December Infamy

December has given us more than one "day which will live in infamy."

Here's a random sampling:  After three years of unconstitutional incarceration, Japanese-American citizens are finally released from detention camps (1944); United States and Russia conduct nuclear test explosions on the same day (1970) spewing particles of radiation contaminants over three quarters of the earth; Rosa Parks arrested in Alabama for refusing to move to the back of the bus (1955); Jerry Lee Lewis marries his 13-year-old cousin while still married to Jane Mitcham (1957).

And in 1981, on Dec. 12, President Ronnie Reagan authorized the CIA to begin spying on Americans -- the start of the United States government assault on the Bill of Rights that reached its apex when Bush II buffaloed a compliant Congress into passing what's come to be known as the Patriot Act. (The name is an acronym, probably created by Mrs. Malaprop.)

Now add to the days of infamy Dec. 16, 2009.  With only 34 nays, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a $636 billion defense spending bill -- (that's not the bad part) -- into which was tucked (here's the infamy):

 * Extension of the Patriot act.

*  1,080 so-called earmarks totaling $2.7 billion, most of it for companies or lobby groups that had contributed substantially to the campaigns of the representatives who inserted the earmarks into the bill.  Jim Moran (D-Va.) put in 45 earmarks to firms, mainly in the defense industry, in his home district that gave him a total of $201,000 in campaign contributions.  Jack Murtha (D-PA) put in earmarks to reward firms that gave him $199,050.  The earmark infamy was bipartisan.  C.W. "Bill" Young of Florida (R) took in $122,000 from beneficiaries of his earmarks.

The pork is business as usual in Washington   Ho-hum.  It's only taxpayer money.  We can't afford to pay for health care for every American.  But we can earmark billions  for graft.

And we continue to live under the thick black cloud of legislation that savages the Bill of Rights.  The Patriot Act -- its entire title is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001" -- literally repealed great sections of the Bill of Rights without bothering to follow the constitutional process for repeal.

In a fell swoop, Congress:

 * Decimated the First Amendment with unconstitutional restrictions on free speech and the right to peaceably assemble.

*  Virtually repealed the Fourth Amendment requirements of probable cause and prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure.

* Canceled the Sixth Amendment's right to prompt and public trial.

* Wiped out the Eighth Amendment's protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

With a ho and a hum and a dum dum dum, these abominations against our citizenship have just been extended, rather than being permitted to expire en bloc, as they would and should have at the end of  December.

In the intensely emotional aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the legislation was handed to Congress late at night -- 402 pages of language cleverly designed to mask the real effect of the bill and play rather upon the emotions of the Congress for immediate passage.  It is probable that whoever came up with the acronymable title spent more time creating it than our legislators spent actually studying the text of the legislation.

It contains nearly 30 amendments to the United States Code or to legislation previously passed by the Congress following study and debate.  Each of these changes in our laws is constructed in language comparable to the following actual excerpt from the act:

Chapter 10 of title 18, United States Code, is amended—

(1) in section 175—

(A) in subsection (b)—

(i) by striking ‘‘does not include’’ and inserting

‘‘includes’’;

(ii) by inserting ‘‘other than’’ after ‘‘system for’’;

and

(iii) by inserting ‘‘bona fide research’’ after ‘‘protective’’;

(B) by redesignating subsection (b) as subsection (c);

(2) in subparagraph (E), by striking the period at the

end and inserting ‘‘; and’’; and

(3) by adding at the end the following:

‘‘(F) does not discriminate against victims because they

disagree with the way the State is prosecuting the criminal

case.’

In their emotional state so soon after the towers fell, most of those who voted for the act probably had to read no further than this paragraph on the very first page: "To deter and punish terrorist acts in the United States and around the world, to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools, and for other purposes."

The devil indeed was in the details, in those "other purposes." And so we torture or hand over our prisoners to nefarious regimes to do the torturing for us; every American citizen lives under the specter of his government's probing into his most personal records and acts, and possibly suffering dire consequences for innocent transactions; for every one of us there is the awful possibility of being incarcerated without bail, without charge, without trial simply for being politically active.

Ho, hum and a dum dum dum.  Merry Christmas.

*#!$@**&%!!#

F**k the conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom today: So it isn't perfect.  But the Senate health care bill would prevent insurance companies from refusing coverage to people who are already sick.  It will, um. . . .it will extend coverage to 30 million people who aren't covered now.  Tell them we won't pass the bill because it isn't perfect.

F**k the conventional wisdom.

C'mon, the conventional wisdom says, be practical.  With the little compromises we've made, we can get the backing we need to pass a bill.  Think of it!  A health care law, after all these years of contention.  An actual bill we can get to the President's desk to be signed into law.

F**k the conventional wisdom.  Why?

1. The bill won't really cover 30 million more Americans.  It simply mandates that every single American buy health insurance or break the law and face penalties and fines. So, rather than "covering" 30 million more Americans, the bill makes them criminals if they don't buy insurance from the same companies that corrupted our health care system in the first place.

2. A real public option -- which in itself is a compromise from true reform, which would have given us a single-payer system --  is a tool that would drive down costs and improve coverage by offering an affordable alternative to private insurance. Your gutless, spineless Democratic "leadership" in the Senate has bargained that away to get "a bill that can pass."




3. It is loaded with little sops to "key" senators to buy their votes.  Sops that sock the rest of us, like the stealth cap on coverage for long-term illnesses, or this little gem: $50 million for abstinence-only sex education.  That's not education; that's not health care; that's religion. "Congress shall pass no law. . ."

F**k the conventional wisdom.

"Honestly, the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill," former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told Vermont Public Radio. "The Senate has somehow managed to turn the House's silk purse into a sow's ear," said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus. "Without a public option and no hope of expanding Medicare coverage, this bill is not worth supporting," said Stephanie Taylor, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. "Without a public option, this bill is almost a trillion dollar taxpayer giveaway to insurance companies," said Jim Dean, a spokesman for a liberal Democratic action group.

The Senate bill is a tribute to the corruption of Joe Lieberman, the man without a soul, who is owned, lock, stock, barrel and bullshit, by the insurance industry and the Israeli hawk lobby.

"I feel so strongly about the creation of another government health insurance entitlement," Soulless Joe said recently."The government going into the health insurance business - I think it's such a mistake that I would use the power I have as a single senator to stop a final vote."

F**k Joe Lieberman.

A Camel in the Room?

If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what is a health care plan designed by the 111th Congress?

Nothing you'd want to ride into the mid-term elections. Committee mark-ups dictated by health industry lobbyists, secret deals whose makers regularly renege, sell-outs, cop-outs and downright sleaze have turned the idea of reform into something possibly worse than the godawful mess we have now.

We can't be certain until we know specifically what little surprises have been, and continue to be, slipped into the bill,  like the stealthy cap on insurance payments for the seriously ill. (See previous post, "How Things Work.")  But when the likes of Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson are calling the shots, you can bet the farm on two general points: (1) It'll be bad for sick people and (2) it'll fatten the coffers of insurance companies and their top executives.

For example, the insurance company surrogates have already twisted the bill to virtually assure that, absent a public option to compete with the private insurers, your health care premiums will increase by an average of $1,000 a year.  There's nothing to prevent providers from continuing to raise their fees; not one word.  Medicare won't be allowed to use its economy of scale to bargain down your drug prices.  Since insurance companies will continue to be exempt from anti-trust laws, they won't even have to compete with one another.  New biologic drugs will be protected forever from competition from generics.  All of this has been done more or less out in the open.

Now consider that the first draft of a House effort at health care reform ran to 1,000 pages, much of it written in legispeak gobbledygook that militated against genuine reform.  The last unverified report I saw speculated that the thing kicking around the Senate was up to 2,000 pages and growing.  Can you imagine the number of Catches 22 the lobbyists, lawyers and legislators can cram into 2,000-plus pages behind closed doors?

When something finally reaches the floor, how many Senators will actually have read and understood every word of this document by the time they cast their votes?  Will they finally be so weary of the whole torturesome business, so eager to send something, anything, to the President, so desperate to crow about "making history," that they'll rush this worse-than-a-camel to passage unread, the way they did the horrible USA Patriot Act?

And after that comes the process of reconciliation in conference, where the same health industry puppets who created the messes will attempt to merge the House and Senate versions of health care "reform" into a final bill.  The conferees will, of course, continue to be guided by their muses, the lobbyists, even as they prattle, outside the chamber doors where the TV cameras lurk, about public options and public debts and Joe Lieberman's wife, a former insurance industry shill who now -- Say it ain't so, Joe! -- actually gets money for  promoting donations to a breast cancer charity.

Try to sell this plot as a comedy for the Broadway stage and they wouldn't even let you in the side door at Sardi's.

But there it is, our government in action, our leaders doing their duty to the people who elected them.

May the Angels of Mercy save us!  The health care bill sure as hell won't.

The Nobel Speech

Your Pianist hit a sour note, which he realized only after reading Andrew Sullivan's excellent piece (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/the-tragedy-of-hope.html) about President Obama's Nobel acceptance speech.

That's why I deleted my blog, "Audacity sans Hope."  In it I wrote that the speech "did not lend itself to quick, facile analysis," whereupon my own attempt at analysis proved my point.

I have not reversed my opinion of the speech as oratory: it is a sublime example of the oratorical powers of our most eloquent President since Lincoln.  It was, as Sullivan wrote,  "written and spoken in such a way to reach anyone of any faith or none. . . . It was an expression of tragic hope."

I have reversed my opinion that his defense of war while accepting a prize for peace was an act of monumental hypocrisy.  Rereading the speech, for perhaps the fifth time, I have come to see it as an act of absolute candor, an honest acknowledgment of his own "difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other."

The key to understanding the speech is to understand this paragraph:

"We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.  There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified... For make no mistake:  Evil does exist in the world.  A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies.  Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms.  To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."

Even as an apostle of hope, in his pre-campaign writings, Mr. Obama was ever the pragmatist.  Sometimes progressives such as your Pianist found themselves so uplifted by his rhetoric of hope -- especially  during the last abysmal days of Bush -- that they did not hear his simultaneous warning about what's possible.

Sullivan writes, "Hope is not optimism. We have little reason for optimism given the first decade of the twenty-first century. Hope is a choice. As much a choice as faith and love."

Mr. Obama did not start these wars.  "Our actions matter," he said in Oslo, "and can bend history."  The wars launched by another President have bent the history with which he must deal, a history that hands him a terrible paradox.  On the one hand, no nation can be truly safe as long as there exist those who not only hate it with a suicidal passion, but also possess the wealth and the means to do it the kind of harm that the United States suffered on Sept. 11, 2001.  And so he must pursue Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda and to do so he must also fight the Taliban.  In the context of the history he inherited, he can do no other.  Yet the very process of pursuing those goals, of eliminating those threats, builds new animosity toward America in the muslim world, gives birth to new terrorists and terrorist sympathizers, complicates his already labyrinthine task, and can make his acceptance of a peace prize while justifying war seem like hypocrisy.

It is not, for, as Sullivan wrote:  "(Obama) sees that the profound flaws in human nature affect 'us' as well as 'them'; that we "face the world as it is," not as we would like it to be; that the decision to go to war is a moral and a pragmatic one; that ends have to be balanced by a shrewd and sometimes cold-eyed assessment of means."

Obama's cold-eyed assessment of means has led to policies, or the continuation of old policies, that I still find abhorrent.  "All nations," he said in Oslo, "must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." There is call in his own use of force for not just assessment, but reform, to meet those governing standards.

Yet, all things considered, as an editorialist in Canada observed, the Nobel acceptance was "the right speech at the right time."

How Things Work

Ah, Democracy!

Why was Joe Lieberman, Aetna's $3-million man, the only Senator smiling as they emerged from the closed-door meeting that "compromised" the health care public option for the third or fourth time?  Could it have anything to do with the fact that Hartford, which calls itself "the insurance capital of the world," has almost as many insurance company headquarters as Florida has oranges?  Nah, that's cynical.

Left on the cutting room floor after that meeting were the last shreds of "reform" in the Senate version of health care reform legislation.

Among them is one that particularly infuriates me because I am a cancer survivor.  Its loss represents literally a death blow to fellow survivors who, unlike me, require costly, long-term treatment.  A case in point is my friend Garry, one of the most courageous people I know, an athlete who, in the Lance Armstrong mold, continues to push himself to the limit even as medicine and chemistry keep him alive.

He'd have had to start paying all of his treatment costs if the new Senate health care "reform" bill had been in effect.  It would have wiped him out, leaving him a pauper. (A dead pauper, most likely.) That's because the bill would place dollar limits on insurance coverage for costly illnesses like Garry's.

The Associated Press reports today: The legislation that originally passed the Senate health committee last summer would have banned such limits, but a tweak to that provision weakened it in the bill now moving toward a Senate vote.

The AP quotes an American Cancer Society official as saying, "We don't know who put it in, or why it was put in."

But we can guess, can't we?  As investigative reporters used to be told, back when journalism was practiced and there were investigative reporters, "Follow the money."

What began as a noble ideal called health care reform has died aborning.

The best kind of reform, a government single payer plan, was taken off the table before the drafting of the first proposed legislation had even begun.

Follow the money.

When the first weakened draft of health care reform became public, a vast and highly successful campaign of lies and misinformation ("death panels," "forced enrollment in a government plan," etc.) turned the public against it.

Follow the money.

When Max Baucus (an insurance company million-dollar man) and his finance committee went behind closed doors to craft a Senate version of the bill, the media assured us that "the public option is dead."

Follow the money.

Senators Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, Rolland Burris, and Sherrod Brown revived the public option. The $80 million insurance industry puppets Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Mary Landrieu took Joe Lieberman's Sword of Hartford and carved out another "compromise."

Ah, Democracy! Follow the money.

The Climate Memos

A very bright fellow who worked for me at one of my newspapering stops eventually left The Business to become an information officer for the Argonne national research laboratory in Chicago.

After a few months on the job he e-mailed me that he was "learning" scientists' humor, which, he assured me, was unlike any other.  He sent me a few samples.  That was 15 years ago and I still don't get the jokes.

Lately, in an effort to make chicken salad out of something less palatable, I have been slogging through the entire text of the purloined e-mails of the climate scientists during a sedentary period inflicted upon me by spinal problems.  I do not recommend this for pleasure-seekers -- neither the spinal problems nor the e-mail reading.

I still don't get most of the jokes, but it's obvious to me that the climate change deniers, ever vigilant for easy-on, easy-off propagandizing, don't "get" any of it.  Like Bushites plucking squibs of intelligence and spinning them into causes for war, the climate deniers have picked out a dozen or so of the memos and made them sound like a vast left wing conspiracy. Much has been made, for example, about one memo in which a climate scientist acknowledges having used a "trick."

Having lived a good deal of my life with a chemist father whose hobbies included astronomy and archeology, and an older brother with a doctorate in chemical engineering whose hobbies ranged from biology to zoology, I became well acquainted with scientists' fondness for the word "trick."

It can mean a shortcut past an otherwise complicated process; a promising new theory; a happenstance; or a scientific joke that involves false clues that aren't revealed until you confess bafflement and the joker explains the correct result. 

In the total context, the "trick" in the purloined memos is simply a shortcut.

Other "suspect" e-mails read very much like the Argonne jokes.  Since the climate deniers don't understand basic science, it's little wonder they cannot "get" the esoteric chit-chat of scientists at work.

The Obfuspeakers

In the mid-80s, several of our favorite Blue Ridge mountain hiking trails were cluttered with obstructions: diseased trees had fallen across them and Reaganomics left the public lands agencies lacking funds to clear them away.

Forestry experts said the villain was acid rain; it was literally decimating the forests under their care.  Drawing on a 1960s paper by a University of Wisconsin graduate student, federal lawmakers came up with a plan to curb the SO2 emissions that were killing the trees and wrote it into Title  IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act.  By 2007 acid rain levels had dropped nearly 70% and the forests were healthier.

The allowance market method that won this critical environmental battle came to be called "cap and trade."

Today, thanks to the Republicans' mastery of the art of obfuspeak, cap and trade has been transmogrified into something nasty, like "liberal" and "welfare."  In the op-ed columns of the Wall Street Urinal and most of the right-wing corporate media outlets that pose as "mainstream," the term has mobilized wild-eyed opposition to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2007.

Ignoring the two-thirds of the proposed legislation that would create jobs by promoting renewable sources of energy and create  more efficient  energy across all sectors of the economy, the obfuspeakers have made "cap and trade" a bogey man symbol for the entire bill. 

Title III of the bill addresses global warming and proposes an allowance market system for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  Most proponents of government action to curb global warming favor a straight-out "carbon tax" on bad emissions. But in yet another of the concessions to bipartisanship that have come to exemplify the Dr. Kidglove approach to everything, the bill's authors accepted the recommendations of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of electric utilities, oil companies, chemical companies, automobile manufacturers and other foxes who like to "guard" our henhouses.  These concessions to Republican big business interests are the Title III "cap and trade" provisions that Republicans now revile.

Go figure.

Even Thomas Crocker, the graduate student whose paper gave us the allowance market method, has been widely quoted as saying that cap-and-trade is not the best way to cope with today's global warming emissions.

Cap and trade, he said, is better suited to dealing with discrete, regional problems like acid rain. "It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally," Mr. Crocker, now 73, said recently. "There are no institutions right now that have that power."  He favors persuading nations to impose straight-out  taxes on their own carbon polluting industries.

If Republicans really cared about solutions, rather than obstructionism, they would join a bipartisan effort to replace Title III of the new Clean Energy Act with a carefully crafted carbon tax provision. 

But they don't really want that, nor do their big buck campaign contributors in the energy and extraction industries.

They'd rather continue their witless sloganeering against the bogeyman of cap and trade.

FOOTNOTE


"Obfuspeak" is a neologism manufactured from "obfuscate" and "speak" to denote the manner in which Republicans have changed the meanings of words to dominate the vocabulary of political debate in the United States.

It's Broke; Fix It

The two-party system simply does not work any more.

A far, far right-wing tweeter on Twitter texted, during Obama's war speech, "This could just as well be Bush speaking. . . ."

Democrats were complicit in all the terrible policies of the Bush administration.   There is in fact very little difference between the two major parties and the people they elect to office. 

It is time for truly progressive Americans, regardless of their voter registration affiliation, to lead a movement toward a multi-party democracy by forming a new party for those of us who believe:

Peace is better  than war.  For years, a bill sponsored by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D. -OH) to establish a cabinet Department of Peace has languished somewhere in the vast bowels of congressional inaction.  Kucinich should be  among the leaders of the new party, whose platform would incliude a pledge to reverse the United States policy of waging endless war.

Americans -- all of them -- are entitled to affordable health care.  The despicable farce that was represented as debate over "reforming" our health care system achieved nothing other than to expose the shameless hypocrisy of our national leadership and our congress.  The new party would promise a single-payer, government-managed system that would provide, in effect, Medicare for everyone.

Massive reforms are essential in how we elect public officials.  We need public funding of campaigns. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, special interests contributed more than $470 million to presidential and congressional candidates last election.  Tax 'em 70% of that for a public campaign fund and they'd save money.  You'd have $330 million in the campaign fund pool.  Put a $3 voter participation surcharge on every individual tax return and you'd have another $300 million.   Divvy the $630 million among all the candidates for congressional seats and the presidency and that's it.  Big Oil couldn't buy candidates; nor could Big Banking, Big Defense Manufacturing, Big Anything.

The two worst laws enacted in half a century must be rescinded.  The War Powers Act of 1973, in which Congress gave away its Constitutional war-making powers to the chief executive, particularly in Sections 4 (b), 4 (c) and 5 (b), gave us Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan.  It must be repealed.  The so-called USA Patriot Act -- rushed through a brain-numbed Congress, most of whom hadn't even read it -- was the first and foremost of Bush-era actions to deprive U.S. citizens of the protection of the Bill of Rights.  These rights must be restored by repealing the act and replacing it with legislation that at once protects  our national security and our individual liberties.

Separation of Church and State. We are not a "Christian nation."  Nor are we a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation or an atheist nation.  We are a free people with freedom of and from religion. It is imperative that our national leaders recognize and respect this condition, which the founding fathers gave us after intense thought, debate and with prophetic foresight.

Government regulation of business is mandatory.  Not just  because  25 years of deregulation have left  the economy in  a mess, but also because the Constitution mandates it (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).

Government has a social obligation, a mandated role in our lives.  It's right there in the very preamble of the Constitution: "promote the general welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty."  The new progressive party must give us candidates who can outshout and outthink the fools who shout "Socialism" every time government proposes to right social wrongs, improve our system of justice for all and help the downtrodden among us to lead better lives.

Absolute Equality for Women.  This includes their absolute right to make their own private reproductive health decisions. 

There's more, but these beliefs are the framework for a new, viable and vital force in American politics.  We need to form a new party around them because the existing parties have long since abandoned them. There is a perfectly good, perfectly respectable, perfectly honorable term for such an ethic.  It is "liberal."

We must retake that honorable word and restore its original meaning, even as we lead the way to restore the original meanings of the  founding fathers.

At this stage of our national existence, the alternative -- a continuing rightward slide into a domestic police state and a world policy of perpetual war against . . . .something -- is unthinkable.

Follow Up

Today's news about Max Baucus's bedroom gymnastics and their connection to his Senatorial duties regarding U.S. Attorney nominations reaffirms the bipartisanship of the corruption ethic in today's Washington.

Baucus, Israeli Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson of Nebraska -- two Democrats and a former Democrat turned Independent -- are important obstructions to passage of the sad carcass of  health care reform being debated in the Senate.

Each of them has received well over $500,000 in campaign contributions between 2005 and 2009 from the health insurance, health care and pharmaceutical industries.

What "days are over?"

Something is rotten in a statement by President Obama in his war speech at West Point.

"In the past," he said, "we too often defined our relationship with Pakistan narrowly. Those days are over.  Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust. We will strengthen Pakistan’s capacity to target those groups that threaten our countries, and have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear."

Uh-oh!

None of the 30,000 new troops he has committed to the war in Afghanistan can legally be deployed to Pakistan.  U.S. operations there are strictly CIA.

The same CIA that was in charge of our operations in Vietnam before we decided to start sending "military advisers" there.  The same CIA that in February of 1963 told President Kennedy: 

We believe that Communist progress has been blunted and that the situation is improving. . . . Improvements which have occurred during the past year now indicate that the Viet Cong can be contained militarily and that further progress can be made in expanding the area of government control and in creating greater security in the countryside.

More than 58,000 combat deaths later, we finally pulled out of Vietnam.

Afghanistan is not Vietnam, Mr. Obama told us, asserting that we have a coalition of allies supporting the Afghanistan effort whereas we acted unilaterally in Vietnam. In support of Mr. Obama's surge, NATO nations have offered 5,000 more troops, mainly in small increments from small nations like Albania.  OK, that's multilateral in the strictest sense of the word, but not  exactly a ringing endorsement of the "new" strategy, which sounds a lot like the old one. Neither France nor Germany, for example, promised any fresh troops.

What's new in Obama's strategy is the ominous little paragraph about Pakistan.

How, pray, shall we build this "partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust?"

By expanding the CIA's secret program of attack drones raining terror on Pakistani civilians? Our government proclaims that these robot attacks have killed nine of the top 20 al Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan.  It does not tell us that in the same time, 687 Pakistani civilians have been killed by the drones, a roughly 50-to-1 ratio of innocents killed to bad guys killed.  One suspects that this sort of thing fosters neither mutual interests, mutual respect nor mutual trust.

The hard fact is that Pakistan does not trust the United States and nothing in the new Afghan policies seems designed to change that fact.

Exactly what "days are over" then?

"We cannot tolerate  a safe-haven for terrorists whose location is known, and whose intentions are clear."  Is that a thinly-veiled threat to a nuclear-armed nation whose people are already suspicious of anything American?

"Further progress can be made in expanding the area of government control and in creating greater security in the countryside," the CIA said 46 years ago about Vietnam.

"America is providing substantial resources to support Pakistan’s democracy and development," President Obama said Tuesday.

"Invest in companies that make prosthetics," a friend advised me after listening to Mr. Obama's war speech.  "Our military will be needing a lot of them."

Shall I invest in casket-makers, as well? 

Something is rotten.

President Irrelevant

"Expect it pains you," a dear friend wrote after President Obama's war speech at West Point.  She sent me a charming little dog story -- knowing these always warm my crotchety old heart -- to salve my pain.

Another longtime friend posted: "As a one-time Obama supporter, it has been difficult not to notice that we, virtually all us old Obama supporters, have been rooked, or not to notice how consistently and persistently we have been rooked. No more love in exchange for getting rooked, Mr. Obama. No deal. For the first and only time, I watched about half of your campaign's life story replayed on HBO's documentary last night. And as I watched, I kept wondering what you were thinking while you fooled us over and over again. Never again, sir. Never again."

We knew it was coming (see my earlier post on Obama's Sinai).  But seeing the scalpel coming doesn't ease the pain of an unanesthetized incision.

Lies, deceit, flippant disregard for basic human decency -- we expected these from his predecessor, an empty-headed buffoon whose only qualification for any office was a rich and well-connected family.

But this man was intelligent, articulate, seeming to ooze human compassion from every pore.  Yet as we watched his actions, even in the honeymoon interim between election triumph and the harsh realities of the Oval Office, we quickly realized that the new President was not the person we thought we were voting for.

Well, some tell us now, you simply deceived yourselves. You invented a Knight in Shining armor, named him Sir Barack, and voted for him.  Quite a bit of truth to this,  Mea culpa.

Well, some tell us, it's simply brilliant strategy.  He will compromise with the opposition on everything and when the resulting policies clearly fail, Shazam!, Dr. Kidglove will become Captain Marvelous and fix everything. Now that's self-delusion!

In fact, Mr. Obama is what he is: a gifted orator, mundane politician and largely powerless chief executive.

Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, writes:

"In less than one year, President Obama has betrayed all of his supporters and broken all of his promises. He is the total captive of the oligarchy of the ruling interest groups. Unless he is saved by an orchestrated 9/11-type event, Obama is a one-term president. Indeed, the collapsing economy will doom him regardless of a 'terrorist event.'

"Essentially, Obama is irrelevant."

How sad.  A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Ethics and a Hawk

Our annual ethical dilemma has begun.  The Cooper's hawk is back.

He has emigrated from his home in mountain forests somewhere north of us to hunt prey in our warmer clime.  He especially likes to hunt from a perch on our back gate, for our premises attract other birds the year round.  We ply them with fruit, bread crumbs and seeds and nectar feeders for the hummingbirds. They nest  on our roof and in niches and corners of our house.  They hatch their young, feed them, teach them to fly.

They are beautiful and welcome guests.  But they are also prey for the Cooper's hawk. He is a princely bird, noble in features and stature.  One of the smaller accipiters,  he is a swift flier who can dart through trees in pursuit of smaller birds. His speed in flight, his aerial agility are forms of beauty, too.

He visits us every winter precisely because our feeders attract other birds.  Are we thus complicit in the murder of the birds he kills for food?   Last year I watched a harsh episode of nature next to the little pond beside the desert willow tree: a white winged dove -- probably accustomed to easy meals from the nearby feeder -- fell prey to the hawk and provided it with two days worth of nourishment.

That was an exception.  We seldom find evidence of his bird-kills.  I tell myself that he feeds far more often on rodents and other small mammals on the desert floor around us. In this part of the country, certain rodents can transmit a terrible, fatal disease to humans.  Since the hawk helps control the rodent population, he is, in a sense, like the rattlesnake, a friend of man.

My wife Lois frets over the hawk's annual threat to the birds she so fondly feeds.  But we need not feel guilty, say I; we are not abettors in murder.  The hawk does what it must, and has a place in the natural order of things.  We should be acting badly if we interfered in that order. Let hawks be hawks, sparrows be sparrows, wolves be wolves and fawns be fawns and may all, as species, survive.

I say that's just being pro-life.

Come Back, Col. Horton

Someone said of Burke Horton that if you asked him the time of day, he'd tell you how to make a watch.

He was an engineer and inventor.  He was also a musician, tennis player and coach, hockey player and coach, retired military officer and an expert on small-force counter-insurgency tactics.

As an Air Force colonel working in military intelligence, he often gave President Eisenhower's daily intelligence briefing in the west wing of the White House. 

I've got to assume that in the enormous labyrinth of the world's largest armed force, there were a number of counterparts of Col. Burke Horton on Sept. 11, 2001.  I wonder if they were even consulted after the terrorist attacks that day.

I doubt it because our response was all wrong. Massive military force is useless against stateless terrorism, as Burke Horton knew full well. But the civilian leaders of our military, from George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld down through the ranks, were obsessed with Saddam Hussein and Iraq even as they ordered a token military effort to capture the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, somewhere in Afghanistan.

Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority issued a report this week saying what we all knew, that bin Laden was vulnerable in December of 2001 in the Tora Bora area near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.  Gearing up to attack Iraq, Rumsfeld pursued the fleeing terrorist leader with a force of a mere 100 troops through the rugged mountain terrain.  Of course he got away.

But the pertinent point in the report was buried: appropriate military power, "from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," it said.

The point is important because it hints at what would have been a far more effective response to 9/11 than the purely military and essentially unilateral effort that we mounted.  Burke Horton would have designed something very different.

First, he would have assembled far more reliable intelligence.  The entire world was sympathetic to American sensibilities in the aftermath of the attacks.  Horton would have moved swiftly to use that empathy: he'd have tapped every national intelligence service to pool information about bin Laden and his whereabouts and his associates and his vulnerability.

Then he would have mounted a clandestine police action, employing elite military and intelligence units from around the world, supplemented by the very sniper teams and ultra mobile Marine divisions mentioned in the Senate report, especially including Arab-speaking experts in high-mountain maneuvering, to run down bin Laden and his band and bring them to justice.

The Bushhawks' obsession with Hussein and Iraq's enormous oil reserves blinded them to that option, if anyone even presented it to them. 

What Dr. Kidglove needs in his faltering administration is another Burke Horton.  When Burke was the tennis pro for my group of early bird tennis players at an indoor racquet club, not even a blizzard could keep him from unlocking the door to the club at precisely 5:30 a.m. every day.  "How the heck did you get here?" I asked during a record blizzard one February day.  He nodded to the corner of the office toward a pair of cross country skis.  "A successful operation requires two things," he said. "Provision for every exigency, and a strong will." Burke was 77 when he skied the six hilly miles to open the tennis club door.

Would that someone as steel-willed had this president's ear.

FOLLOW-UP

Michael Graham, a former Air Force counterintelligence officer, writes:

I knew a lot of guys like Col Horton, honorable old soldiers who just wouldn't tolerate the BS the Pentagon is slinging today.

Over the weekend, I read the entire Senate report on Tora Bora.  A friend of mine was there at the time and confirms that we could have had bin Laden.

But here's the problem:  If we had caught him, it would have destroyed the plan to pin 9-11 on Saddam, thus destroying the "reason" to invade Iraq.  Look how much money was made in that little adventure. 

His Military Masters

The utter intimidation of Dr. Kidglove by the military he ostensibly commands could not be made more clear than by the story in this morning's New York Times.

Alissa J. Rubin reports from Kabul: " An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates for sometimes weeks at a time and without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base."

Kidglove campaigned on the theme of change, promising to reverse the shameful Bush policies of torture, illegal imprisonment, Geneva Convention violations and lies.

His promises have turned into lies to equal those those Bush told, with the possible exception of the fairy tale WMDs in Iraq that have wasted the lives of thousands of United States military personnel.

The Bagram jail, Rubin writes, "consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each lighted by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day, where detainees said that their only contact with another human being was at twice-daily interrogation sessions."

Kidglove signed an order last January to eliminate the so-called "black sites" run by the CIA, but -- oops! -- it didn't apply to this particular torture chamber because it's run by the military Special Operations forces.

Ah, but last August, our kindly torquemadas revised Pentagon policy so that detainees in these black sites could be held there no more than two weeks.

Rubin writes:

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who was detained there and who, like some Afghans, doesn’t use a last name. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

Mr. Hamidullah was released in October, after five and half months in detention, five to six weeks of it in the black jail, he said.

Two weeks, schmoo weeks, he's only a raghead, right?

Rubin's article refers to "tension" between Kidglove and his military commanders, to whom the President wants to give "leeway to operate."

Operate? What's that mean, "operate?"

“They beat up  people in the black jail,” Hamidullah said. “They didn’t let me sleep. There was shouting noise so you couldn’t sleep."  Two Afghan teen-agers held in Bagram jail for more than ten months told a reporter they had been subjected to beatings and "humiliation" by their captors.

They were detained because they were suspected of being Taliban terrorists.  They weren't.  They were just people.  When their captors finally learned the truth, the detainees were released.

One of the freed prisoners said he was told, "'Please accept our apology, and we are sorry that we kept you here for this time.’ And that was it. They kept me for more than 10 months and gave me nothing back.”

By that time his family had spent two years' income in a futile effort to learn if he was alive or dead.

A Thanksgiving Day

   It was Thanksgiving Day of 1943 -- the only one from my childhood that I can truthfully say I remember.

   The Herbert Avenue gang was in the Hembergers' spacious yard, tossing a football around, and swapping tales of  downing enormous quantities of turkey and trimmings and pie -- especially pie.

   Many of us had big brothers fighting in the Great War, kids who had signed up the moment they turned 18, without waiting for a draft notice. One of the big brothers was "Bud" Dougherty.  He had been serving aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet when it went down in 1942 in the Battle of Santa Cruz.  He hadn't been heard from since and was presumed killed in action.

   Bud and the Hembergers' big brother, "Speed," had been stars on an American Legion Junior baseball team that went to the national finals in Pennsylvania in 1940.  They were neighborhood heroes even before they went off to war.  Now they were gods.

   We didn't talk much about Bud when his little brother was around.  He was a sensitive boy, the youngest of the Herbert Avenue gang, and the hurt in his heart was too enormous to violate.

   We talked football -- Ohio State, mostly, and the Western Hills high school team we all aspired to play for one day .

   Whence cometh a wailing and shouting from up the hill, toward the street car stop.

   At first it was incomprehensible but as it came closer we could make out: "He's alive!  Bud's alive."

   It was Bud Daugherty's sister, racing down the Herbert Avenue hill, blubbering and bellowing, "Bud's alive!"

  The residents of Herbert Avenue poured into the street.  They surrounded Rose Daugherty and hugged her until she caught her breath.  She was heading home from work on the Westwood Avenue street car when a sailor with lots of battle ribbons took the seat beside her.  "Do you know where Herbert Avenue is?" he asked.  "I live there," she said.  "Get off when I do."

  "I've got to see a shipmate's family on Herbert Avenue," he said.  "Tell them their son is OK.  He was in a coma for months after his ship went down.  When he came out of it,  I was in the bed next to him.  'Tell my family I'm OK,' he said, when he found out I was going home."

  "What was his ship?" Rose asked.

   "The Hornet," the sailor said.

   Through tears of disbelief she gasped,  "And the sailor's name?"

   "Daugherty," the young man said.  "Bud Daugherty."

   At that moment the streetcar came to a halt at the Herbert Avenue safety island.

    Rose began her sprint down  the street, shouting out the good news.

   She didn't even get the sailor's name.

10 Million Child-Killers

  Don't you just love our government's propensity for euphemism?

  We're not a perpetual war machine; we're "a global provider of security."

  The phrase was repeatedly invoked this week to defend the U.S. government's decision, announced Tuesday by the State Department, not to join a global treaty banning landmines.

  The treaty prohibits the use, stockpiling, production or transfer of landmines. It has been endorsed by 156 countries, but the United States, Russia, China and India have not adopted it.

   The signatories to the treaty will convene this weekend in Colombia to review its terms and compliance records.  The United States will send "observers" to the conference, a State Department spokesman said, because "as a global provider of security, we have an interest in the discussions there."

   That "interest" is a U.S. stockpile of 10 million such weapons and a grim determination to retain its option to use them as it pleases.  "We determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we signed this convention," the spokesman said.

   Just who the hell are these "friends and allies," I wonder?  All but one NATO nation, and most of our other allies, are parties to the treaty.  If most of our allies are pledged not to use the damned things, why are we hoarding 10 million of them?

   These antipersonnel devices (another government euphemism) are in fact child-killers.  Once planted, the lethal gizmos stay in place long after the conflict that impelled their use has ended -- whereupon civilians step on them and get fragged. Landmines are known to have caused 5,197 casualties last year, a third of them children, according to the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which links some 1,000 activist groups.

  Our eloquent President speaks grandiosely about leading the way to a world without nuclear weapons -- a worthy, but impractical, dream at this time.  But the many small, practical steps toward a more peaceful world, the things he could do right now with the stroke of a pen, go undone.

   Things like signing the landmine treaty. 

   U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, a leading advocate for the treaty, called the decision "a default of U.S. leadership."

   You can't hide that behind a euphemism.

  

  

Obama's Sinai

   As I contemplate, and dread, the likely announcement within days that President Obama will send another 32,000 U.S. troops into Afghanistan, an improbable memory popped into my head.  It was one of the great newswpaper ledes I have ever read, published in the New York Times when Albert Einstein returned to Princeton from a long sabbatical to think about the Holy Grail of his late career, a unified field theory.

   "Albert Einstein," the Times said, "returned today from his scientific Sinai with a new set of laws for the cosmos."

   Obama has been atop his own Sinai lately, perhaps suffering a sort of Gethsemane as well, thinking about the thorniest of his inherited problems, the Middle East wars.  One hopes against hope that when he returns, his tablet will contain a single law: Thou shalt not kill.

   He should announce that he is directing his generals to draw up a plan for  withdrawal  "with deliberate speed" from Afghanistan and Iraq, and he should dismiss Stanley McChrystal from the group of generals ordered to do so.

   Americans are well aware of the arguments for ending our involvements there.

   A former tennis partner wrote to me recently:  "A million dollars per troop per year!  Two-thirds of Afghans illiterate! And we're going to build a nation in 10 years? Give me a break!  I read an article a few months ago  discussing how we could get some of the Muslim nations to take up the fight there. Not being infidels they are not resented and could do a better job."

   That's a plan, negotiated through the United Nations, that I have advocated, too, but as far as I can tell, the notion doesn't exist in the high command that advises the President.

   I have come to believe that two forces in the United States have become so powerful that not even a President, not even a very popular President, which Obama once was, can resist them.

   One is the oligarchy of finance, a cartel of Wall Street bankers and super-rich mega- corporations whose wealth is based in oil or defense or both.

  The other is the military establishment, the Pentagon generals and the civilian hawks from the defense industries.

   Ray McGovern, whom I consider the most authoritative voice now writing about politico-military affairs and national security, reminds us, however, that there has been, in recent history, one President who stood up to them: John F. Kennedy. 

   A month before his assassination, according to McGovern,"during his last visit to Hyannis Port, Kennedy told his next-door neighbor Larry Newman, 'I'm going to get those guys out [of Vietnam] because we're not going to find ourselves in a war it's impossible to win.'

   A majority of his own National Security Council was opposed to withdrawal. McGovern recalls that Kennedy sent  Marine Commandant  Gen. David M. Shoup, “to look over the ground in Southeast Asia and counsel him.” Shoup told the President:

   “Unless we are prepared to use a million men in a major drive, we should pull out before the war expands beyond control.”

   McGovern writes that, "Kennedy concluded  there was no responsible course other than to press ahead for a phased withdrawal regardless of the opposition from his senior national security advisers. He decided to pull 1,000 troops out of Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the rest by 1965.

   "Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff told James Douglass, author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, that Kennedy's mind was fixed on Vietnam the day before he was slain. Instead of rehearsing for a press conference that day, Kennedy told Kilduff:

   "'I've just been given a list of the most recent casualties in Vietnam. We're losing too damned many people over there. It's time for us to get out. The Vietnamese are not fighting for themselves. We're the ones who are doing the fighting.

   ""There is no reason for us to lose another man over there. Vietnam is not worth another American life.'"

  Nor is Iraq.  Nor is Afghanistan.

It's Only Money

China -- actually a single Chinese very high roller -- has bought the Hummer SUV brand for a paltry $150 million.

I'd say "Good riddance" except for the fact that the buyer says he will introduce a new model -- the H4 -- that will get 25 or more miles per gallon of gasoline.  Why couldn't GM have done that?

Don't ask.

Hummer's new owner is Suolang Duoji, a private entrepreneur who will personally hold 20 percent of the company.  The other 80 per cent will belong to Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery, which is owned by Sichuan Huatong Investment Holding Co, Ltd, which is owned by Sualong Duoji.

This sort of thing smacks of one of our superbanks, the too big to fail outfits that we bailed out so they could continue to run the country by pulling the strings on Tim Geithner and Barack Obama.

And sure enough, Morgan Stanley is a financial adviser to GM during its restructuring. Morgan Stanley acknowledges receiving $10 billion in the first go-around of TARP (i.e., bailout) funds.

Morgan Stanley's  "advice" to GM seems to have been, "Give away the store."

We gave 'em $10 billion for this? 

Dr. Kidglove and the General

Ray McGovern, the former high-ranking U.S. intelligence officer who has been exposing the flaws of our foreign policy for many years now, has called for President Obama to fire Gen. Stanley McChrystal for insubordination. He's the NATo commander in Afghanistan who publicly insulted Vice President Biden and defied President Obama's policy initiatives in a speech in London.

McGovern is absolutely right.

McGovern recalled Harry Truman's firing of a far more experienced, far more respected and far more arrogant general -- Douglas MacArthur -- during the Korean war.  Good precedent.

I'd like to see it happen again because (1) McChrystal should be fired and (2) it would be wonderful comic relief to see the Far Right go berserk.

In the Truman-MacArthur clash, Col. Robert Rutherford (Bertie) McCormick, owner and publisher of the right-wing Chicago Tribune, personally wrote a Page One editorial entitled, "Impeach Truman."  The publisher called the President "addle-pated."

Harsh talk at the time, but tame compared to what would happen at, say, Fox Faux News or the editorial page offices of the Wall Street Urinal if Obama emulated Truman and did the right thing.

Unfortunately, it's a comedy we won't get to watch.  Dr. Kidglove will give the general at least some of the troops he wants and we'll remain mired in another costly war we can't win.

McChrystal  said the policy Biden was advocating for Afghanistan would lead to "Chaos-istan." He went on to say: "Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support." That kind of talk is a NonoStan.

Here's Ray McGovern:

"No more slaps on the wrist for Gen. Stanley McChrystal. In the Truman-McArthur showdown nearly six decades ago, MacArthur had been playing a back-channel game to win the support of . . . Republican congressmen to widen the Korean war.

"Today, Gen. McChrystal is conducting a subtler but equally insubordinate campaign for wider war in Afghanistan, with the backing of CENTCOM commander David Petraeus. It is now even clearer in retrospect that the President should not have appointed McChrystal in the first place, given what was already known of his role in covering up the killing of football star Pat Tillman and condoning the torture practices by troops under McChrystal's earlier command in Iraq.

(In the London speech) "he was clearly out of line in going public at so sensitive a time.  Senior generals know better than to do that; there is little doubt his outspokenness was deliberate. McChrystal should meet the same fate as McArthur, and “silently steal away.” Obama should have taken the telegenic general to the woodshed instead of inviting him to confer quietly on Air Force One.

"McChrystal's continuing defiance shines through in the gratuitous remarks by NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen at a NATO meeting on Nov. 17 in Edinburgh. Siding clearly with McChrystal, Petraeus, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen in the intense debate over sending more forces to Afghanistan, Rasmussen blithely announced that NATO countries will soon order “substantially more forces” there.

"As Denmark's Prime Minister (2001-2009), Anders Fogh Rasmussen was one of George W. Bush's most sycophantic supporters—particularly when it came to the war on Iraq. Although amply warned by Danish intelligence officers of the deceptive nature of the U.S. case for war, he shunned them and outdid himself cheerleading for war. He told the Danish Parliament:

'Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. This is not something we just believe. We know.'

"As NATO Secretary General, Rasmussen told CBS News, 'I think that Gen. McChrystal shares the same goal I do.'"

McGovern reports that Obama had been warned about Rasmussen even before he moved into the Oval office. Once again he reacted as Dr. Kidglove— "a highly educated, well-spoken wuss on many key issues," as McGovern put it. Obama "did not lift a finger to prevent Rasmussen from becoming NATO Secretary General."

The President has to live with the Rasmussen mistake.  But he need not live with the insubordinate Gen. McChrystal.

He should can the man, if only to trigger a re-issue of Gene Autry's recording of "Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away."

Rubber Stamping

Back in the day when city rooms had butts on the floor, even the women reporters cussed like drill sergeants, and you could believe a great deal of what you read in almost any newspaper, public relations people thought it would enhance the chance of getting their press releases published if they delivered them in person.

If a flack came in with a handout when my friend Tom Houston was running the Detroit Free Press city desk, Tom would accept the manuscript, ceremoniously open a desk drawer, take out a rubber stamp, press it on an ink pad and stamp the paper "WGAS."

He'd nod to the flack and say, "Take care of it right away."

Never mind that the initials meant "Who gives a shit?"

Can we please put WGAS stamps on:

Anything more about Sarah Palin, her stupid book, her idiotically named kids or her cockeyed views?

Jock talkers' views on Bill Belicheck's decision to go for it on fourth and two?

Any celebrity's latest diet?

Why Lou Dobbs left whatever worthless network he left, where he's going (if anywhere) and his political ambitions (if any)?

What Joe Lieberman says -- about anything?

Sports writing that calls rebounds "boards," asserts that a team "looks to" a particular outcome or refers to "student athletes" without quotation marks?

Any so-called news story that containes the phrase "moderate Democrat" and the names Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana or Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas?  They're as moderate as cottonmouths in a swimmin' hole.

Any quotation of the mouthings of Mitch McConnell?  Who writes this guy's lies for him?  Who taught him to deliver them with a straight face? 

The punditry of Charles Krauthammer?

Tax Political Religionists

It is high time to rescind federal tax exemptions for the Roman Catholic church and other religious groups that scorn the constitutionally ordained separation of church and state.

The Roman church's high-handed interference in secular affairs is unrelenting and unlawful.  Consider the recent revelation that the top bishop in Rhode Island has instructed his priests not to give communion to Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) because he supports keeping government out of the private realm wherein women make decisions about their reproductive health. Kennedy said the bishop told him "that I am not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that I've taken as a public official," particularly on abortion.

During the 2008 presidential election, voters in heavily Catholic southern New Mexico were bombarded with robo-calls from "Bishop Ramirez"  telling them that Catholics in good conscience could not vote for any candidate (read Obama) who supported a woman's right to choose.

The anti-woman Stupak amendment to the health care bill in the house -- which prohibits health insurance payments for abortion -- was inserted at the insistence of the powerful Roman Catholic bishops' national organization, in alliance with other powerful fundamentalist religion groups.

These blatant intrusions into secular affairs must be punished under the law.  The Roman church and its fundamentalist allies, as they persist in violating the law that gives them exemptions from taxation, must be made  to pay the appropriate penalty: loss of those exemptions.

The religious lobby has become too powerful in our political system and must be curbed, along with the military-industrial lobby, the gun lobby and all the other lobbies that send overpaid sleazes in designer suits into every legislative office in Washington with bags of money and veiled threats. 

The founding fathers intended ours to be a secular government representing "we the people."  Let's begin to restore that ideal.

A Contrarian Victory

Ron Paul, the nominally Republican congressman from Texas, is sui generis in American politics.

After nine years during which bipartisanship utterly disappeared from our government, Rep. Paul revived it yesterday in stunning fashion.

Paul, who is more libertarian than Republican, teamed with a Democrat, Alan Grayson of Florida, to sponsor an amendment to the sweeping financial overhaul legislation that aims to regulate the industry for systemic risks.  It subjects  the Federal Reserve to greatly intensified audits and oversight. The amendment advanced on a 43-26 vote of the House Financial Services Committee with both Democratic and Republican support. The vote reflected the widespread and bipartisan populist anger at the central bank's policy decisions and secretive methods of operation.

It was also a sharp rebuke of the Obama administation's economic policies and especially of its top two financial regulators, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and National Economic Council director Larry Summers.

Summers and Geithner were among President Obama's very first appointments, and among his very worst.  The debate in the financial services committee gave Republicans an opening to go after Geithner's hide with particular fervor, even demanding that he be fired from the treasury post.

It stung. Geithner snapped back at them that the country's financial mess was "inherited."  What hypocrisy! Sure it was "inherited" -- from a gang of Wall Street thugs including then president of the New York Federal Reserve Timothy Geithner.

At the New York Fed he operated in the very atmosphere of clubby secrecy that the Paul-Grayson amendment will terminate.  It would allow Congress to order audits of all the Fed's lending programs as well as of its basic decisions to set monetary policy by raising or lowering interest rates.

I hope the Paul-Grayson Odd Couple keep the pressure on this administration for all of its economic policy follies.  The worst of them is what former New York Gov. Elliott Spitzer called "continuity."  He elaborated:

"They have embraced the Bush Administration view that if you solve the problem of big banks everything else flows from that. They are wrong. Too big to fail is too big. They don't get it. The only two people I know who don't appreciate that are Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, Henry Kaufman, Mervyn King -- every major academic has said, we must get rid of too big to fail." 

Public exposure of which financial institutions get big bucks from the Fed  will put a significant dart  in Too Big to Fail.

Perhaps the Odd Couple have a few more darts in their quiver. I hope so.

What's Our Line?

America's business was business when Calvin Coolidge first uttered his famous phrase.  Now, however, America's business is war.

Although Barack Obama campaigned on a theme of change, he has done nothing to change that fundamental fact about the United States.

Why, in a nation that can work itself into a frenzy over a celebrity's breast popping out of her costume at halftime of a football game, is there not a tsunami of anger at this fundamental fact? 

Why can a blathering ignoramus on a TV show rally thousands to protest -- protest! -- our government providing health care to its citizens, whereas few voices are raised in alarm, let alone anger, at the squandering of our human and monetary resources on preemptive wars we cannot win?

Born in the violence of armed revolution, ours is a national history steeped in violence. We love it. We love our guns. We love our gory movies and the tough guys  portrayed in them.  We love our war slogans and our flag-waving notions of patriotism.  We love the idea that we are the best, bravest, most powerful nation on the face of the earth -- and if you don't believe that we mean well, we'll drop a few bombs on you and force peace down your throats.

Chris Hedges put it well in a piece entitled, "Quit Begging Obama to Be Obama and Get Mad."

"Violence," he wrote, "is spreading outward from the killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan to slowly tear apart individuals, families and communities. There is no immunity. The longer the wars continue, the longer the members of our working class are transformed by corporate overlords into serfs, the more violence will dominate the landscape. The slide into chaos and a police state will become inevitable.

"The soldiers and Marines who return from Iraq and Afghanistan are often traumatized and then shipped back a few months later to be traumatized again. This was less frequent in Vietnam. Veterans, when they get out, search for the usual escape routes of alienation, addictions and medication. But there is also the escape route of violence. We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.

"The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society. According to a joint Veterans Affairs Department-University of San Francisco study published in July, 418,000 of the roughly 1.9 million service members who have fought in or supported the wars suffer from PTSD. As of August 2008, the latest data available, about a quarter-million military veterans were imprisoned on any given day-about 9.4 percent of the total daily imprisoned population. . .There are 223,000 veterans in jail or prison cells on an average day, and an unknown number among the 4 million Americans on probation. They don't have much to look forward to upon release. And if any of these incarcerated vets do not have PTSD when they are arrested, our corrections system will probably rectify the deficiency. Throw in the cocktail of unemployment, powerlessness, depression, alienation, anger, alcohol and drugs and you create thousands, if not tens of thousands, who will seek out violence the way an addict seeks out a bag of heroin."

As a people, we choose to ignore such grim truths.  Too many of us live in communities where the local economy is dependent upon the nearby military base or DoD installation.  Too many of our colleges and universities have become part of the Military Industrial Complex, dependent upon government defense contracts for too much of their budgets.  Too many of us believe that the wars we wage -- whether openly in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Kuwait or Afghaqnistan -- or clandestinely, virtually all around the world, somehow are necessary to preserve our freedoms.  Yet we willingly forfeit our most basic freedoms in the oxymoronic belief that doing so makes us safer. The president who campaigned for change has done nothing to restore those freedoms, either; has, in fact, fought to continue the very policies of his predecessor that took them away from us.

Hedges again:

"There is a yawning indifference at home about what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hollow language of heroism and glory, used by the war makers and often aped by those in the media, allows the nation to feel good about war, about 'service.' But it is also a way of muzzling the voices that attempt to tell us the truth about war. And when these men and women do find the moral courage to speak, they often find that many fellow Americans turn away in disgust or attack them for shattering the myth. The myth of war is too enjoyable, and too profitable, to be punctured by reality."

It is profitbale only for those who are in the business of war, and whose wealth is so powerful that even those in the highest offices of the land do their bidding.  Never mind that we have exported most of our manufacturing jobs to other countries where workers are paid less; we dare not dismantle our enormous war machine because we'd lose too many jobs. We ignore the studies that demonstrate that a billion dollars invested in health, mass transit, home construction, education or tax cuts for personal consumption produce up to two and one-third times the number of jobs as the same billion spent on defense.

We justify unjustifiable wars by asserting that they will end our dependence on foreign oil, even as our military exponentially increases the petroleum consumption that already is greater than the consumption of the entire Chinese nation.

None of this makes us mad. After all, war is just business as usual.

Like It is, As It Were

When did it become de rigueur to apologize for saying, "I told you so" -- if, in fact, one did tell you so?  My parents said it to me often and they never apologized, always nursing the usually futile hope that one fine day I would wake up and heed their warnings about wrong and ill-advised ventures.

The time has come for many of us -- pre-eminently Dennis J. Kucinich, the most qualified person never to be seriously considered for the Presidency -- to say, unapologetically, "I told you so."

It was the oil, stupid.  Yes, Mr. and Mrs. America, your sons and daughters bled and died in Iraq for oil.

Every week, when we gathered for Peace and marched silently around the federal building, one or more someones in the group carried a sign saying, "No war for oil."  You spat on us, mooned us and flashed middle fingers at us.  When the war for oil actually began you pasted little flags and "Support Our Troops" ribbons on your SUVs and called us traitors.

You had to believe that your sons and daughters were being sent abroad to  protect us from terrorists, to bring democracy to the poor, stupid people of the Middle East, where Saddam Hussein had a great store of WMDs ready to rain upon us.  "If we don't fight 'em there," you told us, "we'll have to fight 'em here."  You would not, could not, believe that your kids were fighting and dying over there so that a handful of Americans stakeholders in megacorporations could become filthy rich on Iraqi oil.

Now the truth is seeping out.

Peter W. Galbraith, a former American ambassador and son of the respected economist John Kenneth Galbraith, brought his clout and his membership in the Democratic party to an alliance with the Bush administration hawks to promote the war with Iraq. "It is time to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power," he prattled in the influential op-ed opages of the New York Times. "Regime change is not an end in itself but a means to an end."

When we had occupied the country, fetched Hussein from his hole in the ground and Mr. Bush had declared fatuously, "Mission Accomplished," Mr. Galbraith became a key member of the commission that crafted our puppet government in Iraq and drafted its constitution.  He took good care of the Kurds, with whom he had a long history of profitable relationships.

Now the Times tells us, in another of its sorry sequence of "oopses"  about its own sorry role in promoting this sorriest of American war initiatives, Mr. Galbraith did all these things while quietly building a major stake in a Norwegian oil company whose Kurdish oil rights will net Mr. Galbraith a profit of more than 100 million dollars.

But that's peanuts in the Iraq oil takeover game.

Remember the "leadership" of British Prime Minister Tony Blair in forming the "coalition of the willing" to invade Iraq?  His own intelligence people warned him that U.S. intelligence was being "cooked to fit the policy"  of going to war under whatever justification could be made to fly.  But Blair risked scathing rebuke in Commons to take Britain into that war.   Blair is now a fat cat in the Carlyle Group, the shadowy super-investment cartel with staggering oil interests all over the globe.  British Petroleum, which owned him as PM, won the first of the enormous contracts to exploit Iraqi oil that are being awarded by our puppet government there.

Then there's our own Exxon-Mobil, whose  profits during the economic meltdown that sent millions of Americans into poverty and homelessness were greater than any ever made by a United States corporation.  Exxon  and Royal Dutch Shell recently won the right to develop one of Iraq's most prized oil fields, the West Qurna Stage 1 field.  How many Americans died to liberate that piece of the Middle East?

There are many more lucrative oil contracts to be awarded in Iraq.  Virtually every key member of the two Bush Administrations has large personal holdings in Carlyle, Haliburton, big oil companies or their major suppliers.

Timmy  Russert, who played the role of "journalist" on a TV entertainment called "Meet the Press," was a favorite in the Bush White House.  Whenever the administration wanted to plant a particularly smelly piece of bullshit, a toady would call Timmy Titmouse and arrange for someone in the administration to appear on "Meet the Press" to answer planted softball questions.

As evidence of his good conscience, Timmy occasionally brought a Democrat onto his TV show.  He invited Kucinich in February of 2003.

Quoting from the transcript of that show:

MR. RUSSERT: Congressman, you made a very strong charge against the administration and let me show you what you said on January 19. "Why is the Administration targeting Iraq? Oil." What do you base that on?


REP. KUCINICH: I base that on the fact that there is $5 trillion worth of oil above and in the ground in Iraq, that individuals involved in the administration have been involved in the oil industry, that the oil industry certainly would benefit from having the administration control Iraq, and that the fact is that, since no other case has been made to go to war against Iraq, for this nation to go to war against Iraq, oil represents the strongest incentive."

He told you so.

Back to Reality

   I returned from a recent trip to a few favorite places feeling a slight sense of optimism about the state of the nation.  I considered taking two aspirins and going to bed, but chose instead a better antidote: I read the letters to the editor and op-ed pieces in the local paper.

  There is no better place to gain appreciation of the appalling collective ignorance of Americans.   Here you find, repeated as Holy Writ, the craziest of the utterings of the familiar right-wing loonies -- people who still believe there are WMDs in Iraq (they're just very well hidden), Democrats in Washington mean to create death panels to kill grandma, and legislation to clean up our air and water is just a thinly-disguised plot to raise our taxes and use the money to provide abortions for wanton harlots who are in the country illegally.

   Our congressman, a nominal Democrat who campaigned as a champion of health care for all and women's right to make their own decisions about reproductive health, won high praise from many letter-writers for  voting for the anti-abortion amendment to the House health care bill, then voting against the bill itself.  "I was voting for what my constituents wanted," he explained.

    Translation:  All the screaming about death panels, socialized medicine, exorbitant taxes and denial of choice -- lies, every one  -- worked. 

    Blatant lies and distortions succeed as a political tactic only when the audience to whom they are directed is stupid enough to accept them on face value.

   Thus do the carefully contrived "talking points" of the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, and the Center for the Study of Popular Culture -- right wing-funded propaganda institutes all -- turn up as Vox Populi in the pages of our local rag.

To quote Lewis Lapham:

"The quickening construction of Santa's workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs and background briefings intended to bring about the ruin of the liberal idea in all its institutionalized forms - the demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the destruction of liberal education - and by the time Ronald Reagan arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines were operating at full capacity."

Or Gore Vidal:

 "Does anyone care what Americans think? They're the worst-educated people in the First World. They don't have any thoughts, they have emotional responses, which good advertisers know how to provoke."

And the fools don't even realize they're being used.

The Missing Link

The late David Rosenbaum of the New York Times, one of the longest-serving true journalists  in the nation's capital, was a master at reading, digesting and analyzing the important legislation in Congress. 

Oh, how we need him today!

The House of Representatives has passed a massive (nearly 2,000 pages) bill designed to provide health insurance for Americans regardless of their ability to pay, and prohibit some of the worst practices of the private health insurance industry such as denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or family health history.

I wonder if any single legislator who voted late Saturday night for or against the bill had read and understood it the way David understood the legislation he wrote about so clearly and lucidly.  I doubt it.

The media accounts don't really tell us much, either, and what they do say is suspect given today's media reliance on spin, sound bites, handouts and propaganda. So it's hard to work up much jubilation because our elected representatitives -- at last! -- at last! -- seem to have taken a meaningful step toward giving our citizens the kind of health care that citizens of most other civilized democracies have long taken for granted.

I share the feelings of my friend and sometime contributor, Mort Persky: "Lord, I hope it's a good bill that leads to an even better bill, but gotta be highly skeptical."

Until we can flyspeck the thing, neither he nor I will know if it's a "good bill," nor will our fellow citizens.  The mindless lemmings of the right will parrot Limbaugh and Beck and Boehner and other Republican meatheads, prattling about "government takeover" and what-all, as if they actually knew something about the bill.  But their vacuous barnyard leavings don't matter.

What matters is whether some of our elected representatives actually read every line of the legislation, and its Senate counterpart when that emerges, with as much thought, care and objectivity as David Rosenbaum once did.  If that were to happen, perhaps another Republican mind or two would see what Rep. Joseph Cao, a first-term Republican from New Orleans, saw: that the importance of health care transcends party politics.  He voted "yes" last night. Thirty-nine Democrats, including one who represents my district, voted against health care for all. There are like-minded Democrats in the Senate.

Will any of them see the light of reason?  Most of them won't even bother to read and analyze what they're ranting against.

Would that David were still around to tell them.

Forest Evashevski, Football Coach

Forest Evashevski came to Iowa in the 1950s with a Michigan background and the Delaware winged-T offense.

He took over a downtrodden program whose last great memory was the 1939 season when Nile Kinnick was an all-American.

Michigan State, Ohio State and Michigan, in one order or another, were the top dogs in the Big Ten back then. Evy beat all three of them in his first two seasons as head coach of the Hawkeyes.

Woody Hayes, the Ohio State coach, should have known what was coming when Evy snatched three of the best Ohio high school stars, including an end named Jim Gibbons, in his very first season of recruiting. Gibbons caught the game-winning touchdown pass in Iowa's upset victory over an OSU team that had national championship aspirations.

Two years later two of Iowa's most promising recruits were suspended after two young women who were not students filed sexual assault charges against them. Ultimnately the charges were dismissed when defense lawyers produced records of previous convictions of the complainants on prostitution charges -- in Columbus, OH.

I was a young sportswriter when Evashevski, the newly-hired Hawkeye coach, made his first speaking visit to eastern Iowa. Thinking to be helpful, I told him about a high school freshman the local folk thought would blossom into a very special player. "I've been in touch with Kenny's Dad," Evy replied. "I think he'll play at Iowa some day."

Play indeed. Kenneth Allen Ploen led Iowa to the Rose Bowl, where he was the most valuable player in a one-sided victory over Oregon State.

Evashevski seemed to be a step ahead of everybody -- including the fiery-tempered Hayes. Twice Evy outfoxed Hayes by installing entirely new offensive and defensive schemes just for the Ohio State game.

I learned of Forest Evashevski's death, at age 91, on the same day that I watched an Iowa football team remain undefeated through nine games by making an improbable comeback to beat Indiana 42-24.

Kirk Ferentz, who coaches the Hawkeyes these days, attributed his team's success to its "mental toughness."

Surely Evy was smiling in his new grave.

Two Updates

Update No. 1

The United States of Goldman Sachs has shifted one of its oligarchs from a high position in the businesses it controls to a high position for regulating businesses in the government it controls.

Adam Storch, vice president in Goldman Sachs' Business Intelligence Group, is assuming the new position of managing executive of the Security and Exchange Commission's enforcement division.

The Pianist has begun an autdit to determine of there are now more foxes guardinmg henhouses than there are hens in the henhouses.

A report will be published when the audit is finished.

Update No. 2

There are independent courts of great integrity in at least one western democracy: the United Kingdom.

After long months of a function called due process, which once existed also in the late United States of America, the highest court in the U.K. has reversed itself on making public information in a torture case that has aroused international indignation.

Binyam Mohamed, a British citizen, alleges in a suit against the United States and in statements by his lawyers on his behalf, that he was tortured at the hands of the CIA while in custody in Pakistan and in other countries to which he was "rendered" by the Bushies, a practice the Obamaniacs continue to defend.

Because the CIA told British intelligence agents exactly what was done to Mohamed while he was in custody, he asked the British courts to release those documents to him to prove that anything he told the CIA was coerced.

The High Court's original ruling in Mohamed's favor contained seven paragraphs which described the torture to which Mohamed was subjected. In its original decision in favor of Mohamed, the High Court redacted those seven paragraphs at the request of the British government, because the Bushies threatened -- the court's verb -- to cut off intelligence flow to Britain that was deemed essential to the national security of the U.K .

The Obamaniacs stood behind the Bush threats, but in a new decision, the British High Court ruled that it considered the threats to be mainly blue smoke, and in any event, the U.K. public interest in the seven paragraphs overrules any national security questions.

In short: Truth trumps government bullshit.

There's one more appeal to be heard before the stuff hits the fan.  (Hint:  Reports in England, where many reporters still practice journalism, indicate that the most lenient of what was done to the prisoner was waterboarding.)

Panic's first cousin

  Today's Wall Street Journal tells me that the Tea Party gang -- they don't mention "birthers," Palinites, Limbaugh lovers or Fox "News" faithful --  are creating problems for the Republican Party in its efforts to rehabilitate itself and retake Congress in 2010.

  I don't believe a word of it.

  The Republican base IS the Tea Party Gang -- and the birthers, Christicans, Foxies and their ilk.  Among the assets they bring to their party, besides a zealot's passion and a lemming's mob mentality, is an uncanny ability to use the internet to turn blatant lies into widely accepted "truth."

   Breathes there a soul who did not receive the e-mail about how Ollie North, testifying in the Iran-Contra hearings, warned the country about Osama bin Laden and put a Senate questioner, John Kerry, in his place while doing so?  There were two little flaws in this: North, long enshrined in the litany of right-wing saints, never said any such thing; and Kerry was not a member of the Senate committee that questioned St. Ollie.

   What's now going around is an e-mail purported to have been written by David Kaiser, a reputable historian and member of the faculty of the Naval War College.

   It's a screed, pure and simple, sounding very much like a list of talking points from Limbaugh and Michael Steele.  The friend who forwarded it to me asked, "What if he's right?"

  "He" is not right and "he" is not David E. Kaiser, who posted the following on his website, "History Unfolding:"

"People are still arriving here because they have received an email attributed to myself comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler. They are also still calling my home, contacting the public affairs office of the Naval War College, and deluging another David Kaiser with emails. I did not write, and do not agree with, that fraudulent email."

   There was the Jane Fonda lie intended to add heroic dimension to John McCain's stoicism as a Prisoner of War.  The fellow POW to whom it was attributed denied having written it.

   The birth certificate lie got its first legs through internet forwarding of messages often attributed to reputable sources who had to issue denials.

   I can't count the number of internet forwards -- not all of them political in nature -- that I've checked out and found to be fraudulent.  Most of the political frauds come from the far right and they have been inordinately effective -- "death panels," forced enrollment in government-run health plans, Obama as socialist, Obama as Muslim, Obama  and the birth certificate.

   The Base disttributes these lies and The Base believes them.  A recent poll conducted in rural, fundamentalist Tennessee disclosed pluralities who believed the socialist, Muslim and birther lies.

   The First Amendment right to free speech must not be weakened, although, as the Supreme Court ruled in Schenk v. United States, it is not absolute.  In his majority ruling, Justice Oliver Wendell Homes, Jr., wrote:

   ". . .the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

   In my view, the right-wing internet liars are shouting fire in a very crowded public place.  Are they causing a panic?  They're sowing fear, which is panic's first cousin.
 

Toward Corporatocracy

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

–W.B Yeats

By Steve Klinger

   The summer was all about what happens when a country is run by a greed-driven oligarchy that is able to tap into populist fear, anger and racism to advance its agenda – and block reform. Although polls have shown up to 75 percent of Americans support universal health care, it’s the other 25 percent, largely funded by moneyed special interests, who grab all the headlines with their hysterical obstructionism and wild accusations.
   Instead of a discourse on corporate healthcare rationing and the impending bankruptcy of the middle class, teabaggers and rabble-rousers scream incendiary rhetoric: socialism, Hitler, Maobama. The debate is deflected from the merits of fixing our broken healthcare system to a vitriolic assault on all things Democrat that leaves progressives and moderates alike in helpless confusion at this unexpected lack of civility from the right. Gosh, could there be violence?
   Congress as usual is gridlocked, with all the power residing in the corporate puppetmasters who pull the strings backstage while Max Baucus does his little tapdance. The Democrats, having already compromised with themselves, are poignantly begging for one Republican vote to get the most diluted of bills moving in the Senate. Also stalled are meaningful climate-change and financial-industry reform. The economy may be inching out of recession, but home foreclosures and unemployment rage on. The ice shelf keeps crumbling into the sea. Everybody knows what the problems are, but no one can accomplish a solution.
   It’s a good thing Americans are optimistic people because things are about to get a whole lot worse. Our glaring socioeconomic inequities and ongoing national paralysis are perhaps a few months away from taking a mortal body blow from the third branch of government – the Supreme Court. While the mainstream media have frothed over healthcare legislation, a SCOTUS case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, was reheard by the Roberts court in September, and the smart money says the conservative majority will overturn more provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act, allowing special interests to pour money more freely into campaign advertising, just in time for the 2010 elections and the 2012 presidential campaign (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0909/26843.html).
   To put it succinctly, the Court is leaning heavily toward a ruling that puts the First Amendment protection of corporations on the same footing as that of individuals, rolling back some tight restraints on political spending by special interests. Instead of having to channel money through PACs to “soft-issue” advertising, corporations (and labor unions, among others) would be able to spend money on ads directly backing or opposing candidates. If the Court doesn’t just further loosen restraints but opens the floodgates, the millions now filtering into the healthcare debate from Big Pharma and Big Insurance would be a trickle compared to the frontal assault unleashed to help Republicans regain Congress and oust Obama.
   Forget public campaign financing, the sensible alternative practiced in most other advanced western nations, along with universal health care. (Do we see a pattern here?). Like single payer, that’s off the table in this country. Instead, we seem to be in a losing fight to hold onto what’s left of McCain-Feingold. If you think it’s frustrating right now that our leaders won’t do the people’s bidding on financial or healthcare reform, just wait and see what kind of “elected” government we have in a few years.
   Isn’t it ironic that so many humanoids who pass for citizens of American Dreamland are getting their panties in a knot calling Obama and the Democrats totalitarians? They will have a rude awakening when the fecal waste of their populist rhetoric hits the blades of the approaching corporate propeller.
   (Steve Klinger conducts and writes regularly on http://www.grass-roots-press.com/blog/ and is the founder of both the print and online versions of New Mexico's outstanding alternative information source, The Grassroots Press.