt. Joe Tymkowych said only Democratic signs were in the pickup: seven Betsy Markey signs, three Mark Udall, six Debbie Pilch, two Jim Reisberg, one Barack Obama, eight Pierre DeMilt and one Bill Williams sign.

Grieser was arrested on misdemeanor theft charges and booked into the Weld County Jail. The value of the signs ranged from $8 to $10 each, Tymkowych said...
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20081010/NEWS/810...
*
I'm telling you. These people are getting really nutty.

In their alternate Rushbo/Faux News reality they can't believe what can happen in a democratic republic; they can lose. It's a mindblower to them. Without their imaginary fascist gang behind them they're starting to panic.

I enjoy seeing midget brains like this get in trouble.

I don't want anyone cool hurt, though. Just the idiots.

How long before one of El Rushbo's exes spills the beans on his pedophilia & rampant dope addiction? That will be a great day.

I hate right wing cranks. I had to spend too much time with them growing up. Enough's enough.

2008-10-10T18:32:00.002-06:00

Palin Rallies Ignite Widespread Talk of 'Fascism'

By Jeffrey Feldman

Because I published a book recently on the harm done to U.S. democracy by violent rhetoric, I get lots of calls for comment on whichever right-wing shock jock uttered the most menacing words on air in any given week. Lately, however, those questions have shifted in a very noticeable way. Whereas the public concern used to be focused on violent terms and phrases used in broadcast media, nowadays all the talk is about Sarah Palin's speeches and fear of 'fascism.' And even if 'fascist' is not a very accurate description of Sarah Palin -- neither sociologically nor historically -- public concern in response to her campaign events is a social fact well worth noting, if only for the sheer scale of it.

Palin Events Evoke Image of 'Rallies' Seen in History Museums
The most common point brought to my attention in this new concern for Palin is that her events remind people of the kind of 'rallies' people have seen in old newsreels and exhibition photographs in history museums about the fascist period.

Many people have said to me, in so many words, 'I went to a Holocaust museum, recently, and the kinds of rallies they had in the 1930s are exactly what we are seeing now at these Palin events.'

What is it that makes people see events from 1930s Europe and Sarah Palin's campaign stops in Florida (e.g.) as similar? People repeatedly mention three things:

(1) Palin's claim that Sen. Obama has covert ties to 'domestic terrorism'
(2) Palin's claim that Sen. Obama wants to see the U.S. military defeated in war
(3) Shouts from attendees calling for physical harm against Sen. Obama

Interestingly, I have heard these observations from Democrats and Republicans. The logic is that it is not just one feature of the Palin events that leads people see them as 'rallies' of the sort they have learned about in history museums, but three elements combining together: claims of Obama's covert terrorist ties and desire to see the military fail, combined with voiced calls for harm to Sen. Obama.

Palin Events Elicit Talk of Attendee 'Mentality''
After talk of historical references, the most common concern I hear is about the 'mentality' or 'psychology' of the attendees at Palin events. When put to me, the question is often phrased as:

Is there some reason why the people at these events -- and not other people -- are susceptible to the kind of political rhetoric Palin uses?

The psychology questions are most often posed in response to several observations made about the attendees:

(1) Since Sen. Obama has no ties to terrorism, why do some people believe it?
(2) Why are these people susceptible to right-wing propaganda while other people are not?
(3) Why do people continue to accept the 'terrorism' and 'treason' smears even when presented with facts about Sen. Obama?

Nobody who has presented me with these questions has claimed any kind of expertise in psychological theory. Rather, they seem to be looking for a scientific sounding answer for what they observe as an irrational 'anger' at Palin rallies and, in general, a 'mentality' departing from 'normal.'

We find these same kinds of questions about 'anger' and 'mentality' in the writings from observers of the rise of fascism in the 1930s and 1940s -- such as Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. What I hear in these questions about the 'mentality' of the Palin attendees is not a return to social psychological theories of the postwar period, but a voiced concern for what people view as behavior in the public sphere that strikes them as a departure from normal, healthy behavior...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-feldman/palin-ral...

Palin rallies are like European 'skinhead' events. What a nutty moment in history.

It'll be interesting to see what happens when we have a president & justice dept NOT sympathetic to the wacko element.

Great Northern Plains

The Bush White House's Appalling and Evil Legacy: Now We Know the Whole Story

By Frank Rich, The New York TimesPosted on April 27, 2009, Printed on April 27, 2009http://www.alternet.org/story/138472/

Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link

Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition

Pro-Israel Rally Attended by Big-Time NY Dems Descends into Calls for 'Wiping Out' Palestinians

By Max Blumenthal, AlterNetPosted on January 13, 2009, Printed on January 13, 2009http://www.alternet.org/story/119372/

I Survived the Bush Presidency

Neoconservatism dies in Gaza

Israelis, sipping Pepsi, watch bombardment of Gaza town

By Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers

A very dark Black Friday

Obama’s first problem is US war crimes

The president-elect has to take a stand on Bush’s dark legacy

The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla

Scary: The Far-Right's Crazy Attacks on Obama Are Just Getting Started

By Bob Cesca, Huffington PostPosted on November 13, 2008, Printed on November 13, 2008http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.huffingtonpost.com//106926/

by: blueness

Thu Nov 13, 2008 at 03:56:00 AM EST

The Desperate Right's Five Biggest Flops of the 2008 Election

By Brad Reed, AlterNetPosted on November 8, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/106184/

Watching Them Squirm: Is Fox News Abandoning the Mob It Created?

By Mark Ames, AlterNetPosted on November 7, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/106234/

Internal Battles Divided McCain and Palin Camps

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

The Triumph of Ignorance: How Morons Succeed in U.S. Politics

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.comPosted on October 31, 2008, Printed on October 31, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/105447/

Neocon weasels heart Sarah...

The Insiders

How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin.

by Jane Mayer

Jane Mayer on “The Insiders: How John McCain Came to Pick Sarah Palin”

Joe the Plumber and GOP 'Authenticity'

It's hard to reach out to workers while cracking down on unions.

By THOMAS FRANK

Waiting for the Barbarians

Comment

By Richard Kim

October 16, 2008

Here's what her state paper of record says about nutjob Michelle Bachmann.

Bachmann on TV questions Obama's patriotism

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10 years of the Pinochet principle

The arrest warrant served on the Chilean head of state in 1998 changed history and has implications for the US government now

guardian.co.uk, Thursday October 16 2008

My Friend Bill Ayers

Once wanted by the FBI, he's since become a model citizen.

By THOMAS FRANK

Well, here we are folks...Nazis by any other name...on FOX 'NEWS'...right here in River City...we got trouble...yes we got trouble...

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama

From Greeley, CO:

Arrest for political sign thefts

By Frank Rich, The New York Times
Posted on April 27, 2009, Printed on April 27, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/138472/

By Max Blumenthal, AlterNet
Posted on January 13, 2009, Printed on January 13, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/119372/

By Bob Cesca, Huffington Post
Posted on November 13, 2008, Printed on November 13, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.huffingtonpost.com//106926/

By Brad Reed, AlterNet
Posted on November 8, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106184/

By Mark Ames, AlterNet
Posted on November 7, 2008, Printed on November 8, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106234/

By George Monbiot, Monbiot.com
Posted on October 31, 2008, Printed on October 31, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/105447/