The Party Line: Why A Republican Vote Is A Racist Vote, Paul Krugman

...[There is a] difference between the goals of the modern Republican Party and the strategy it uses to win elections. The people who run the G.O.P. are concerned, above all, with making America safe for the rich. Their ultimate goal, as Grover Norquist once put it, is to get America back to the way it was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over,” getting rid of “the income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.” But right-wing economic ideology has never been a vote-winner. Instead, the party’s electoral strategy has depended largely on exploiting racial fear and animosity.

Ronald Reagan didn’t become governor of California by preaching the wonders of free enterprise; he did it by attacking the state’s fair housing law, denouncing welfare cheats and associating liberals with urban riots. Reagan didn’t begin his 1980 campaign with a speech on supply-side economics, he began it — at the urging of a young Trent Lott — with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. And if you look at the political successes of the G.O.P. since it was taken over by movement conservatives, they had very little to do with public opposition to taxes, moral values, perceived strength on national security, or any of the other explanations usually offered. To an almost embarrassing extent, they all come down to just five words: southern whites starting voting Republican.

In fact, I suspect that the underlying importance of race to the Republican base is the reason Rudy Giuliani remains the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination, despite his serial adultery and his past record as a social liberal. Never mind moral values: what really matters to the base is that Mr. Giuliani comes across as an authoritarian, willing in particular to crack down on you-know-who. But Republicans have a problem: demographic changes are making their race-based electoral strategy decreasingly effective. Quite simply, America is becoming less white, mainly because of immigration. Hispanic and Asian voters were only 4 percent of the electorate in 1980, but they were 11 percent of voters in 2004 — and that number will keep rising for the foreseeable future.

Those numbers are the reason Karl Rove was so eager to reach out to Hispanic voters. But the whites the G.O.P. has counted on to vote their color, not their economic interests, are having none of it. From their point of view, it’s us versus them — and everyone who looks different is one of them. So now we have the spectacle of Republicans competing over who can be most convincingly anti-Hispanic. I know, officially they’re not hostile to Hispanics in general, only to illegal immigrants, but that’s a distinction neither the G.O.P. base nor Hispanic voters takes seriously.

Today’s G.O.P., in short, is trapped by its history of cynicism. For decades it has exploited racial animosity to win over white voters — and now, when Republican politicians need to reach out to an increasingly diverse country, the base won’t let them.

GOP Plot: Let's Dump The Undemocratic Electoral College, NYT Ed

The Electoral College should be abolished, but there is a right way to do it and a wrong way. A prominent Republican lawyer in California is doing it the wrong way, promoting a sneaky initiative that, in the name of Electoral College reform, would rig elections in a way that would make it difficult for a Democrat to be elected president, no matter how the popular vote comes out. If the initiative passes, it would do serious damage to American democracy.

California currently gives all 55 of its electoral votes — the biggest electoral college prize in the nation — to the candidate who wins the statewide popular vote. Virtually all states use this winner-take-all method. The California initiative, which could go to a vote in June, would instead give the 2008 presidential candidates one electoral vote for every Congressional district that they win, with an additional two electoral votes going to whoever got the most votes statewide. (Democrats appear to have backed off from plans to try just as anti-democratic a trick in North Carolina, which is good.)

The net result of the California initiative would be that if the Democratic candidate wins in that state next year, which is very likely, the Republican candidate might still walk away with 20 or more of the state’s electoral votes. The initiative, backed by a shadowy group called Californians for Equal Representation, is being promoted as an effort to more accurately reflect the choices of the state’s voters, and to force candidates to pay more attention to California, which is usually not in play in presidential elections. It is actually a power grab on behalf of Republicans.

The Electoral College should be done away with, but in the meantime, any reforms should improve the system, not make it worse. If California abandons its winner-take-all rule while red states like Texas do not, it will be hard for a Democratic nominee to assemble an Electoral College majority, even if he or she wins a sizable majority of the popular vote. That appears to be just what the backers of the California idea have in mind.

If voters understand that the initiative is essentially an elaborate dirty trick posing as reform, they are likely to vote against it. But judging by the misleading name of their organization, the initiative’s backers want to fool the public into thinking the change would make elections more fair. They are planning on putting it to a vote in June 2008, an election when there will be few other things on the ballot, and turnout is expected to be extremely low. This bad-faith initiative is yet another example of the ways in which referenda can be used for mischief and a reminder of why they are a bad way to resolve complex public-policy issues.

Opponents of the initiative announced yesterday that they are sponsoring their own, rival initiative, which would commit California to a national plan that aims to ensure that the winner of the national popular vote becomes president. That idea makes much more sense.

Leading Republicans, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have been silent about the initiative to split California’s electoral votes, but they should be speaking out against it. The fight isn’t about Republicans vs. Democrats. It is about whether to twist the nation’s system of electing presidents to give one party an unfair advantage. No principled elected official, or voter, of either party should support that.

The Average Citizen: Men of Good Fortune, Lou Reed, Politex

Men of good fortune
often cause empires to fall
While men of poor beginnings
often can't do anything at all

The rich son waits for his father to die
the poor just drink and cry
And me, I just don't care at all

Men of good fortune
very often don't know a thing
While men of poor beginnings
think they can do anything

At heart they try to act like a man
handle things the best way they can
They have no rich daddy to fall back on

Men of good fortune
often cause empires to fall
While men of poor beginnings
often can't do anything at all

It takes money to make money they say
look at daddy Bush, he started that way
Anyway, it makes no difference to me

Men of good fortune
often wish that they could die
While men of poor beginnings
want what they have and to get it they'll die

All those great things that life has to give
they wanna have money and live
But me, I just don't care at all

Mind Detox: Selected Op-Eds, Various

1. The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda by John Pilger

....I’ve made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first was Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. It describes the American bombing that provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had started, Pol Pot completed-CIA files alone leave no doubt of that. I offered Year Zero to PBS and took it to Washington. The PBS executives who saw it were shocked. They whispered among themselves. They asked me to wait outside. One of them finally emerged and said, “John, we admire your film. But we are disturbed that it says the United States prepared the way for Pol Pot.” I said, “Do you dispute the evidence?” I had quoted a number of CIA documents. “Oh, no,” he replied. “But we’ve decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator.” Now the term “journalist adjudicator” might have been invented by George Orwell....

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=137

2. Two Legs Good, Four Legs Equal by Jason Miller While there are myriad ways we can each minimize our culpability in the egregious crimes of savage capitalism and its most banal representation, consumerism, the struggle to end speciesism is at the vanguard of our much needed moral evolution. Yet is often minimized and ridiculed by sociopolitical thinkers of nearly all stripes.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=208

3. ‘Managing Consent’: The Art of War, Democracy and Public Relations by Ramzy Baroud

Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents argues that man’s subconscious desires would be utterly violent and sadistic if uncontrolled; his nephew suggested the cure was to curb these desires in a way that generated immense profits. Successive US administrations have taken note and their greatest achievement has been to exploit the subconscious factors that infuse fear and paranoia amongst the masses. Wars have been undertaken, regimes overthrown, and bombs dropped in the midst of sleeping populations, all in the name of democracy.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=214

4. "The American Middle Class Sham" by Michael Alton Gottlieb

Lou Dobbs is no prairie populist, though he sings that song. Lou Dobbs is as elite as they come. Frankly, Lou Dobbs is a snob. So why his heartfelt lamentations over the dire straits of America's middle class? You don't hear a breath about the billions of folks who face death and dying everyday through poverty, disease and oppression by tyrants with Swiss bank accounts on the payroll of 'free trading' transnational corporations.....No, Lou's alarm at the plight of the middle class isn't because he cares about your kids, but because he cares about himself. This isn't about jobs, or American egalitarianism or the economy directly. The truth is the middle class acts as a moat around the Castle Elite and protects the oppressors from the wrath of those who have nothing to lose and are willing to sacrifice themselves for the hope of a better future for their children.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/gottlieb.MiddleClassSham1.07.htm

5. The Inhuman State of US Healthcare by Vicente Navarro (a CJO audiofile produced by Paul Donovan)

http://www.bestcyrano.org/AUDIO/cyranoaudio2.htm

6. The SiCKO Controversy : Views From the Left (analyses of Michael Moore's documentary by Carolyn Baker and by David Walsh)

Michael Moore’s documentary Sicko (2007) has attracted its fair share of critics among the liberaloid guardians of the status quo, and, naturally, rabidly negative and mendacious reviews from the right. But a film of this importance, that has managed to touch off a desperately needed debate about the nature of the “health care” system in the US, and the grasping values underscoring it, has also elicited criticism from the left. In this series of posts we cover the more compelling arguments.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=139

7. Bonds and bondage by Guy Zimmerman

...the economic system is structured to allow the owners who are enriching themselves to completely ignore the suffering, misery and environmental and social degradation that are a direct result of their activities. Modern corporate structures were set up explicitly to accomplish this sleight of hand, and the entire cultural edifice, as we’ve noted, is geared toward degrading awareness of the huge cost of consumer capitalism in terms of visceral human suffering - wars, famines and all the rest.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/voxpop/?p=175

8. The Strange Case of Ted Nugent (or How to Flaunt One's Depravity All the Way to Public Acclaim) by Patrice Greanville

But what of Teddy's demonstrably psychotic makeup? Here we use the term advisedly. For decades forensic psychiatrists have recognized that a total lack of empathy with the suffering of fellow creatures is a telltale sign of psychopathic tendencies. Serial killer Ted Bundy exhibited that trait. The little known (in America) Luis Alfredo Gavarito, a Colombian serial killer notched 140 children before he was caught, but the telling fact is that he had a long previous and parallel history of savage mutilation of animals. Jeffrey Dahmer, of necrophiliac fame, was also an early and obsessive animal tormentor. Psychiatrists are in agreement that the trait is found in the overwhelming majority of psychosexual criminals. Hunting is of course far more widespread that I, for one, would like, and not all hunters are serial killers. Still, caution is in order when in comes to these pastimes.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/greanvilleNugent1.htm.

9. Calvinism, Capitalism, Conversion, and Incarceration by Chip Berlet What Calvinism accomplished was to fulfill the psychic needs of both upwardly mobile middle class entrepreneurs and alienated workers. Middle class businessmen (and they were men) could ascribe their economic success to their spiritual superiority. These businessmen and others who were predestined to be the Elect of God could turn to alienated workers, and explain to them that their impoverished economic condition was the result of a spiritual failure ordained by God. Their place in the spiritual (and economic) system was predestined. This refocused anger away from material demands in the here and now. Because of their evil and weak nature, those that sinned or committed crimes had to be taught how to change their behavior through punishment, shame, and discipline.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=124

10. Home Grown Terrorists? by Rowan Wolf

....As an activist (non-governmental organizations), a researcher (use the internet and even sponsor a political site), teacher and sponsor of student groups, who eats out from time to time, I find the breadth of NYPD’s list stunning and alarming. It is particularly alarming within the context of the loss of Constitutional protections; the extension of the “terrorist” label; and the “liberalization” of data gathering and surveillance. Not surprisingly, the report was seen by Homeland Security (AP article) contributing to understanding radicalization.

http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=81

Helping the Victims: The Bush Housing Bubble Bursts, Paul Krugman

Unlike the Enron scam, the hand of the Bush family and the Bush administration on the housing bubble is not as obvious, but it's there. The Bush policy of removing safeguards from financial dealings to benefit his corporate masters continues its harmful march over the backs of average Americans. Like Clinton's dot com bubble, the Bush housing bubble was engendered to float a sick economy, and its destructive end has been predicted by most economists for years. Yet, nothing was done, because our corporate and political leaders were making a buck off the sweat of unknowing citizens. Now, these greedy manipulators of the public trust want the government to bail them out, plundering further the public till. --Politex

...It is becoming increasingly clear that the real-estate bubble of recent years, like the stock bubble of the late 1990s, both caused and was fed by widespread malfeasance. Rating agencies like Moody’s Investors Service, which get paid a lot of money for rating mortgage-backed securities, seem to have played a similar role to that played by complaisant accountants in the corporate scandals of a few years ago. In the ’90s, accountants certified dubious earning statements; in this decade, rating agencies declared dubious mortgage-backed securities to be highest-quality, AAA assets.

Yet our desire to avoid letting bad actors off the hook shouldn’t prevent us from doing the right thing, both morally and in economic terms, for borrowers who were victims of the bubble. Most of the proposals I’ve seen for dealing with the problems of subprime borrowers are of the locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone variety: they would curb abusive lending practices — which would have been very useful three years ago — but they wouldn’t help much now. What we need at this point is a policy to deal with the consequences of the housing bust.

Consider a borrower who can’t meet his or her mortgage payments and is facing foreclosure. In the past, as Gretchen Morgenson recently pointed out in The Times, the bank that made the loan would often have been willing to offer a workout, modifying the loan’s terms to make it affordable, because what the borrower was able to pay would be worth more to the bank than its incurring the costs of foreclosure and trying to resell the home. That would have been especially likely in the face of a depressed housing market.

Today, however, the mortgage broker who made the loan is usually, as Ms. Morgenson says, “the first link in a financial merry-go-round.” The mortgage was bundled with others and sold to investment banks, who in turn sliced and diced the claims to produce artificial assets that Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s were willing to classify as AAA. And the result is that there’s nobody to deal with. This looks to me like a clear case for government intervention: there’s a serious market failure, and fixing that failure could greatly help thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans. The federal government shouldn’t be providing bailouts, but it should be helping to arrange workouts.

And we’ve done this sort of thing before — for third-world countries, not for U.S. citizens. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s was brought to an end by so-called Brady deals, in which creditors were corralled into reducing the countries’ debt burdens to manageable levels. Both the debtors, who escaped the shadow of default, and the creditors, who got most of their money, benefited.

The mechanics of a domestic version would need a lot of work, from lawyers as well as financial experts. My guess is that it would involve federal agencies buying mortgages — not the securities conjured up from these mortgages, but the original loans — at a steep discount, then renegotiating the terms. But I’m happy to listen to better ideas. The point, however, is that doing nothing isn’t the only alternative to letting the parties who got us into this mess off the hook. Say no to bailouts — but let’s help borrowers work things out.

Narcissist-in-Chief: Sick Party Produces Sick Choices For Sick Backers, Paul Krugman

...It has long been clear that President Bush doesn’t feel other people’s pain. His self-centeredness shines through whenever he makes off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks, from his jocular obliviousness in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the joke he made last year in San Antonio when visiting the Brooke Army Medical Center, which treats the severely wounded: “As you can possibly see, I have an injury myself — not here at the hospital, but in combat with a cedar. I eventually won. The cedar gave me a little scratch.” What’s now clear is that the two men most likely to end up as the G.O.P. presidential nominee [,Romney and Giuliani,] are cut from the same cloth. This probably isn’t a coincidence. Arguably, the current state of the Republican Party is such that only extreme narcissists have a chance of getting nominated.

To be a serious presidential contender, after all, you have to be a fairly smart guy — and nobody has accused either Mr. Romney or Mr. Giuliani of being stupid. To appeal to the G.O.P. base, however, you have to say very stupid things, like Mr. Romney’s declaration that we should “double Guantánamo,” or Mr. Giuliani’s dismissal of the idea that raising taxes is sometimes necessary to pay for things like repairing bridges as a “Democratic, liberal assumption.”

So the G.O.P. field is dominated by smart men willing to play dumb to further their personal ambitions. We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to learn that these men are monstrously self-centered. All of which leaves us with a political question. Most voters are thoroughly fed up with the current narcissist in chief. Are they really ready to elect another?

Genocide As U.S. Foreign Policy: Bush Shares The Guilt For The Darfur Genocide?, 60 Minutes

This segment was originally broadcast on Oct. 22, 2006. It was updated on Aug. 8, 2007.

It hardly seems possible, but after four years, the genocide in Darfur continues. Correspondent Scott Pelley first reported this story last year, as the government in Sudan launched a new offensive of "ethnic cleansing."...

..."What is it that you think people don’t understand about what’s going on here now?" Pelley asks Dr. Brahma.

"This is bad. They go to the villages, and they burn one village after the other, then when the people come out they catch the women and gang bang, they rape them not one guy, no 10, 15 then they carve up the men and throw them in the drinking water to make sure that this place will never ever be used again. And you’re telling me the people in America don’t know this or don’t want to know this. Maybe its too much to know but that’s what’s happening right now and its happening all over again," Dr. Brahma says. "I’m sorry to say I’m going to sit here with you in two years time and I’m gonna tell you the same sad story. People will say, 'Ich habe nicht gewusst,' which is German for 'I didn’t know.'"

The man who doesn’t want you to know is Sudan’s dictator Omar AlBashir. In 2006, he signed a U.S.-brokered peace agreement but it never took hold. AlBashir launched a new offensive, and then, last September, came to the U.N. to hear President Bush say this to his face, "To the people of Darfur, you have seen unspeakable violence and my nation has called these atrocities what they are: genocide."

Sudan’s U.N. representative looked amused during Bush's speech. AlBashir threatened war against U.N. peacekeepers.

Why do these guys mock the U.S. in public? Well, it turns out our government's relationship with Sudan is complicated. In the 1990’s AlBashir hosted Osama bin Laden for five years, so he has information on al Qaeda.

"It's been a very good deal for the government of Sudan to give little tidbits of information about suspects around the world in order to blunt United States outrage over what’s happening in Darfur," Prendergast says.

n 2005, the U.S. sent a private jet to bring Sudan’s intelligence chief to CIA headquarters.

"This is the same guy who was the architect of the counter-insurgency strategy in Darfur. What kind of signal does that send to the government of Sudan?" Prendergast asks.

"Look, this is a hard thing to swallow, because what you’re saying is, the United States is in bed with the government in Khartoum on counterterrorism issues and therefore we are looking the other way on a genocide I mean, that’s tough," Pelley remarks.

"I think it's a really heinous arrangement and one that history will judge very harshly," Prendergast replies.

The Bush Economy: The U.S. Economy Has Hit The Fan, Paul Krugman

...What’s been happening in financial markets over the past few days is something that truly scares monetary economists: liquidity has dried up. That is, markets in stuff that is normally traded all the time — in particular, financial instruments backed by home mortgages — have shut down because there are no buyers. This could turn out to be nothing more than a brief scare. At worst, however, it could cause a chain reaction of debt defaults.

The origins of the current crunch lie in the financial follies of the last few years, which in retrospect were as irrational as the dot-com mania. The housing bubble was only part of it; across the board, people began acting as if risk had disappeared. Everyone knows now about the explosion in subprime loans, which allowed people without the usual financial qualifications to buy houses, and the eagerness with which investors bought securities backed by these loans. But investors also snapped up high-yield corporate debt, a k a junk bonds, driving the spread between junk bond yields and U.S. Treasuries down to record lows.

Then reality hit — not all at once, but in a series of blows. First, the housing bubble popped. Then subprime melted down. Then there was a surge in investor nervousness about junk bonds: two months ago the yield on corporate bonds rated B was only 2.45 percent higher than that on government bonds; now the spread is well over 4 percent. Investors were rattled recently when the subprime meltdown caused the collapse of two hedge funds operated by Bear Stearns, the investment bank. Since then, markets have been manic-depressive, with triple-digit gains or losses in the Dow Jones industrial average — the rule rather than the exception for the past two weeks.

But yesterday’s announcement by BNP Paribas, a large French bank, that it was suspending the operations of three of its own funds was, if anything, the most ominous news yet. The suspension was necessary, the bank said, because of “the complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments” — that is, there are no buyers. When liquidity dries up, as I said, it can produce a chain reaction of defaults. Financial institution A can’t sell its mortgage-backed securities, so it can’t raise enough cash to make the payment it owes to institution B, which then doesn’t have the cash to pay institution C — and those who do have cash sit on it, because they don’t trust anyone else to repay a loan, which makes things even worse.

And here’s the truly scary thing about liquidity crises: it’s very hard for policy makers to do anything about them. The Fed normally responds to economic problems by cutting interest rates — and as of yesterday morning the futures markets put the probability of a rate cut by the Fed before the end of next month at almost 100 percent. It can also lend money to banks that are short of cash: yesterday the European Central Bank, the Fed’s trans-Atlantic counterpart, lent banks $130 billion, saying that it would provide unlimited cash if necessary, and the Fed pumped in $24 billion.

But when liquidity dries up, the normal tools of policy lose much of their effectiveness. Reducing the cost of money doesn’t do much for borrowers if nobody is willing to make loans. Ensuring that banks have plenty of cash doesn’t do much if the cash stays in the banks’ vaults. There are other, more exotic things the Fed and, more important, the executive branch of the U.S. government could do to contain the crisis if the standard policies don’t work. But for a variety of reasons, not least the current administration’s record of incompetence, we’d really rather not go there....

Mailbag: on GOP Debates, Impeaching Bush, Losing Freedom, Bush Propaganda Museum, various

Yesterday I felt masochistic so turned on the "Republican Debates" to ruin my day. I am a glutton for punishment so just had to see what rhetoric they were all mouthing. I honestly was shocked to hear three of them sounding just like "W" saying that the US needs to spread democracy around the globe. "We do?" Have the 300 million people in this country gone deaf - am I the only one shocked by this kind of talk? I am getting to the point where I hear the things these politicians say & wonder where I am living. Guliani last week on Rose said, "Americans should be responsible for their own health insurance choices just like auto insurance". If only I had gotten out of here before the housing crash. --Elaine

The talk goes on about impeaching Bush and removing him from office, talk talk talk, yet has it ever happened? There is so much proven,documented information about all his terrible injusticies and yet the guy is still president after over six years! The republicans (unsucessfully, of course) fought tooth and nail to remove Bill Clinton from office for getting a blow job behind his wife's back, yet all I ever hear is more talk about impeaching Bush but it never seems to happen. Actually, the whole Bush adminisatration needs to be brought down so we shouldn't just target Bush. I get the feeling that many of the moves attribued to Bush have been masterminded by others in his administration since he never has had the most intelligent air about him. --Joe

Give them sports, easy credit and all the beer they can drink
The powers came to perceive
If they just work and play and seldom think
More deeply than games and TV
Freedom will fade, their Constitution grow dim
They'll consent to all laws heaped upon them

Through crisis and war rumors they extracted much fear
And justified total control
Over sleepy citizens pleased to not interfere
In exchange for flattering cajole
From judges and lawyers turned politicians, wherefore?
To exist and move money as the corporate whore. --Glenn

Southern Halliburton University:
Moving the Bush Bubble to the Big D

In her final column before her untimely death, Molly Ivins wrote:

"We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders."

Dr. Benjamin Johnson, a history professor at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, where President Bush is proposing to build his $500 million library and neoconservative institute (DeFrank, 2006; Berkowitz, 2007), recently attended the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians. Several colleagues there reported that Karl Rove, Bush's chief political strategist, has been traveling around the country examining research facilities, discussing how to select Bush Institute fellows, and meeting with library directors (Johnson, 2007a).

According to Dr. Johnson, one well-respected colleague said, "Rove seems to know exactly what the square footage is of the building that will be at SMU and where it will be located on campus." Rove also expressed displeasure that some SMU faculty and United Methodist bishops were protesting the proposed partisan institute (Korosec, 2007; Silva, 2007) over which Bush and company will have total control (Johnson, 2007b). This hands-on involvement of a top-level White House operative like Rove demonstrates the importance of the proposed library and think tank at SMU to Bush insiders.

Convincing the United Methodist Church to stain its good name and a major university to give away its academic respectability by linking itself with a president that much of the world views as an authoritarian bully who has authorized and advocated for torture and international kidnapping is one nifty trick.

Bush is the most unpopular and isolated president since Richard Nixon. Inside his bubble, the President is being told by the Secretary of State (Rice, 2004) that he is another Winston Churchill or Harry Truman -- unpopular now, but he will be vindicated by history for his heroic effort to bring democracy to the Middle East at the point of a gun (even if it requires a total re-write). To re-write history on the scale Bush needs will necessitate the complete control of a disinformation institute, and if it uses the legitimacy of a respected university and the good name of a major Protestant tradition, all the better (imagine the American Enterprise Institute with a giant cross on the front door, and you get the picture).

Importantly, Rove and friends will be able to continue to conceal the most damaging information about this administration in its bubble using Bush's Executive Order 13233, signed into law shortly after 9/11, which insures that the president and his heirs are able to deny access in perpetuity to government records they select (Gillman, 2007). Emily Sheketoff, Executive Director of the American Library Association, observed that the executive order "completely goes against the spirit of the essence of a library" (Gillman, 2007). Steve Aftergood, Director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said "If the Bush folks are going to play games with the records, no self-respecting academic institution should cooperate" (Gillman, 2007). Professor Benjamin Hufbauer at the University of Louisville, a recognized authority on presidential libraries, believes that dictating which papers can be seen at the library reduces it to "just a museum of political propaganda" (Jascik, 2007).

--Rev. Andrew J. Weaver, Ph.D.

Inspectors explained that they were unable to visibly inspect portions of the bridge in Minnesota prior to its collapse because they couldn't get their heads in some of the openings. Right, and that's what my doctor said when I suggested a colonoscopy. --Politex

10 Recent Op-Eds: ...from Thomas Paine's Corner, various

1. "Reviewing Ferdinand Lundberg’s 'Cracks in the Constitution'" by Steve Lendman

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=186

....Lundberg quickly transfixes his readers by disabusing them of notions commonly held. Despite long-held beliefs, the Constitution is no “masterpiece of political architecture.” It falls far short of “one great apotheosis (bathed) in quasi-religious light.” The finished product was a “closed labyrinthine affair,” not an “open” constitution like the British model. It was the product of duplicitous politicians and their close friends scheming to cut the best deals for themselves by leaving out the great majority of others who didn’t matter.

2. "Vick and Dick: What the Falcons QB may have in common with America’s VP" by Andrew Feinstein

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=129

...Cheney and Vick - or Dick and Vick, as I like to call them - actually have a lot in common. They’re both obscenely rich, travel with an entourage of cronies who’ll take the heat should their ringleader get in trouble, dropped out of college early (although in fairness to Dick, after flunking out of Yale, he did finish his degree at the University of Wyoming), starred on their high school football teams but can’t throw an accurate pass, and, of course, seem to revel in the caging, torturing and killing of helpless animals....

3. "Kucinich on the Record" by Amanda Griscom Little

http://www.bestcyrano.org/cyrano/?p=128

"First of all, as president, I’m going to let the rest of the world know that the days of America trying to be a nation above nations is over. We have to quit trying to dominate other countries, and we have to step out of our isolation and into the brotherhood and sisterhood of all people. I think the world is ready for an American president who puts the sword down, so that nations won’t have to spend a tremendous amount of their resources trying to prepare for war."

4. "A Metallurgist’s Insights Into the Minneapolis Bridge Disaster" by Joel Hirschhorn

http://www.bestcyrano.org/avenger212/?p=72

Make no mistake: The deeply researched and totally supported case for a massive national infrastructure spending program could not have been clearer. But spending on infrastructure is not sexy and politicians at ALL levels of government have found countless excuses for not facing the totality of the problem. Instead, public spending is dribbled out, dealing with the most urgent problems or, worse yet, the ones that are the most visible to the public. But unaddressed are massive numbers of problems, such as the Minneapolis bridge and thousands more bridges, that our bureaucratic system has learned to game, postpone, rationalize and, therefore, put the public safety at considerable risk....

5. "Solidarity" by John Stippling

http://www.bestcyrano.org/voxpop/?p=166

...I may not have liked living under the Cultural Revolution, but it was not my revolution. Same as Nepal. It’s not my country, not my people. I feel solidarity with these struggles, however. As I said, perfection is beyond us, and before we liberate our minds, there are often more materialistic things to deal with, especially for the world’s poor. I only want to stress, whether its Milosevic, Castro, Chavez, or the Nepalese maoists, one can rest assured the western press and the official academic orientalists of the Empire, will engage in their usual character assassination and re-writing of history.

6. "Malcolm X on Politics" (from Cyrano's Audio Section)

http://www.bestcyrano.org//AUDIO/AudioPageMalcolm/malcomx_the_dixicrats.mp3

7. "ATAVISM" by Vi Rainless

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=184

....Territoriality limits not only area, but outlook, a provincialism prone to becoming vainglorious when amplified by the injection of terror alerts transforming it to full-blown xenophobia

and a proprietary identification with the “Homeland”, which serves as a springboard for wanton aggression that may begin as threats, but always escalates to an unprovoked act, an assault or an invasion....

8. "US War On Terror And Muslim Response" by Usman Khalif

http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=180

...As America expands its list of enemies to include those who resist the Indian and Israeli occupation, the reaction of the Muslim masses is vociferous, sometimes even violent. Many Governments take into account the anger of their people and resist American pressure. The degree to which a government submits to American pressure is the extent to which it is seen as illegitimate. Free media, it has been seen, is also not immune to bribes or intimidation. The ‘free press’ in many countries has started to call the resistance fighters as ‘terrorists’. Withdrawal of citizenship and persecution of those who took part in Afghan Jihad is the norm in most Muslim countries. Banditry by demobilised soldiers has been the after effect of every war, but the after effect of demobilisation of Mujahideen in Afghanistan is unique and horrific because of the way their home countries treated them after the end of the Afghan war against Soviet occupation. In consequence, there is an exponential destabilisation of the entire Middle East and much of South Asia.....

9. "FIRST (ABRIDGED) CATALOG OF U.S. MEDIA BIASES, DISTORTIONS AND SUPPRESSIONS" by Patrice Greanville

http://www.bestcyrano.org/catalog.html

...How is such a colossal feat of imposture and pacification accomplished? The corporate system has perfected a communications machinery ruled by powerful, widely accepted myths that prop up the legitimacy of the system by hiding and whitewashing its antisocial flaws. This article does not claim that the system functions robotically and by executive fiat so as to rule out all deviations. The latter do crop up, but never with enough persistence to prevail against the ocean of distortions and banalities that drown out the most serious messages. This usually suffices to stifle meaningful political action. Ironically, these deviations are actually "tonics" to the media system, enhancing its credibility, for they tend to convince the casual observer that the media are indeed independent of government or ownership control.....

10. "Why Socialism?" by Albert Einstein

http://www.bestcyrano.org/mrEinstein5.49.htm

...I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society....