Beast of the Month - May 2008
Roger Clemens, Cooperstown Caliber Major League Pitcher
"I yam an anti-Christ... "
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"There is no joy in Mudville."
Ernest Lawrence Thayer, “Casey at the Bat”
Okay, fine, we get it. It's no longer just about unconvincing performances before Congress by Sammy or Mac, nor is it about Jason Giambi, Rafael Palmeiro or even Barry Bonds. Steroids is no longer the exception to the rule in baseball, it is the rule. And sorry Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.
That would be lesson after the release of the Mitchell Report, the investigative report commissioned by Major League Baseball that named at least some of the names of the steroid era, a list that still is likely the tip of the iceberg. Iceberg tip or not, the names of drug dopers could field a team of All-Stars that would hold their own against the '27 Yankees. Among the roster, besides Giambi and Bonds: 200-Game winner Kevin Brown, former Philadelphia Phillies hero Lenny Dykstra, 2003 NL Cy Young winner reliever Eric Gagne, 2002 World Series MVP Troy Glaus, two-time AL MVP Juan Gonzalez, one-time rookie sensation Wally Joyner, 1990 Rookie of the Year and postseason hero David Justice, 1987 Rookie of the Year and Gold Glove catcher Benito Santiago, 2002 AL MVP Miguel Tejada, 1995 AL MVP Mo Vaughn and 1994 home run champion Matt Williams. And though many of these revelations came with the predictable denials and no comments, the general impression is that despite it being a tad politically compromised (tellingly, the report only named players who roided up and not executives or league officials who had knowledge of the widespread abuse) Senator George Mitchell did a solid job in his investigation, and all claims could be backed up in court.
Winners in the latest juicer revelations are few and far between. One could be Mark McGwire, who, after a number of doping indictments all related to perjury, seems all the more wiser for his infamous 2005 Congressional clam-up. The other would be Barry Bonds, whose defenders can repeat their insistence he was hardly some lone wolf and that his prosecution appears to be a politically motivated vendetta. The biggest winner, however, would have to be Jose Canseco once again. Even more so than the Mitchell Report and Game of Shadows, it is Canseco who has written the definitive account of the steroid era in baseball. In 2005, when Juiced was released, he became widely reviled in the sports press as a liar and shameless opportunist for pointing the finger at other dopers and making stunning claims along the way. Three years later, nothing in his book has been disproved and much has been found to be shockingly accurate. Despite this proven track record of reporting history, the publication of his recent sequel (cleverly titled Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball) led to a repeat of attacks on Canseco's honesty and character.
Meanwhile, there is little question who is the biggest loser from the Mitchell Report. That would be Roger Clemens, The Konformist Beast of the Month, who has replaced Bonds as the poster boy for steroid cheaters.
Clemens, like Bonds was for batters, is no mere pitcher. With all due respect to Sandy Koufax, Tom Seaver and Steve Carlton (or even his current competitors Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez) The Rocket was named, in a 2006 ESPN poll of baseball experts, the greatest living pitcher by an overwhelming margin. He has won a record seven Cy Young Awards (two more than Randy Johnson, his closest competitor) and is the last starting pitcher to win an MVP trophy (after he went 24-4 for the Boston Red Sox in 1986.) His career record is 354-184 (nearly a 2 to 1 won-loss ratio) and is second only to Nolan Ryan in career strikeouts. He is also one of only three pitchers to strike out 20 batters in 9 innings (the others being Randy Johnson and Cubs one-time rookie flamethrower Kerry Wood) and he's done it twice.
(Granted, this has nothing to do with the rest of the article, but all these mentions of Randy Johnson bring up a good question: does a guy named Randy Johnson really need "The Big Unit" as a nickname?)
On a personal level, members of The Konformist staff have long admired Clemens for his tenacity, even if sometimes it has gone a tad psychotic. Of special infamy was his twin encounters with Mike Piazza of the New York Mets in 2000. After Piazza hit a grand slam off The Rocket a month earlier, Clemens beaned him on the hand and head with a single pitch during a July game. Then, in Game 2 of the World Series, Clemens threw a shard of Mikey's shattered bat at Piazza, leading to a bench-clearing on both sides. Even in this bizarre moment his greatness shines through: in that game he pitched a two-hitter with 9 strikeouts in eight innings of shutout ball, a performance that effectively silenced the Mets and led to Clemens' second World Series ring with the Yankees. This followed his one-hit shutout with 15 Ks in the ALCS, in the greatest postseason pitching performance besides Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series. Clearly, he was the true Yankee hero of their last World Championship.
And so it is this background that makes his inclusion on the Mitchell Report so tragic. What makes it even worse is his sad and sorry response. He could've owed up to his cheating (cheating that is apparent in evidence detailed below) in a tearful confession, a move that would've earned him long-term sympathy for honesty. Or he could've simply declared "no comment" and disappeared from public view for awhile. Instead, Clemens demanded a Congressional hearing to deny his usage of steroids. And, as Oscar Wilde would warn, when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
At first, it actually seemed like a good strategy: pit Roger Clemens word and character mano a mano against his former trainer, Brian McNamee. After all, if Canseco is, for all the accuracy of his books, a dubious character, he's got nothing on the shadiness of McNamee, a man who has since admitted lying even on the testimony that implicated Clemens. It seemed likely that, given the choice between believing McNamee against the word of Clemens, Clemens would win. He even tested this strategy somewhat successfully on 60 Minutes in an embarrassing suck-up fest "interview" by Mike Wallace.
The problem with this strategy, it turned out, is it wasn't just Clemens V. McNamee. It was Clemens V. McNamee, Andy Pettitte, and Chuck Knoblauch, two other players who McNamee outed as drug dopers. Both of them have since confirmed under oath what McNamee told Senator Mitchell. Pettitte added Clemens had admitted to him in 1999-2000 that he had received HGH injections. Clemens insists that Pettitte "misremembered" the quotes.
Not only was it Clemens V. McNamee, Pettitte and Knoblauch, it was literally Clemens V. Clemens. It was revealed by McNamee (in a rather sleazy moment) that he had injected Clemens wife Debbie with HGH for a Sports Illustrated pictorial, a claim she would later confirm. So according to Roger Clemens, Pettitte, Knoblauch and even his own wife were injected with performance enhancing drugs by his own trainer, but Clemens himself, despite his own deserved reputation for being ultra-competitive, wouldn't even dream of the doing the same.
Besides the testimony, there was physical evidence to back the charges against Clemens. McNamee may be a weasel, but he sure is a sharp weasel, saving vials, syringes and gauze pads involving his injections of Clemens, evidence McNamee handed over to prosecutors in February.
It is interesting to note how the actual Congressional hearings went. The Democrats on the committee, almost to a man and woman, pounced on Clemens' admittedly flimsy defense with glee. Perhaps it was because the case Clemens made was so beyond dubious. It certainly didn't hurt that, after Kobe, Bonds and Michael Vick, finally there was a sports scandal this decade where liberals could proclaim outrage without politically correct fears of being called a racist. But perhaps the biggest reason for the Democratic Party pounding of Clemens was due to him being a friend of the Bush family, most notably Bush Senior. As it turned out, GOP members at the hearing not-so-coincidentally seemed to go out of the way to defend Clemens and bash McNamee, making this into a partisan battle. Of course, this only inflated the circus-like nature of the hearings. In the end, neither party really won: the GOP looked like shameless defenders of outwardly deceitful testimony, while the Dems looked like a sniveling group of cowards who could only press a case in the most frivolous of causes. (Perhaps the hearings are a perfect metaphor for the last eight years on the Capitol.)
Frivolous or not, the Democrat's conclusions seem pretty solid: that Clemens did indeed take performance enhancing drugs and then perjured himself repeatedly on the issue. Despite this, it seems unlikely there will be any prosecution of Clemens over this, and even if there is, rumors are floating that Bush Jr. would pardon him at the request of his daddy. (Of course, this pardon would hardly match Scooter Libby's on the Outrage-o-meter.) In any case, it is telling to contrast the Clemens saga results with the vendetta against Bonds, and wonder, politically correct or not, if race is indeed a factor for the discrepancy.
Clemens may not face the long arm of the law, but in the court of public opinion, he has suffered the biggest loss of his career. He may be the greatest living pitcher, but five years from now (when the recently retired Clemens first becomes eligible for Cooperstown) he will likely be snubbed from Baseball's Hall of Fame over the scandal. That may the least of his worries: after filing a defamation lawsuit against McNamee, claiming his stellar reputation had been tarnished by his former trainer's allegations, reporters uncovered evidence of multiple adulterous affairs by the Rocket, including one with former country music star Mindy McCready. (When asked about the news allegation, McCready replied: "I cannot refute anything in the story.") Needless to say, besides putting obvious strain on his marriage, such revelations undercut his claim that his family man image has been unfairly tarnished by the steroid scandal.
It appears the fallout of the recent steroid revelations will soon go beyond Clemens, Bonds and others. Of special note: in Vindicated, Canseco outs current New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez as someone who asked for help in finding a trainer that would supply steroids. Rodriguez, a three-time AL MVP and a likely candidate to surpass Bonds in the career home run derby, has been hyped as a player who could supposedly restore the integrity of the game. While the charge has been hysterically denounced in the sports media in a repeat of the Juiced controversy, it is important to repeat that Canseco has a proven track record of telling the ugly truths that are eventually admitted as such.
But hopefully the steroid scandal will go beyond the current scapegoating of ballplayers. Of special note: in February, former relief ace (and infamous racist ranter) John Rocker claimed MLB commissioner Bud Selig knew he failed a drug test for steroids in 2000, and that doctors for both management and the players' association advised him and other Texas Rangers on how to effectively use steroids. (Among the other players were Rafael Palmeiro, Ivan Rodriguez and, of course, Alex Rodriguez.) But the real issue here isn't if A-Rod, Rocker and others were drug cheats: it's that it was known and sanctioned from the highest levels of the team, the players' union and even the league itself. This is the kind of scandalous conclusions that George Mitchell, for all his meticulous work, evaded in his report. Hopefully, this complicity in the doping scandal will soon no longer be ignored.
In any case, we salute Roger Clemens as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Roger!!!
Sources:
Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com, ESPN.com, MLB.com, SportingNews.com and SportsIllustrated.com for help on this article
Canseco, Jose. Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits & How Baseball Got Big. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.
Canseco, Jose. Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.
Fainaru-Wada, Mark and Williams, Lance. Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports. New York: Gotham Books, 2006.
Gammons, Peter. "Ample Living Proof of Clemens' Greatness." ESPN.com 1 May 2006 <http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=gammons_peter&id=2426053>.
Mitchell, George. Report to the Commissioner of Baseball of an Independent Investigation into the Illegal Use of Steroids and Other Performance Enhancing Substances by Players in Major League Baseball. 13 December 2007.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Saturday, August 30, 2008
If Obama Loses
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=749&Itemid=1
If Obama Loses
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
by Paul Street
The author, no fan of Barack Obama's "neoliberal centrist" ambitions, believes that "hubris and overreach" as well as race "could play a role in a hypothetical Obama defeat." Like other Democrats of his corporate bent, "Obama has done everything he can to reassure the nation's ruling bipartisan political class that he is fully on board with the American Empire Project." An Iraq and Afghanistan war funder, Obama "deserves to lose Iraq as an issue working in his favor." If he loses, "it will be important for progressively inclined citizens and activists to understand that it was corporate-imperial centrism, not the left and not the People, that got defeated."
If Obama Loses
by Paul Street
"Obama appears to be a natural and longtime neoliberal centrist."
"It Would Not Be Because of Race"
While seeking to distance himself from his former pastor Jeremiah Wright last spring, Barack Obama told reporters that if he lost in his quest for the presidency, "it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail"[1].
I have no idea what's going to happen in November. This presidential election is even more difficult to call than the last two, thanks in part to race.
Still, I can safely say that, like many of Obama's formulations, his comment was partly true and largely false. Racial bloc voting and the well-documented reluctance of many whites to vote for a black presidential candidate - widely evident during the Democratic primaries - are obviously going to be a relevant factor in the November elections [2]. If Obama loses to the reactionary war-mongering nut-job John McCain despite a political context that would normally strongly favor a Democrat this time around, the refusal of a significant number of white voters to support a black candidate will be a significant part of the explanation.
The Swift-(Wright-) Boating is Underway
"'Conservatives' continue to score points with the ‘patriotism' and military cards, absurdly tarring Obama as a ‘far left' opponent of American interests and security."
But other factors besides "race" (racism), Obama mistakes included, will contribute to an Obama defeat if he loses. The powerful Republican right-wing attack machine is already effectively "Swift-boating" him. The "war hero" (former bomber of Vietnamese civilians) and leading Iraq "war" (imperial invasion) enthusiast John McCain and the FOX News crowd are bludgeoning Obama with the charge of being "soft" (insufficiently militaristic and imperial) on Iraq and now on Russia. With dominant U.S. media consistently following the lead of the far right by framing electability around "toughness" when it comes to "national security," situations like the current conflict between Russia and Georgia work to leading Russia critic McCain's distinct advantage.
Obama has done everything he can to reassure the nation's ruling bipartisan political class that he is fully on board with the American Empire Project, but it doesn't matter: "conservatives" continue to score points with the "patriotism" and military cards, absurdly tarring him as a "far left" opponent of American interests and security. That preposterous allegation is the central theme in the far-right crackpot Jerome Corsi's current best-selling book The Obama Nation - a monument to neo-McCarthyist smear tactics in the post 9/11 era.
Corsi was the co-author of the ridiculous but important and widely read 2004 volume Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. His latest bestselling hatchet-job is loaded with lurid innuendos and guilt-by-association narratives claiming to link the deeply conservative Obama to African radicalism, "black rage," drugs, Reverend Wright (of course), the Communist Party, the Weathermen, Islamic "anti-Americanism" and the plot to open up Israel and the United States to nuclear attack.
"Any Democratic presidential candidate (no matter how centrist and compromising) is going to be subjected to relentless charges of ‘leftist' weakness and questionable ‘Americanism.'"
Race is a critical sub-text throughout the narrative of "Swift Boat 2.0," of course.
Corsi is making the dominant media rounds and is a featured guest on right wing talk radio around the country.
This is not really Obama's fault, of course. The Fatherland (FOX) "News" crowd would be doing the same thing in different ways if Hillary Clinton or John Edwards (who we now know would have been dead in the water thanks to his sordid dance with Rielle Hunter) had gotten the nomination. At this stage in the corporate-totalitarian and imperial degradation of U.S. political culture, any Democratic presidential candidate (no matter how centrist and compromising) is going to be subjected to relentless charges of "leftist" weakness and questionable "Americanism" - vicious accusations that will be dutifully bounced across the dominant media's echo-chambers and hall of mirrors.
Still, just as Edwards went into the primaries with the Rielle Hunter affair waiting to explode, Obama (no dummy) certainly made his bid with full knowledge that the "controversial" (sadly) Afro-Centric Reverend Wright (his pastor of 20-plus years) would likely emerge as a potent symbol for the Republicans' racist, right-wing noise machine.
Overreach and Fatigue
Hubris and overreach could play a role in a hypothetical Obama defeat, with voters getting turned off by the quasi-millennial aspects of the Obama ascendancy, replete with an oration before 200,000 Germans and an acceptance speech to be delivered to 70,000 chanting Democrats in a Denver football stadium that will have to do since Mount Sinai is unavailable. You don't have to be a Republican to think it's more than a little over the top.
Obama fatigue could factor into a possible Obama defeat as millions of Americans get tired of seeing Obama's face and hearing his measured baritone "eloquence" over and over and over again. We are now technically into the fifth year of the Obama phenomenon, launched during the Democratic National Convention in late July of 2004. Obama is over-exposed at this point, even as most Americans (including many of his supporters) know amazingly little about his actual public record and world view. A recent Pew poll finds that nearly half (48 percent) U.S. voters say that they "have been hearing too much about Obama lately." Just barely more than a quarter (26 percent) of Pew's respondents said they had heard too much about McCain.
Alienating Media
Team Obama has recently demonstrated some remarkably controlling and prickly behavior towards the press. This could be a big mistake. If it isn't more careful about ruffling dominant media egos, the Obama camp could do significant damage to the "Obama Love" proffered by a corporate media that retains a soft spot for the supposed "maverick" McCain. As Gabriel Sherman noted in The New Republic in late July, "Reporters are grumbling more and more that the campaign is acting like the Prom Queen. They gripe that it is ‘arrogant' and ‘control[ling],' and the campaign's own belief that Obama is poised to make history isn't endearing, either. The press certainly helped Obama get so far so fast; the question is, how far can he get if his campaign alienates them?" (G. Sherman, "End of the Affair: Barack Obama and the Press Break Up," TNR, July 24, 2008. read at www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6e9f4a42-9540-4d99-aba2-25adc276c25d)
Why Obama Deserves to Lose Iraq
"His plans for ‘withdrawal' have long been nauseatingly ambiguous and maddeningly deceptive."
The offensive notion that "the Surge" is "working" in Iraq has hurt Obama and helped McCain. But while it is true that "the Surge's" triumphs are grossly exaggerated and that claims of U.S. "success" in Iraq ignore the fact that the Iraq War should have (as Obama says) "never been launched in the first place," Obama deserves to lose Iraq as an issue working in his favor. He has repeatedly voted funds for the criminal occupation and distanced himself from antiwar activists and from more courageous politicians (e.g. Jack Murtha and Russ Feingold) on Iraq . He backed pro-war antiwar Democrats in the 2006 Congressional primaries. He has embraced the preposterous Orwellian claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq out of its excessive "good intentions" to export democracy. He has advanced the odious Orwellian notion that the U.S. is involved in a selfless effort to "put Iraq back together." Absurdly applauding America for its great "sacrifice" in the cause of "freedom" within and beyond Iraq and enthusiastically embracing George W. Bush's equally illegal invasion of Afghanistan, "antiwar" Obama has never come close to acknowledging the extent of the monumental damage the U.S. has done to Iraq (including more than a million Iraqi dead) during (and before) the occupation. His plans for "withdrawal" have long been nauseatingly ambiguous and maddeningly deceptive, hiding the strong likelihood that a President Obama would maintain the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period.
Obama has never exhibited the elementary courage or decency to oppose the occupation of Iraq on moral and legal grounds - as a monumental imperial crime. He has only opposed it as a "strategic blunder" and "mistake": as a "dumb war" that isn't "working." This has made him vulnerable to losing the Iraq War as an issue working on his behalf once the Bush administration and dominant U.S. war media succeeded in selling the notion that the criminal invasion was finally being properly executed - the vile idea that the unmentionably criminal invasion is "working."
Kicking Progressives in the Face
The ugly conceit with which Obama has been willing to risk alienating progressive, left-leaning voters could come back to haunt him in November. The militantly centrist corporate-sponsored Obama has irritated many of his leftmost supporters with the lurches he has made further to the right after securing the Democratic presidential nomination. Even I (a consistent left critic of Obama since his highly conservative 2004 Keynote Address) have been surprised at the speed and strength with which he has kicked his more progressive supporters in the face (and other bodily regions) by:
* embracing the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a Washington D.C ban on personal handguns and claimed that the Second Constitutional Amendment pertains to private citizens, not just organized state "militias."
* declaring his belief in the state's right to kill certain criminals, including child rapists.
* becoming the first major party presidential candidate to bypass the public presidential financing system and to reject accompanying spending limits (violating his earlier pledge to work through the public system and accept those limits).
* supporting a refurbished spy bill that grants retroactive immunity to telephone corporations who collaborated with the White House in electronic surveillance of American citizens (violating Obama's earlier pledge to filibuster any surveillance legislation containing such immunity).
* appointing the corporate-friendly Wal-Mart apologist and Hamilton Project [3] economist Jason Furman as his economic policy director - something that stood in curious relation to his criticism ("I won't shop there") of Wal-Mart's low-wage anti-union practices when speaking to labor audiences.
* increasing his declared support of "free trade," contradicting his campaign-trail criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
* "tweaking" his claim that he would meet with Iran 's president (he added new and more restrictive conditions).
* embracing (in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee - AIPAC) Bush-McCain rhetoric on the supposed Iranian nuclear threat and promising to do "anything" to protect the nuclear occupation and apartheid state of Israel from Iran (a nation previously attacked by Israel ).
* calling (in his AIPAC speech) for an "undivided" Israel-run Jerusalem despite the fact that no government on the planet (and not even the Bush administration) supports Israeli's right to annex that UN-designated international city.
* making bolder Iraq "withdrawal" statements indicating that an Obama administration would not leave Iraq.
* vocally supporting a major part of the Republican agenda: the granting of public money to private religious organizations to provide social services.
* endorsing the conservative white male Blue Dog Democratic Congressman John Barrow (D-GA) over the progressive black female challenger Regina Thomas in a July 15 primary [4].
* flip-flopping on energy policy by calling for increased domestic and offshore oil drilling after it became clear that McCain was getting traction with voters by calling for such environmentally insensitive drilling.
"Dropping the Class Language"
With a large part of the citizenry supporting serious progressive change in the wake of the hard-right Cheney-Bush nightmare, Obama's corporate-imperial centrism could end up costing him the White House. This is standard operating procedure for the Democrats, who have long been unable and/or unwilling to run in accord with the progressive and anti-imperial sentiments of the American majority [5].
Last time out, John "I am Not a Redistribution Democrat" Kerry made the usual surrender. Given the closeness of the 2004 race and the unpopularity of the arch-plutocratic George W. Bush, Kerry could have won if he'd run further to the populist left. With help from the "liberal" New York Times (which agreed not to publish its findings on the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping until well after the election), the super-opulent windsurfing aristocrat Kerry ran to the corporate center and thereby gave us four more years of the Worst President Ever.
This great failure followed in perfect accord with Thomas Frank's widely mentioned but commonly misunderstood book on why so many white working class Americans vote for regressive Republicans instead of following their supposed natural "pocketbook" interests by backing Democrats. Released just before Bush defeated Kerry with no small help from working class whites, Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: 2004) has generally been taken to have argued that the GOP distracts stupid "heartland" (white working-class) voters away from their real economic interests with diversionary issues like abortion, guns, and gay rights. Insofar as Democrats bear responsibility for the loss their former working class constituency, Frank is often said to have argued that this was due to their excessive liberalism on these and other "cultural issues."
"The corporate-sponsored, capitalism-praising Obama is repeating the same old classist Democratic mistake."
But Frank's argument was more complex or perhaps more simple. At the end of his book, in a passage that very few leading commentators seem to have read (a shining exception is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman), Frank clearly and (in my opinion) correctly blamed the long corporatist shift of the Democratic Party to the business-friendly right and away from honest discussion of - and opposition to - economic and class inequality for much of whatever success the GOP achieved in winning over working-class whites. As Frank noted in his final chapter:
"The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McCauliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far out-weighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and --- more important --- the money of these coveted constituencies, 'New Democrats' think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as 'class warfare' and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness with business. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the voice of poor people?"
"...The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talks constantly about class - in a coded way, to be sure - but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up" (Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?, pp. 242-245).
The corporate-sponsored, capitalism-praising Obama is repeating the same old classist Democratic mistake. For all Obama's talk about activating the popular base to bring about "change from the bottom up," Obama is making his own ironic contribution to the de-mobilization of the progressive electorate with a militantly centrist, neoliberal, and boring policy agenda that is noticeably bereft of populist inspiration. It's more Goldman Sachs and Hamilton Project than lunch pail and picket line, consistent with his (actually) elitist comments to an affluent gathering of fundraisers in San Francisco prior to the April 22nd Pennsylvania primary (won decisively by Hillary Clinton with large support from white working-class voters).
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania," Obama condescendingly said, "and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years and there's nothing's to replace them...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them." Later, in clarifying his comments, Obama said that poor white small town Americans simply "don't vote on economic issues," turning instead to things like guns, gay marriage, abortion and religion [6]. Sounding like he accepted the standard false version (the self-serving upper-middle-class adaptation) of "the Tom Frank Kansas thesis," he failed to note that working class whites actually vote more on the basis of economic concerns than do affluent whites [7] and that Democrats lose white proletarian voters by taking the workers' material concerns "off the table" and running (unlike John Edwards' ill-fated semi-progressive 2007-08 campaign) away from the populist language and commitments that once made the Democratic Party a relevant defender of working peoples' material interests. (He had nothing to say about the source of the "bitterness" that leads him to cling so strongly to the guns of American Empire and to his own self-serving notions of God.)
I recently sat through a tiresome Obama " Town Hall " on "Economic Security" before hundreds of relatively unenthused supporters in Cedar Rapids , Iowa . Beyond some brief chest-pounding about Exxon-Mobil's latest record profits and "big oil's" campaign contributions to McCain, the content and tone of Obama's policy presentation was positively Dukakisian. It was very University of Chicago , loaded with arcane neoliberal policy wonkery that may have countered McCain's picture of him as an empty-headed celebrity (ala Paris Hilton) but also left much of the audience cold. It seemed almost calculated not to mobilize people for an epic confrontation with the vicious arch-plutocratic and messianic-militarist bastards behind the McCain campaign. A former John Edwards staffer who cringed through the event with me asked "where's the red meat?" I imagined millions of formerly engaged Obama supporters forsaking politics altogether - their hopes for reform and "change" shattered and their desire to avoid politics reinstated - when and if Obama's tepid, business- and Empire-friendly campaign goes the way of Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry.
Snotty Know-it-All Middle-Class Obamaists Not Transcending Race
Which brings me to another factor that could help cost Obama the election - the elitism, ignorance, and occasional race-baiting of many of his ostensibly progressive white middle and upper-middle class supporters. So far this campaign season, I have been lectured by three white Iowa City liberal-"progressive" Obamaists on how Tom Frank's book shows the "idiocy" of the white lower and working classes - those misguided proletarian dunderheads who foolishly "vote against their own pocketbook interests" (against those supposedly wonderful and progressive Democrats) because of childish vulnerability to "cultural issues" like "guns, God, gays, and abortion."
"What's the matter with these clowns" one university-affiliated forty-something white male Obamaist asked me the other day, citing Frank's book. "Don't they get that the Democrats are the party of the workers and the poor?"
The Obama fan who asked me this insulting question became noticeably perturbed when I noted (A) the white working-class actually "votes its pocketbook" more than the white middle and upper class and (B) that Frank's book actually ends with the argument I quoted above, observing that the corporate-captive and excessively bourgeois Democratic Party opens the door for working class defection and apathy precisely by abandoning its commitment to working-class people's moral-economic issues and needs. The Democrats have long been the other business wing - the "inauthentic opposition" in - the corporate-managed American "one-and-a-half party system" (Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin's term) and Obama is not fundamentally challenging that terrible reality.
"'Race-neutral' Obama has exhibited a disturbing tendency to eagerly join the white post-Civil Rights majority in blaming blacks for their disproportionate presence at the bottom."
Affluent white Obamaist liberals display a related and disturbing tendency to argue that any criticism of their hero's aristocratic bearing and commitments actually betray the critic's underlying "racism."
"You know what people really mean when they say Obama is bourgeois and elitist, don't you?" a patronizing white male university-connected know-it-all Obamaist asked me a few weeks ago. Before I could say anything, he answered his own question: "they mean they think he's ‘an uppity nigger.'"
Oh, okay. I'm sure there are plenty of white folks, including a large number of Republicans, who are using the charge of elitism and "haughtiness" as cover for racism. But I (the author of two books and numerous project studies and hundreds of articles against white supremacy and institutional racism) am not one of those racists. When many whites and (by the way) blacks I know say that Obama is bourgeois and elitist, they simply mean that (whatever his skin color) he's, well, bourgeois and elitist, which (by the way) he is.
He's also very weak, from a progressive perspective, on race, interestingly enough, part of why he has long been viewed as elitist by a significant portion of the black community in Chicago and Illinois. Having run to the right of Kucinich and even Hillary and Edwards on racial justice issues, "race-neutral" Obama has exhibited a disturbing tendency (strongly approved by arch-conservative white Republican commentators like William Bennett, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will) to eagerly join the white post-Civil Rights majority in blaming blacks for their disproportionate presence at the bottom of American hierarchies.
It is interesting to hear university town white Obamaists claim that that their candidate "transcends race" while hurling reckless charges of racism at those who make the elementary observation that Obama is an elite, Harvard-educated, and Wall Street-sponsored (and excessively white-friendly) candidate running an openly (for those willing to do some elementary research) corporate-imperial campaign. As the black and Left political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. noted last April, the Obama campaign repeatedly contradicted its own claim to "transcend race" during the primary season. "Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at nearly any criticism of him," Reed observed, "in steadily more extravagant rhetoric." They claimed, for example, that Hillary Clinton was expressing racial bias when she dared to criticize Obama as "inexperienced." The attempt to portray one's opponent as short on experience is "standard fare in political campaigns" (Reed) and goes back to the beginning of electoral politics.
Along the way, the Obama campaign has called for voters to support its candidate because of the opportunity to "make history" simply by putting someone who happens to be half-black in the White House. That is hardly going "beyond race" [8].
Obama recently made the false charge that the McCain campaign has been telling voters to oppose the Democratic presidential candidate because he "doesn't look like those other presidents on the dollar bills." The McCain camp's opportunistic response was (naturally) over the top but, sadly, McCain was right to note that Obama had played the race card in an unfortunate way.
Obamaists should be careful with the racism charge if they want to avoid over-alienating potential supporters, who don't generally deserve to hear snotty know-it-all pseudo-progressives screeching "Your Whiteness is Showing" (the title of an ill-advised letter from the progressive anti-racist Obama supporter Tim Wise to certain already pissed-off white female Hillary Clinton fans last June) because they happen to find the openly imperialist capitalism and Afghan Invasion enthusiast and Israeli apartheid supporter Obama hard to swallow. The Obama campaign is making a mistake by not doing more to actively discourage some of its more irritating staff and supporters - an especially good example is current "Progressive for Obama" Web site chief Carl Davidson (who has absurdly leveled the accusation at me on at least two occasions) - from recklessly charging racism.
Maybe It Isn't About Running for President
"Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, the Clintons, and Gore did not need to be black in order to walk the same basic tiresome centrist line trod by ‘the new black Clinton.'"
Speaking of race, it is common to hear white middle-class Obama supporters excuse and explain their candidate's conservative centrism as a result of the fact that's he's black and therefore "has to be especially careful not to offend" white voters by seeming too strident or "angry." "John Edwards can get away with talking class struggle," one academic Obamaist told me last fall, "because he's white. Barack can't because he's black and that's scary enough in and of itself for white voters."
There's a kernel of truth in this argument. Toxic white racial fears and stereotypes of the "angry black man" (e.g. Jesse Jackson Sr. and big bad Reverend Wright) are alive and well in U.S. political culture. Sadly enough, white dread of (legitimate) black anger may well help make it especially hard for a black male politician to fight for the poor and working-class Many against the rich and powerful Few. I have long suspected that Obama has felt the need to go an extra mile or three to prove his fealty (in ways that are often quite unpleasant to behold) to dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines partly because he senses that his racial identity raises red flags for the nation's predominantly white political class and electoral gatekeepers and the white majority electorate.
Still, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, the Clintons, and Gore did not need to be black in order to walk the same basic tiresome centrist line trod by "the new black Clinton" (or perhaps "the new black Carter" - see below), Barack Obama. Obama appears to be a natural and longtime neoliberal centrist, consistent with his elite private prep school and Harvard background, his "deeply conservative" temperament, his well-known personal narcissism, and his impressive corporate sponsorship.
It should be understood that the main white folks who can't deal with "populist" rhetoric are the rich and powerful Few. Angry "class language" (Frank) works pretty well with much of the white working class majority - a main reason that any potentially viable candidate who speaks it to any significant degree (e.g. John Edwards in 2007) must be marginalized and discredited by corporate media.
"Re-establishing Confidence in the Legitimacy of the Current Political Order"
And insofar as it is true that Obama "can't be all that progressive because he's black" (something that may NOT be true) wouldn't that seem to indicate that it's, well... a mistake for progressives to advance a black candidate for president?
This might seem like a terrible thing to say (I can just see my nemesis Carl Davidson ready to pounce!), but there's a deeper point here. Maybe the struggle against racism and other political and societal evils isn't about running people (of any color) for the presidency - the top position in the executive committee of the American ruling class - or any other high elective office. Maybe it isn't about U.S. electoral politics.
"By the end of his life, King had concluded that only revolutionary change could save the U.S. from an ever-deepening descent into repressive authoritarianism."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned down efforts to get him to run for the White House and died for his determination to authentically resist American capitalist, racist, and imperial power structures - what he called "the triple evils that are interrelated." By the end of his life, King had concluded - correctly in my view - that only revolutionary change could save the U.S. from an ever-deepening descent into repressive authoritarianism. As King noted in the spring of 1967, liberals have for too long "labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there." What is really required, King knew, was "a reconstruction of the entire society...a radical redistribution of political and economic power."
That is exactly what Obama is NOT about. "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama," Ryan Lizza recently observed, "is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them." Later in the same essay Lizza notes that Obama is "an incrementalist."
As Greg Guma recently noted in a thoughtful reflection on Obama as "The New Jimmy Carter": "the truth is that, in Obama, a worried establishment has found the vessel through which they hope to restore international and domestic stability." As Guma darkly but rightly observes, "Obama, like Carter, can be useful [to the U.S. power elite] in calming things down and re-establishing confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order. In short, he can reinforce the argument that ‘the system' still works"[9].
Beyond Electoralism
Revolution (desperately required) aside, even the attainment of basic reforms is about building and expanding grassroots social movements beneath and beyond the false promises of political campaigns and mass media, who market domesticated corporate candidates like they sell cars and candy. It's about the real politics of popular organization and resistance beneath and beyond the quadrennial narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted candidate-centered election extravaganzas, whoever wins and whoever loses. As Dr. Reed noted last November, "Elected officials are only as good or as bad as the forces they feel they must respond to. It's a mistake to expect any more of them than to be vectors of the political pressures they feel working on them" [10].
Given the harsh realities that make even avowedly "progressive" politicians, policymakers, and candidates veer center and right, Reed argued, correctly in my estimation, progressives should focus less on election dramas and more on building movements for democratic change from the bottom up and across and between elections:
"We need to think about politics in a different way, one that doesn't assume that the task is to lobby the Democrats or give them good ideas, and correct their misconceptions."
"It's a mistake to focus so much on the election cycle; we didn't vote ourselves into this mess, and we're not going to vote ourselves out of it. Electoral politics is an arena for consolidating majorities that have been created on the plane of social movement organizing. It's not an alternative or a shortcut to building those movements, and building them takes time and concerted effort. Not only can that process not be compressed to fit the election cycle; it also doesn't happen through mass actions. It happens through cultivating one-on-one relationships with people who have standing and influence in their neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, families, and organizations. It happens through struggling with people over time for things they're concerned about and linking those concerns to a broader political vision and program. This is how the populist movement grew in the late nineteenth century, the CIO in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement after World War II. It is how we've won all our victories. And it is also how the right came to power" [11].
"We didn't vote ourselves into this mess, and we're not going to vote ourselves out of it."
Reed's point on the need to concentrate first and foremost on the building of movement capacities - NOT corporate-crafted elections that answer mainly to elite interests - is echoed in Noam Chomsky's instructive reflections on the 2004 presidential contest. By Chomsky's analysis on the eve of the last election:
"The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point of hysteria, hardly represents healthy democratic impulses."
"Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is yet another method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That's politics.' But it isn't. It's only a small part of politics."
"The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction - often in close conformity to majority opinion - is to grow and become strong enough so that that they can't be ignored by centers of power. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women's movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, everyday, not just once every four years..."
"So in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome" [12].
How individual progressives define their version of the "sensible choice" is of little interest to me at this point. People write me to ask "should I vote for McKinney ?" "What about Nader?" "Should I vote tactically for Obama to block Mad Bomber McCain since I live in a contested state?" "I think I'm just going to sit the election out - what do you think?"
I don't know what people should do on Election Day. I'm not sure I care (it changes from day to day, to be honest). What I'd really like to know is when true progressive folks are interested in "struggling with people over time for things they're concerned about and linking those concerns to a broader political vision and program."
And I am frankly haunted by the likelihood that Greg Guma is right: while McCain is obviously terrible and dangerous, Obama is attractive to a large section of the U.S. power elite because he promises to "calm things down and re-establish confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order" by "reinforce[ing] the argument that ‘the system' still works." Wouldn't that seem to suggest that the loathsome and dangerous McCain is the lesser evil in the long run?
Our current corporate-totalitarian system and political culture doesn't work. It is a grave threat to human survival and peace and justice at home and abroad. Dr. King was right forty years ago about the pressing need for "radical reconstruction" and the "radical distribution of political and economic power." The path of that reconstruction is long and leads well past my own time on this planet, but it is at least clear to me that millions of people in the world's most powerful nation are being dangerously hypnotized and repressively de-sublimated yet again by the false hopes and colored lights of the narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted election extravaganza.
If Obama loses, and he may, it will be important for progressively inclined citizens and activists to understand that it was corporate-imperial centrism, not the left and not the People, that got defeated. If he wins, those citizens and activists need to understand the severe limits of what triumphed and be prepared to fight and organize on a daily basis beneath and beyond presidential elections.
Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a veteran radical historian and independent author, activist, researcher, and journalist in Iowa City , IA. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm 2005); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge 2005): and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman&Littlefied 2007). Street's new book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics can be ordered at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
NOTES
My annotation for this piece could easily run to 100 notes - something that would be impractical for reader and writer alike. Readers who want sources for assertions without notes can feel free to write me at paulstreet99@yahoo.com.
1. Obama is quoted in Glen Ford's brilliant article, "Obama Stumbles on His Own Contradictions," CounterPunch (April 30, 3008), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/ford04302008.html
2. Among many possible sources, see especially John Judis, "The Big Race," The New Republic (May 28, 2008).
3. The Hamilton Group is a leading "conservative" (business-friendly) economic think tank. Furman, 37, is linked closely to Robert Rubin, the top Wall Street financial mogul and former Clinton economics advisor and Treasury secretary. Rubin's regressive views on behalf of "free trade" (including the North American Free Trade Agreement, investor's rights, wages, welfare and "deficit reduction" gave the Clinton administration "credibility" in the halls of corporate and financial power.
4. See Leutisha Stills, "Obama Charges Rightward," Black Agenda Report (June 25, 2008), read at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=674&Itemid=1
5. For an (I hope) useful summary of that progressive majority opinion and some key sources, see Paul Street , "Americans' Progressive Opinion vs. ‘the Shadow Cast on Society by Business," ZNet Sustainer Commentary (May 15, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3491
6. Paul Krugman, "Clinging to a Stereotype," New York Times, 18 April, 2008, p. A23.
7. See Larry Bartels, "Inequalities," New York Times Magazine (April 27, 2008), p. 22. As Bartels points out, Frank exaggerated white working-class voters' susceptibility to cultural diversion: "In recent presidential elections," he notes, "affluent voters, who tend to be liberal on cultural matters, are about twice as likely as middle-class and poor voters to make their decisions on the basis of their cultural concerns." In other words, working class white voters don't especially privilege "cultural issues" (God, guns, gays, gender, and abortion) over pocketbook concerns and actually do that less than wealthier voters.
8. Adolph Reed Jr., "Obama No," The Progressive (May 2008). For what its worth, I am told by a reliable source that Michelle Obama dismissed concerns with experience as racism during a coffee with female Democratic voters in eastern Iowa last fall.
9. Ryan Lizza, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama," The New Yorker, (July 21, 2008); Greg Guma, "Barack Obama: The New Jimmy Carter," ZNet (July 28, 2008), read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18288 See also Larrisa MacFarquhar's useful reflctions on Obama's "deeply conservative" world view and commitments: see Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?," The New Yorker (May 7, 2007). Near the end of his article, Lizza proclaims that "He [Obama] is ideologically a man of the left" - a ridiculous indication of how shockingly narrow the political and ideological spectrum is in the U.S. today.
10. Adolph J. Reed Jr., "Sitting This One Out," The Progressive (November 2007)
11. Reed, "Sitting This One Out."
12. Noam Chomsky, "The Disconnect in American Democracy" (October 27, 2004) in Chomsky, Interventions ( San Francisco : City Lights, 2007) pp. 99-100. See also Howard Zinn's excellent reflections in "Election Madness," The Progressive (March 2008).
If Obama Loses
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
by Paul Street
The author, no fan of Barack Obama's "neoliberal centrist" ambitions, believes that "hubris and overreach" as well as race "could play a role in a hypothetical Obama defeat." Like other Democrats of his corporate bent, "Obama has done everything he can to reassure the nation's ruling bipartisan political class that he is fully on board with the American Empire Project." An Iraq and Afghanistan war funder, Obama "deserves to lose Iraq as an issue working in his favor." If he loses, "it will be important for progressively inclined citizens and activists to understand that it was corporate-imperial centrism, not the left and not the People, that got defeated."
If Obama Loses
by Paul Street
"Obama appears to be a natural and longtime neoliberal centrist."
"It Would Not Be Because of Race"
While seeking to distance himself from his former pastor Jeremiah Wright last spring, Barack Obama told reporters that if he lost in his quest for the presidency, "it would not be because of race. It would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail"[1].
I have no idea what's going to happen in November. This presidential election is even more difficult to call than the last two, thanks in part to race.
Still, I can safely say that, like many of Obama's formulations, his comment was partly true and largely false. Racial bloc voting and the well-documented reluctance of many whites to vote for a black presidential candidate - widely evident during the Democratic primaries - are obviously going to be a relevant factor in the November elections [2]. If Obama loses to the reactionary war-mongering nut-job John McCain despite a political context that would normally strongly favor a Democrat this time around, the refusal of a significant number of white voters to support a black candidate will be a significant part of the explanation.
The Swift-(Wright-) Boating is Underway
"'Conservatives' continue to score points with the ‘patriotism' and military cards, absurdly tarring Obama as a ‘far left' opponent of American interests and security."
But other factors besides "race" (racism), Obama mistakes included, will contribute to an Obama defeat if he loses. The powerful Republican right-wing attack machine is already effectively "Swift-boating" him. The "war hero" (former bomber of Vietnamese civilians) and leading Iraq "war" (imperial invasion) enthusiast John McCain and the FOX News crowd are bludgeoning Obama with the charge of being "soft" (insufficiently militaristic and imperial) on Iraq and now on Russia. With dominant U.S. media consistently following the lead of the far right by framing electability around "toughness" when it comes to "national security," situations like the current conflict between Russia and Georgia work to leading Russia critic McCain's distinct advantage.
Obama has done everything he can to reassure the nation's ruling bipartisan political class that he is fully on board with the American Empire Project, but it doesn't matter: "conservatives" continue to score points with the "patriotism" and military cards, absurdly tarring him as a "far left" opponent of American interests and security. That preposterous allegation is the central theme in the far-right crackpot Jerome Corsi's current best-selling book The Obama Nation - a monument to neo-McCarthyist smear tactics in the post 9/11 era.
Corsi was the co-author of the ridiculous but important and widely read 2004 volume Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. His latest bestselling hatchet-job is loaded with lurid innuendos and guilt-by-association narratives claiming to link the deeply conservative Obama to African radicalism, "black rage," drugs, Reverend Wright (of course), the Communist Party, the Weathermen, Islamic "anti-Americanism" and the plot to open up Israel and the United States to nuclear attack.
"Any Democratic presidential candidate (no matter how centrist and compromising) is going to be subjected to relentless charges of ‘leftist' weakness and questionable ‘Americanism.'"
Race is a critical sub-text throughout the narrative of "Swift Boat 2.0," of course.
Corsi is making the dominant media rounds and is a featured guest on right wing talk radio around the country.
This is not really Obama's fault, of course. The Fatherland (FOX) "News" crowd would be doing the same thing in different ways if Hillary Clinton or John Edwards (who we now know would have been dead in the water thanks to his sordid dance with Rielle Hunter) had gotten the nomination. At this stage in the corporate-totalitarian and imperial degradation of U.S. political culture, any Democratic presidential candidate (no matter how centrist and compromising) is going to be subjected to relentless charges of "leftist" weakness and questionable "Americanism" - vicious accusations that will be dutifully bounced across the dominant media's echo-chambers and hall of mirrors.
Still, just as Edwards went into the primaries with the Rielle Hunter affair waiting to explode, Obama (no dummy) certainly made his bid with full knowledge that the "controversial" (sadly) Afro-Centric Reverend Wright (his pastor of 20-plus years) would likely emerge as a potent symbol for the Republicans' racist, right-wing noise machine.
Overreach and Fatigue
Hubris and overreach could play a role in a hypothetical Obama defeat, with voters getting turned off by the quasi-millennial aspects of the Obama ascendancy, replete with an oration before 200,000 Germans and an acceptance speech to be delivered to 70,000 chanting Democrats in a Denver football stadium that will have to do since Mount Sinai is unavailable. You don't have to be a Republican to think it's more than a little over the top.
Obama fatigue could factor into a possible Obama defeat as millions of Americans get tired of seeing Obama's face and hearing his measured baritone "eloquence" over and over and over again. We are now technically into the fifth year of the Obama phenomenon, launched during the Democratic National Convention in late July of 2004. Obama is over-exposed at this point, even as most Americans (including many of his supporters) know amazingly little about his actual public record and world view. A recent Pew poll finds that nearly half (48 percent) U.S. voters say that they "have been hearing too much about Obama lately." Just barely more than a quarter (26 percent) of Pew's respondents said they had heard too much about McCain.
Alienating Media
Team Obama has recently demonstrated some remarkably controlling and prickly behavior towards the press. This could be a big mistake. If it isn't more careful about ruffling dominant media egos, the Obama camp could do significant damage to the "Obama Love" proffered by a corporate media that retains a soft spot for the supposed "maverick" McCain. As Gabriel Sherman noted in The New Republic in late July, "Reporters are grumbling more and more that the campaign is acting like the Prom Queen. They gripe that it is ‘arrogant' and ‘control[ling],' and the campaign's own belief that Obama is poised to make history isn't endearing, either. The press certainly helped Obama get so far so fast; the question is, how far can he get if his campaign alienates them?" (G. Sherman, "End of the Affair: Barack Obama and the Press Break Up," TNR, July 24, 2008. read at www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6e9f4a42-9540-4d99-aba2-25adc276c25d)
Why Obama Deserves to Lose Iraq
"His plans for ‘withdrawal' have long been nauseatingly ambiguous and maddeningly deceptive."
The offensive notion that "the Surge" is "working" in Iraq has hurt Obama and helped McCain. But while it is true that "the Surge's" triumphs are grossly exaggerated and that claims of U.S. "success" in Iraq ignore the fact that the Iraq War should have (as Obama says) "never been launched in the first place," Obama deserves to lose Iraq as an issue working in his favor. He has repeatedly voted funds for the criminal occupation and distanced himself from antiwar activists and from more courageous politicians (e.g. Jack Murtha and Russ Feingold) on Iraq . He backed pro-war antiwar Democrats in the 2006 Congressional primaries. He has embraced the preposterous Orwellian claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq out of its excessive "good intentions" to export democracy. He has advanced the odious Orwellian notion that the U.S. is involved in a selfless effort to "put Iraq back together." Absurdly applauding America for its great "sacrifice" in the cause of "freedom" within and beyond Iraq and enthusiastically embracing George W. Bush's equally illegal invasion of Afghanistan, "antiwar" Obama has never come close to acknowledging the extent of the monumental damage the U.S. has done to Iraq (including more than a million Iraqi dead) during (and before) the occupation. His plans for "withdrawal" have long been nauseatingly ambiguous and maddeningly deceptive, hiding the strong likelihood that a President Obama would maintain the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period.
Obama has never exhibited the elementary courage or decency to oppose the occupation of Iraq on moral and legal grounds - as a monumental imperial crime. He has only opposed it as a "strategic blunder" and "mistake": as a "dumb war" that isn't "working." This has made him vulnerable to losing the Iraq War as an issue working on his behalf once the Bush administration and dominant U.S. war media succeeded in selling the notion that the criminal invasion was finally being properly executed - the vile idea that the unmentionably criminal invasion is "working."
Kicking Progressives in the Face
The ugly conceit with which Obama has been willing to risk alienating progressive, left-leaning voters could come back to haunt him in November. The militantly centrist corporate-sponsored Obama has irritated many of his leftmost supporters with the lurches he has made further to the right after securing the Democratic presidential nomination. Even I (a consistent left critic of Obama since his highly conservative 2004 Keynote Address) have been surprised at the speed and strength with which he has kicked his more progressive supporters in the face (and other bodily regions) by:
* embracing the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a Washington D.C ban on personal handguns and claimed that the Second Constitutional Amendment pertains to private citizens, not just organized state "militias."
* declaring his belief in the state's right to kill certain criminals, including child rapists.
* becoming the first major party presidential candidate to bypass the public presidential financing system and to reject accompanying spending limits (violating his earlier pledge to work through the public system and accept those limits).
* supporting a refurbished spy bill that grants retroactive immunity to telephone corporations who collaborated with the White House in electronic surveillance of American citizens (violating Obama's earlier pledge to filibuster any surveillance legislation containing such immunity).
* appointing the corporate-friendly Wal-Mart apologist and Hamilton Project [3] economist Jason Furman as his economic policy director - something that stood in curious relation to his criticism ("I won't shop there") of Wal-Mart's low-wage anti-union practices when speaking to labor audiences.
* increasing his declared support of "free trade," contradicting his campaign-trail criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
* "tweaking" his claim that he would meet with Iran 's president (he added new and more restrictive conditions).
* embracing (in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby American Israel Public Affairs Committee - AIPAC) Bush-McCain rhetoric on the supposed Iranian nuclear threat and promising to do "anything" to protect the nuclear occupation and apartheid state of Israel from Iran (a nation previously attacked by Israel ).
* calling (in his AIPAC speech) for an "undivided" Israel-run Jerusalem despite the fact that no government on the planet (and not even the Bush administration) supports Israeli's right to annex that UN-designated international city.
* making bolder Iraq "withdrawal" statements indicating that an Obama administration would not leave Iraq.
* vocally supporting a major part of the Republican agenda: the granting of public money to private religious organizations to provide social services.
* endorsing the conservative white male Blue Dog Democratic Congressman John Barrow (D-GA) over the progressive black female challenger Regina Thomas in a July 15 primary [4].
* flip-flopping on energy policy by calling for increased domestic and offshore oil drilling after it became clear that McCain was getting traction with voters by calling for such environmentally insensitive drilling.
"Dropping the Class Language"
With a large part of the citizenry supporting serious progressive change in the wake of the hard-right Cheney-Bush nightmare, Obama's corporate-imperial centrism could end up costing him the White House. This is standard operating procedure for the Democrats, who have long been unable and/or unwilling to run in accord with the progressive and anti-imperial sentiments of the American majority [5].
Last time out, John "I am Not a Redistribution Democrat" Kerry made the usual surrender. Given the closeness of the 2004 race and the unpopularity of the arch-plutocratic George W. Bush, Kerry could have won if he'd run further to the populist left. With help from the "liberal" New York Times (which agreed not to publish its findings on the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping until well after the election), the super-opulent windsurfing aristocrat Kerry ran to the corporate center and thereby gave us four more years of the Worst President Ever.
This great failure followed in perfect accord with Thomas Frank's widely mentioned but commonly misunderstood book on why so many white working class Americans vote for regressive Republicans instead of following their supposed natural "pocketbook" interests by backing Democrats. Released just before Bush defeated Kerry with no small help from working class whites, Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: 2004) has generally been taken to have argued that the GOP distracts stupid "heartland" (white working-class) voters away from their real economic interests with diversionary issues like abortion, guns, and gay rights. Insofar as Democrats bear responsibility for the loss their former working class constituency, Frank is often said to have argued that this was due to their excessive liberalism on these and other "cultural issues."
"The corporate-sponsored, capitalism-praising Obama is repeating the same old classist Democratic mistake."
But Frank's argument was more complex or perhaps more simple. At the end of his book, in a passage that very few leading commentators seem to have read (a shining exception is New York Times columnist Paul Krugman), Frank clearly and (in my opinion) correctly blamed the long corporatist shift of the Democratic Party to the business-friendly right and away from honest discussion of - and opposition to - economic and class inequality for much of whatever success the GOP achieved in winning over working-class whites. As Frank noted in his final chapter:
"The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McCauliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far out-weighing anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and --- more important --- the money of these coveted constituencies, 'New Democrats' think, is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law, privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as 'class warfare' and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness with business. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. As for working-class voters who were until recently the party's very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides, what politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the voice of poor people?"
"...The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically pro-choice or anti-school prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talks constantly about class - in a coded way, to be sure - but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up" (Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?, pp. 242-245).
The corporate-sponsored, capitalism-praising Obama is repeating the same old classist Democratic mistake. For all Obama's talk about activating the popular base to bring about "change from the bottom up," Obama is making his own ironic contribution to the de-mobilization of the progressive electorate with a militantly centrist, neoliberal, and boring policy agenda that is noticeably bereft of populist inspiration. It's more Goldman Sachs and Hamilton Project than lunch pail and picket line, consistent with his (actually) elitist comments to an affluent gathering of fundraisers in San Francisco prior to the April 22nd Pennsylvania primary (won decisively by Hillary Clinton with large support from white working-class voters).
"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania," Obama condescendingly said, "and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone for 25 years and there's nothing's to replace them...And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them." Later, in clarifying his comments, Obama said that poor white small town Americans simply "don't vote on economic issues," turning instead to things like guns, gay marriage, abortion and religion [6]. Sounding like he accepted the standard false version (the self-serving upper-middle-class adaptation) of "the Tom Frank Kansas thesis," he failed to note that working class whites actually vote more on the basis of economic concerns than do affluent whites [7] and that Democrats lose white proletarian voters by taking the workers' material concerns "off the table" and running (unlike John Edwards' ill-fated semi-progressive 2007-08 campaign) away from the populist language and commitments that once made the Democratic Party a relevant defender of working peoples' material interests. (He had nothing to say about the source of the "bitterness" that leads him to cling so strongly to the guns of American Empire and to his own self-serving notions of God.)
I recently sat through a tiresome Obama " Town Hall " on "Economic Security" before hundreds of relatively unenthused supporters in Cedar Rapids , Iowa . Beyond some brief chest-pounding about Exxon-Mobil's latest record profits and "big oil's" campaign contributions to McCain, the content and tone of Obama's policy presentation was positively Dukakisian. It was very University of Chicago , loaded with arcane neoliberal policy wonkery that may have countered McCain's picture of him as an empty-headed celebrity (ala Paris Hilton) but also left much of the audience cold. It seemed almost calculated not to mobilize people for an epic confrontation with the vicious arch-plutocratic and messianic-militarist bastards behind the McCain campaign. A former John Edwards staffer who cringed through the event with me asked "where's the red meat?" I imagined millions of formerly engaged Obama supporters forsaking politics altogether - their hopes for reform and "change" shattered and their desire to avoid politics reinstated - when and if Obama's tepid, business- and Empire-friendly campaign goes the way of Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry.
Snotty Know-it-All Middle-Class Obamaists Not Transcending Race
Which brings me to another factor that could help cost Obama the election - the elitism, ignorance, and occasional race-baiting of many of his ostensibly progressive white middle and upper-middle class supporters. So far this campaign season, I have been lectured by three white Iowa City liberal-"progressive" Obamaists on how Tom Frank's book shows the "idiocy" of the white lower and working classes - those misguided proletarian dunderheads who foolishly "vote against their own pocketbook interests" (against those supposedly wonderful and progressive Democrats) because of childish vulnerability to "cultural issues" like "guns, God, gays, and abortion."
"What's the matter with these clowns" one university-affiliated forty-something white male Obamaist asked me the other day, citing Frank's book. "Don't they get that the Democrats are the party of the workers and the poor?"
The Obama fan who asked me this insulting question became noticeably perturbed when I noted (A) the white working-class actually "votes its pocketbook" more than the white middle and upper class and (B) that Frank's book actually ends with the argument I quoted above, observing that the corporate-captive and excessively bourgeois Democratic Party opens the door for working class defection and apathy precisely by abandoning its commitment to working-class people's moral-economic issues and needs. The Democrats have long been the other business wing - the "inauthentic opposition" in - the corporate-managed American "one-and-a-half party system" (Princeton political scientist Sheldon Wolin's term) and Obama is not fundamentally challenging that terrible reality.
"'Race-neutral' Obama has exhibited a disturbing tendency to eagerly join the white post-Civil Rights majority in blaming blacks for their disproportionate presence at the bottom."
Affluent white Obamaist liberals display a related and disturbing tendency to argue that any criticism of their hero's aristocratic bearing and commitments actually betray the critic's underlying "racism."
"You know what people really mean when they say Obama is bourgeois and elitist, don't you?" a patronizing white male university-connected know-it-all Obamaist asked me a few weeks ago. Before I could say anything, he answered his own question: "they mean they think he's ‘an uppity nigger.'"
Oh, okay. I'm sure there are plenty of white folks, including a large number of Republicans, who are using the charge of elitism and "haughtiness" as cover for racism. But I (the author of two books and numerous project studies and hundreds of articles against white supremacy and institutional racism) am not one of those racists. When many whites and (by the way) blacks I know say that Obama is bourgeois and elitist, they simply mean that (whatever his skin color) he's, well, bourgeois and elitist, which (by the way) he is.
He's also very weak, from a progressive perspective, on race, interestingly enough, part of why he has long been viewed as elitist by a significant portion of the black community in Chicago and Illinois. Having run to the right of Kucinich and even Hillary and Edwards on racial justice issues, "race-neutral" Obama has exhibited a disturbing tendency (strongly approved by arch-conservative white Republican commentators like William Bennett, Charles Krauthammer, and George Will) to eagerly join the white post-Civil Rights majority in blaming blacks for their disproportionate presence at the bottom of American hierarchies.
It is interesting to hear university town white Obamaists claim that that their candidate "transcends race" while hurling reckless charges of racism at those who make the elementary observation that Obama is an elite, Harvard-educated, and Wall Street-sponsored (and excessively white-friendly) candidate running an openly (for those willing to do some elementary research) corporate-imperial campaign. As the black and Left political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. noted last April, the Obama campaign repeatedly contradicted its own claim to "transcend race" during the primary season. "Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at nearly any criticism of him," Reed observed, "in steadily more extravagant rhetoric." They claimed, for example, that Hillary Clinton was expressing racial bias when she dared to criticize Obama as "inexperienced." The attempt to portray one's opponent as short on experience is "standard fare in political campaigns" (Reed) and goes back to the beginning of electoral politics.
Along the way, the Obama campaign has called for voters to support its candidate because of the opportunity to "make history" simply by putting someone who happens to be half-black in the White House. That is hardly going "beyond race" [8].
Obama recently made the false charge that the McCain campaign has been telling voters to oppose the Democratic presidential candidate because he "doesn't look like those other presidents on the dollar bills." The McCain camp's opportunistic response was (naturally) over the top but, sadly, McCain was right to note that Obama had played the race card in an unfortunate way.
Obamaists should be careful with the racism charge if they want to avoid over-alienating potential supporters, who don't generally deserve to hear snotty know-it-all pseudo-progressives screeching "Your Whiteness is Showing" (the title of an ill-advised letter from the progressive anti-racist Obama supporter Tim Wise to certain already pissed-off white female Hillary Clinton fans last June) because they happen to find the openly imperialist capitalism and Afghan Invasion enthusiast and Israeli apartheid supporter Obama hard to swallow. The Obama campaign is making a mistake by not doing more to actively discourage some of its more irritating staff and supporters - an especially good example is current "Progressive for Obama" Web site chief Carl Davidson (who has absurdly leveled the accusation at me on at least two occasions) - from recklessly charging racism.
Maybe It Isn't About Running for President
"Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, the Clintons, and Gore did not need to be black in order to walk the same basic tiresome centrist line trod by ‘the new black Clinton.'"
Speaking of race, it is common to hear white middle-class Obama supporters excuse and explain their candidate's conservative centrism as a result of the fact that's he's black and therefore "has to be especially careful not to offend" white voters by seeming too strident or "angry." "John Edwards can get away with talking class struggle," one academic Obamaist told me last fall, "because he's white. Barack can't because he's black and that's scary enough in and of itself for white voters."
There's a kernel of truth in this argument. Toxic white racial fears and stereotypes of the "angry black man" (e.g. Jesse Jackson Sr. and big bad Reverend Wright) are alive and well in U.S. political culture. Sadly enough, white dread of (legitimate) black anger may well help make it especially hard for a black male politician to fight for the poor and working-class Many against the rich and powerful Few. I have long suspected that Obama has felt the need to go an extra mile or three to prove his fealty (in ways that are often quite unpleasant to behold) to dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines partly because he senses that his racial identity raises red flags for the nation's predominantly white political class and electoral gatekeepers and the white majority electorate.
Still, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, the Clintons, and Gore did not need to be black in order to walk the same basic tiresome centrist line trod by "the new black Clinton" (or perhaps "the new black Carter" - see below), Barack Obama. Obama appears to be a natural and longtime neoliberal centrist, consistent with his elite private prep school and Harvard background, his "deeply conservative" temperament, his well-known personal narcissism, and his impressive corporate sponsorship.
It should be understood that the main white folks who can't deal with "populist" rhetoric are the rich and powerful Few. Angry "class language" (Frank) works pretty well with much of the white working class majority - a main reason that any potentially viable candidate who speaks it to any significant degree (e.g. John Edwards in 2007) must be marginalized and discredited by corporate media.
"Re-establishing Confidence in the Legitimacy of the Current Political Order"
And insofar as it is true that Obama "can't be all that progressive because he's black" (something that may NOT be true) wouldn't that seem to indicate that it's, well... a mistake for progressives to advance a black candidate for president?
This might seem like a terrible thing to say (I can just see my nemesis Carl Davidson ready to pounce!), but there's a deeper point here. Maybe the struggle against racism and other political and societal evils isn't about running people (of any color) for the presidency - the top position in the executive committee of the American ruling class - or any other high elective office. Maybe it isn't about U.S. electoral politics.
"By the end of his life, King had concluded that only revolutionary change could save the U.S. from an ever-deepening descent into repressive authoritarianism."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned down efforts to get him to run for the White House and died for his determination to authentically resist American capitalist, racist, and imperial power structures - what he called "the triple evils that are interrelated." By the end of his life, King had concluded - correctly in my view - that only revolutionary change could save the U.S. from an ever-deepening descent into repressive authoritarianism. As King noted in the spring of 1967, liberals have for too long "labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there." What is really required, King knew, was "a reconstruction of the entire society...a radical redistribution of political and economic power."
That is exactly what Obama is NOT about. "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama," Ryan Lizza recently observed, "is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them." Later in the same essay Lizza notes that Obama is "an incrementalist."
As Greg Guma recently noted in a thoughtful reflection on Obama as "The New Jimmy Carter": "the truth is that, in Obama, a worried establishment has found the vessel through which they hope to restore international and domestic stability." As Guma darkly but rightly observes, "Obama, like Carter, can be useful [to the U.S. power elite] in calming things down and re-establishing confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order. In short, he can reinforce the argument that ‘the system' still works"[9].
Beyond Electoralism
Revolution (desperately required) aside, even the attainment of basic reforms is about building and expanding grassroots social movements beneath and beyond the false promises of political campaigns and mass media, who market domesticated corporate candidates like they sell cars and candy. It's about the real politics of popular organization and resistance beneath and beyond the quadrennial narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted candidate-centered election extravaganzas, whoever wins and whoever loses. As Dr. Reed noted last November, "Elected officials are only as good or as bad as the forces they feel they must respond to. It's a mistake to expect any more of them than to be vectors of the political pressures they feel working on them" [10].
Given the harsh realities that make even avowedly "progressive" politicians, policymakers, and candidates veer center and right, Reed argued, correctly in my estimation, progressives should focus less on election dramas and more on building movements for democratic change from the bottom up and across and between elections:
"We need to think about politics in a different way, one that doesn't assume that the task is to lobby the Democrats or give them good ideas, and correct their misconceptions."
"It's a mistake to focus so much on the election cycle; we didn't vote ourselves into this mess, and we're not going to vote ourselves out of it. Electoral politics is an arena for consolidating majorities that have been created on the plane of social movement organizing. It's not an alternative or a shortcut to building those movements, and building them takes time and concerted effort. Not only can that process not be compressed to fit the election cycle; it also doesn't happen through mass actions. It happens through cultivating one-on-one relationships with people who have standing and influence in their neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, families, and organizations. It happens through struggling with people over time for things they're concerned about and linking those concerns to a broader political vision and program. This is how the populist movement grew in the late nineteenth century, the CIO in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights movement after World War II. It is how we've won all our victories. And it is also how the right came to power" [11].
"We didn't vote ourselves into this mess, and we're not going to vote ourselves out of it."
Reed's point on the need to concentrate first and foremost on the building of movement capacities - NOT corporate-crafted elections that answer mainly to elite interests - is echoed in Noam Chomsky's instructive reflections on the 2004 presidential contest. By Chomsky's analysis on the eve of the last election:
"The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point of hysteria, hardly represents healthy democratic impulses."
"Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is yet another method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That's politics.' But it isn't. It's only a small part of politics."
"The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction - often in close conformity to majority opinion - is to grow and become strong enough so that that they can't be ignored by centers of power. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women's movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, everyday, not just once every four years..."
"So in the election, sensible choices have to be made. But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome" [12].
How individual progressives define their version of the "sensible choice" is of little interest to me at this point. People write me to ask "should I vote for McKinney ?" "What about Nader?" "Should I vote tactically for Obama to block Mad Bomber McCain since I live in a contested state?" "I think I'm just going to sit the election out - what do you think?"
I don't know what people should do on Election Day. I'm not sure I care (it changes from day to day, to be honest). What I'd really like to know is when true progressive folks are interested in "struggling with people over time for things they're concerned about and linking those concerns to a broader political vision and program."
And I am frankly haunted by the likelihood that Greg Guma is right: while McCain is obviously terrible and dangerous, Obama is attractive to a large section of the U.S. power elite because he promises to "calm things down and re-establish confidence in the legitimacy of the current political order" by "reinforce[ing] the argument that ‘the system' still works." Wouldn't that seem to suggest that the loathsome and dangerous McCain is the lesser evil in the long run?
Our current corporate-totalitarian system and political culture doesn't work. It is a grave threat to human survival and peace and justice at home and abroad. Dr. King was right forty years ago about the pressing need for "radical reconstruction" and the "radical distribution of political and economic power." The path of that reconstruction is long and leads well past my own time on this planet, but it is at least clear to me that millions of people in the world's most powerful nation are being dangerously hypnotized and repressively de-sublimated yet again by the false hopes and colored lights of the narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted election extravaganza.
If Obama loses, and he may, it will be important for progressively inclined citizens and activists to understand that it was corporate-imperial centrism, not the left and not the People, that got defeated. If he wins, those citizens and activists need to understand the severe limits of what triumphed and be prepared to fight and organize on a daily basis beneath and beyond presidential elections.
Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a veteran radical historian and independent author, activist, researcher, and journalist in Iowa City , IA. He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm 2005); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge 2005): and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (Rowman&Littlefied 2007). Street's new book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics can be ordered at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)
NOTES
My annotation for this piece could easily run to 100 notes - something that would be impractical for reader and writer alike. Readers who want sources for assertions without notes can feel free to write me at paulstreet99@yahoo.com.
1. Obama is quoted in Glen Ford's brilliant article, "Obama Stumbles on His Own Contradictions," CounterPunch (April 30, 3008), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/ford04302008.html
2. Among many possible sources, see especially John Judis, "The Big Race," The New Republic (May 28, 2008).
3. The Hamilton Group is a leading "conservative" (business-friendly) economic think tank. Furman, 37, is linked closely to Robert Rubin, the top Wall Street financial mogul and former Clinton economics advisor and Treasury secretary. Rubin's regressive views on behalf of "free trade" (including the North American Free Trade Agreement, investor's rights, wages, welfare and "deficit reduction" gave the Clinton administration "credibility" in the halls of corporate and financial power.
4. See Leutisha Stills, "Obama Charges Rightward," Black Agenda Report (June 25, 2008), read at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=674&Itemid=1
5. For an (I hope) useful summary of that progressive majority opinion and some key sources, see Paul Street , "Americans' Progressive Opinion vs. ‘the Shadow Cast on Society by Business," ZNet Sustainer Commentary (May 15, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3491
6. Paul Krugman, "Clinging to a Stereotype," New York Times, 18 April, 2008, p. A23.
7. See Larry Bartels, "Inequalities," New York Times Magazine (April 27, 2008), p. 22. As Bartels points out, Frank exaggerated white working-class voters' susceptibility to cultural diversion: "In recent presidential elections," he notes, "affluent voters, who tend to be liberal on cultural matters, are about twice as likely as middle-class and poor voters to make their decisions on the basis of their cultural concerns." In other words, working class white voters don't especially privilege "cultural issues" (God, guns, gays, gender, and abortion) over pocketbook concerns and actually do that less than wealthier voters.
8. Adolph Reed Jr., "Obama No," The Progressive (May 2008). For what its worth, I am told by a reliable source that Michelle Obama dismissed concerns with experience as racism during a coffee with female Democratic voters in eastern Iowa last fall.
9. Ryan Lizza, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped Obama," The New Yorker, (July 21, 2008); Greg Guma, "Barack Obama: The New Jimmy Carter," ZNet (July 28, 2008), read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18288 See also Larrisa MacFarquhar's useful reflctions on Obama's "deeply conservative" world view and commitments: see Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?," The New Yorker (May 7, 2007). Near the end of his article, Lizza proclaims that "He [Obama] is ideologically a man of the left" - a ridiculous indication of how shockingly narrow the political and ideological spectrum is in the U.S. today.
10. Adolph J. Reed Jr., "Sitting This One Out," The Progressive (November 2007)
11. Reed, "Sitting This One Out."
12. Noam Chomsky, "The Disconnect in American Democracy" (October 27, 2004) in Chomsky, Interventions ( San Francisco : City Lights, 2007) pp. 99-100. See also Howard Zinn's excellent reflections in "Election Madness," The Progressive (March 2008).
a/k/a Tommy Chong
http://www.sacredcowstore.com/aka-tommy-chong.htmla/k/a Tommy Chong
Regular price: $24.99
Sale price: $19.95
a/k/a Tommy Chong chronicles the entrapment and incarceration of comedic legend Tommy Chong. Josh Gilbert's award winning documentary offers a sometimes frightening, often hilarious account of "Operation PipeDreams", a nationwide drug paraphernalia sting operation spearheaded by former Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Russell Crowe as Bill Hicks?
http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2008/08/crowe-bill-hick.htmlRussell Crowe as Bill Hicks?
Aug 25, 2008
by Gary Susman
Categories: Deals, Film, To Care or Not to Care
Not sure how I missed the news that Russell Crowe wants to play Bill Hicks in a biopic of the late comedian. The actor is quoted talking about the project here, and a recent radio interview with longtime Hicks collaborator Kevin Booth (h/t to the Dead Frog comedy blog) confirms Crowe's role in commissioning a screenplay, which is not yet finished. I'm also not sure how I feel about the idea, since Crowe (who's not known for his jocular side) is already 12 years older than Hicks was when he died at 32, and since a botched biopic would trivialize Hicks as just another E! True Hollywood Story casualty, a guy who smoked too much and courted controversy and died of cancer on the cusp of fame. On the other hand, Booth's participation should ensure that Hicks gets the respect he deserves; and Crowe is protean and versatile enough to play pretty much anybody (Exhibit A: The Insider). Besides, Crowe reportedly wants to focus on performance sequences than biographical scenes, and anything that gets Hicks' legendary stand-up material more circulation (even in mimicked form) is good.
The Real Rate of Inflation is 13%
http://www.infowars.com/?p=4189
The Real Rate of Inflation is 13%
The Mogambo Guru
The Daily Reckoning
August 27, 2008
It was when “official government-approved” inflation figures were released that I really lost it last week, as that particular rate of inflation is now a staggering 5.6%. This is - as you can probably tell by the look of panic and terror on my face - Terrible, Terrible News (TTN).
And when you look at what John Williams at shadowstats.com calculates as inflation, according to the time-honored method of actually looking at real prices instead of the “qualified estimates” that are used today, you will see that annual inflation in consumer prices is actually running at over 13%! Some of the worst in American history! We’re freaking doomed!
Anthony Cherniawski of The Practical Investor is not interested in my dour assessment of the situation, and took a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), which increased a whopping 0.5% (non-seasonally adjusted) in July, which is plenty bad enough for one month, but one’s tongue tries to hide by jumping down one’s throat when one learns that it was not a fluke, and that prices are 5.6% higher than in July 2007! 5.6% annual inflation is the best they can wring from admittedly-doctored statistics? Yikes! I’m screaming my guts out here!
Mr. Cherniawski coolly says that I don’t know the literal half of it, as “The alarming part of this report is the acceleration of inflation in the past 3 months. While the unadjusted rate for the past 12 months was 6.2%, the 3-month annualized rate of increase was 11.9%.” Yikes! We’re freaking doomed!
The report itself noted, without any hint of alarm, that “On a seasonally adjusted basis, the CPI-U advanced 0.8 percent in July, following a 1.1 percent increase in June.” Yow!
Some of the terrifying specifics were that the energy index rose 4%, which accounted for “about half of the overall increase in the all items index.”
The worse news for people who eat food is that “the food index rose 0.9 percent in July after rising 0.8 percent in June. Indexes for five of the six major grocery store food groups rose at least 1.0 percent.” In one freaking month! This is outrageous inflation!
This inflation in food may be why Heraldtribune.com interviewed Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of an outfit called America’s Second Harvest, which is “the nation’s largest food bank network”, and which is a name that they are soon changing to “Feeding America”, which seems oddly apropos, considering that in January, they surveyed their 200 food banks and found that “demand was up 20 percent over last year.” Wow! What an increase!
“We’re seeing more and more people visiting food banks for the first time because they’ve lost their jobs or they’re not getting raises”, she says. Yikes! People are reduced to begging for food because they are not getting raises!
Equally alarming is the news from John Williams at shadowstats.com, who says that real inflation in prices, as measured in a subset of the BLS Consumer Price Indexes, the CPI-W, “jumped to 6.2%”.
What makes the CPI-W inflation subset so interesting is that, as Mr. Williams explains, “The CPI-W is used for making the annual cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security payments” which would indicate that the federal budget line-item for Social Security, already one of the largest categories in the whole bloated federal budget that is already over $3 trillion a year, will be increasing by a theoretical 6.2%, just by virtue of mandated higher payments!
Then, to make it all worse, the Labor Department reported the latest survey of producer prices for July, the Producer Price Index, which went up by a stunning 1.2% for the month, where the only saving grace is that it is less than the 1.8% increase in June!
As Mark Gongloff so pithily explained in his Ahead Of The Tape column of the Wall Street Journal, “While consumers suffer inflation a the bottom of the pricing pipeline, producers feel it at the top”, and that producers will be very keen about passing higher costs along to the consumer as quickly as possible, because “to the extent inflation gets stuck with them, their profits suffer.”
And since everybody knows the ugliness of profits suffering, I will not go into it, as it usually means that I am going to be fired soon, and I don’t want to think about that right now, other than to say that “profits that suffer” is ugly in the best of times, and it will be Much, Much Uglier (MMU) this time, thanks to seemingly-impossible leveraged investment use of every freaking dime, real or imagined, here or in the future.
Okay, I will say one other thing; if you are not buying gold, silver and oil in a fit of terrified self-preservation, to the exclusion of everything else including back-to-school clothes for your stupid kids that make them look like mental defectives and cost a fortune, then you are almost certainly making the biggest mistake of your life.
Well, maybe the second biggest mistake after deciding to have the damned kids. Or maybe the third biggest mistake after deciding to get married in the first damned place and then having the damned kids in the second place, but you get the point.
The Real Rate of Inflation is 13%
The Mogambo Guru
The Daily Reckoning
August 27, 2008
It was when “official government-approved” inflation figures were released that I really lost it last week, as that particular rate of inflation is now a staggering 5.6%. This is - as you can probably tell by the look of panic and terror on my face - Terrible, Terrible News (TTN).
And when you look at what John Williams at shadowstats.com calculates as inflation, according to the time-honored method of actually looking at real prices instead of the “qualified estimates” that are used today, you will see that annual inflation in consumer prices is actually running at over 13%! Some of the worst in American history! We’re freaking doomed!
Anthony Cherniawski of The Practical Investor is not interested in my dour assessment of the situation, and took a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), which increased a whopping 0.5% (non-seasonally adjusted) in July, which is plenty bad enough for one month, but one’s tongue tries to hide by jumping down one’s throat when one learns that it was not a fluke, and that prices are 5.6% higher than in July 2007! 5.6% annual inflation is the best they can wring from admittedly-doctored statistics? Yikes! I’m screaming my guts out here!
Mr. Cherniawski coolly says that I don’t know the literal half of it, as “The alarming part of this report is the acceleration of inflation in the past 3 months. While the unadjusted rate for the past 12 months was 6.2%, the 3-month annualized rate of increase was 11.9%.” Yikes! We’re freaking doomed!
The report itself noted, without any hint of alarm, that “On a seasonally adjusted basis, the CPI-U advanced 0.8 percent in July, following a 1.1 percent increase in June.” Yow!
Some of the terrifying specifics were that the energy index rose 4%, which accounted for “about half of the overall increase in the all items index.”
The worse news for people who eat food is that “the food index rose 0.9 percent in July after rising 0.8 percent in June. Indexes for five of the six major grocery store food groups rose at least 1.0 percent.” In one freaking month! This is outrageous inflation!
This inflation in food may be why Heraldtribune.com interviewed Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of an outfit called America’s Second Harvest, which is “the nation’s largest food bank network”, and which is a name that they are soon changing to “Feeding America”, which seems oddly apropos, considering that in January, they surveyed their 200 food banks and found that “demand was up 20 percent over last year.” Wow! What an increase!
“We’re seeing more and more people visiting food banks for the first time because they’ve lost their jobs or they’re not getting raises”, she says. Yikes! People are reduced to begging for food because they are not getting raises!
Equally alarming is the news from John Williams at shadowstats.com, who says that real inflation in prices, as measured in a subset of the BLS Consumer Price Indexes, the CPI-W, “jumped to 6.2%”.
What makes the CPI-W inflation subset so interesting is that, as Mr. Williams explains, “The CPI-W is used for making the annual cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security payments” which would indicate that the federal budget line-item for Social Security, already one of the largest categories in the whole bloated federal budget that is already over $3 trillion a year, will be increasing by a theoretical 6.2%, just by virtue of mandated higher payments!
Then, to make it all worse, the Labor Department reported the latest survey of producer prices for July, the Producer Price Index, which went up by a stunning 1.2% for the month, where the only saving grace is that it is less than the 1.8% increase in June!
As Mark Gongloff so pithily explained in his Ahead Of The Tape column of the Wall Street Journal, “While consumers suffer inflation a the bottom of the pricing pipeline, producers feel it at the top”, and that producers will be very keen about passing higher costs along to the consumer as quickly as possible, because “to the extent inflation gets stuck with them, their profits suffer.”
And since everybody knows the ugliness of profits suffering, I will not go into it, as it usually means that I am going to be fired soon, and I don’t want to think about that right now, other than to say that “profits that suffer” is ugly in the best of times, and it will be Much, Much Uglier (MMU) this time, thanks to seemingly-impossible leveraged investment use of every freaking dime, real or imagined, here or in the future.
Okay, I will say one other thing; if you are not buying gold, silver and oil in a fit of terrified self-preservation, to the exclusion of everything else including back-to-school clothes for your stupid kids that make them look like mental defectives and cost a fortune, then you are almost certainly making the biggest mistake of your life.
Well, maybe the second biggest mistake after deciding to have the damned kids. Or maybe the third biggest mistake after deciding to get married in the first damned place and then having the damned kids in the second place, but you get the point.
Bolt could have run 9.52 in Olympics, coach says
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/feedarticle/7756119
Bolt could have run 9.52 in Olympics, coach says
Reuters, Wednesday August 27 2008
By Sam Cage
ZURICH, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Triple Olympic gold medallist and world record holder Usain Bolt could have run the 100 metres in 9.52 seconds if he had not slowed to celebrate, his coach said on Wednesday.
Glen Mills said Bolt, who electrified Beijing with his sprint victories, was at the start of his 100 career and would peak only in about two years' time.
"If he had continued, the slowest he would have run would have been 9.52," Mills told reporters ahead of Friday's Weltklasse athletics meeting in Zurich, where Bolt is due to run the 100.
"This is his first year of running the 100 metres," Mills said. "In two more years he should be peaking at this distance and by then I am certain he will be down to there."
Bolt set a world record of 9.69 seconds in the 100, and was so far ahead of the field that he slowed before the end to celebrate.
Bolt then broke Michael Johnson's 12-year-old mark in the 200 and added a third gold by contributing to a world record for Jamaica in the 4x100 relay.
On Friday, Bolt will face the two men who won medals behind him in the Beijing 100, Richard Thompson of Trinidad & Tobago and American Walter Dix.
Other Beijing winners on show in Zurich include women's pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva and Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia, who won the men's 5,000 and 10,000 metres.
"I've had some sleep since I've been here so I'm not tired. I'm trying to get my blood pumping again," Bolt said.
He declined to speculate on what time he might run on Friday.
"I don't think you can really set another goal after doing that at the Olympics," said Bolt, who turned 22 the day after his 200 Beijing win. "I'm just trying to get to the end of the season, injury free, and go home and enjoy myself."
(Editing by Clare Fallon)
Bolt could have run 9.52 in Olympics, coach says
Reuters, Wednesday August 27 2008
By Sam Cage
ZURICH, Aug 27 (Reuters) - Triple Olympic gold medallist and world record holder Usain Bolt could have run the 100 metres in 9.52 seconds if he had not slowed to celebrate, his coach said on Wednesday.
Glen Mills said Bolt, who electrified Beijing with his sprint victories, was at the start of his 100 career and would peak only in about two years' time.
"If he had continued, the slowest he would have run would have been 9.52," Mills told reporters ahead of Friday's Weltklasse athletics meeting in Zurich, where Bolt is due to run the 100.
"This is his first year of running the 100 metres," Mills said. "In two more years he should be peaking at this distance and by then I am certain he will be down to there."
Bolt set a world record of 9.69 seconds in the 100, and was so far ahead of the field that he slowed before the end to celebrate.
Bolt then broke Michael Johnson's 12-year-old mark in the 200 and added a third gold by contributing to a world record for Jamaica in the 4x100 relay.
On Friday, Bolt will face the two men who won medals behind him in the Beijing 100, Richard Thompson of Trinidad & Tobago and American Walter Dix.
Other Beijing winners on show in Zurich include women's pole vault champion Yelena Isinbayeva and Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia, who won the men's 5,000 and 10,000 metres.
"I've had some sleep since I've been here so I'm not tired. I'm trying to get my blood pumping again," Bolt said.
He declined to speculate on what time he might run on Friday.
"I don't think you can really set another goal after doing that at the Olympics," said Bolt, who turned 22 the day after his 200 Beijing win. "I'm just trying to get to the end of the season, injury free, and go home and enjoy myself."
(Editing by Clare Fallon)
Holiday World plans towering water slide
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080826/NEWS/808260428/1003/BUSINESS
Holiday World plans towering water slide
By Zach Dunkin
Posted: August 26, 2008
Holiday World & Splashin' Safari in Santa Claus, Ind., today announced an $8.9 million expansion that will include the world's tallest water ride for the 2009 season.
Pilgrims Plunge, a classic "shoot the chute" ride, will use an open elevator to lift boats filled with riders 135 feet in the air. The boats will pause briefly and then rapidly descend a record 131 feet at a 45-degree angle, creating a wall of water splashing 45 feet high and 90 feet wide. Its maximum speed will top 50 miles per hour.
In addition, park president Will Koch announced a free HoliWatch program for 2009. The wristband-style radio frequency identification service will serve as locators for families or groups who become separated during their visit.
The expansion project is the second largest in the 63-year history of the park, located 180 miles southwest of Indianapolis.
Contact Star reporter Zach Dunkin at (317) 444-6079.
Holiday World plans towering water slide
By Zach Dunkin
Posted: August 26, 2008
Holiday World & Splashin' Safari in Santa Claus, Ind., today announced an $8.9 million expansion that will include the world's tallest water ride for the 2009 season.
Pilgrims Plunge, a classic "shoot the chute" ride, will use an open elevator to lift boats filled with riders 135 feet in the air. The boats will pause briefly and then rapidly descend a record 131 feet at a 45-degree angle, creating a wall of water splashing 45 feet high and 90 feet wide. Its maximum speed will top 50 miles per hour.
In addition, park president Will Koch announced a free HoliWatch program for 2009. The wristband-style radio frequency identification service will serve as locators for families or groups who become separated during their visit.
The expansion project is the second largest in the 63-year history of the park, located 180 miles southwest of Indianapolis.
Contact Star reporter Zach Dunkin at (317) 444-6079.
Cindy Sheehan Bugged in Denver
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Cindy-Sheehan-Bugged-in-De-by-Rob-Kall-080825-412.html
August 25, 2008
Cindy Sheehan Bugged in Denver
by Rob Kall
Cindy Sheehan returned to her Denver hotel room today to find the door unlocked and ajar. She walked in to discover a man working on her phone, screw driver in hand.
Sheehan reported, in an email:
"As I walked toward my room, I noticed that the door was opened with the security bolt blocking the complete closing of the door. I knew immediately that I had not left the door open, and I double checked to make sure it was the right room because, as a frequent traveler, I have been known to forget my room number, but it was the right room.
I was upset at first thinking that housekeeping had made a mistake and left my room open and I was worried that something might be missing. So I walked into my room and bigger than life, there was a man standing by my desk holding the room phone with a screwdriver in his hand!
I immediately said; "What the hell are you doing? Are you putting a bug on my phone?" He looked like he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and stammered out: "N--no, we are having problems with the phone." I told him to get out of my room because my phone was fine and I called the front desk and the person at the front desk stammered something out about "problems" with some of the phones.
This room was reserved soon after we got to Denver last night because the room we had was inadequate for 3 people. The room was reserved under my campaign manager's name with a CFC debit card. By the time we left for the march, it could have very well been ascertained that I was the one in this room, and the room we did reserve could be bugged, also. I am confident that that's what was happening when I walked in on the "maintenance" man"
You don't come in the room with a screwdriver if there are problems with the hotel phones. You do it electronically, through the system or you hook up a new phone."
She said to me, "How many hotel rooms have I been in the past four years? It was so obvious."
I asked, "Do you think it was Pelosi's people?" since Sheehan is running against Pelosi, for her congressional seat.
She replied, "Of course, I don't know."
I asked, "Have there been any other episodes that would make you believe this kind of action is being taken against you?"
She replied:
"Not since I've been running for congress, but there were several times when I was in Crawford, or protesting in D.C., when I felt like we were being surveiled. And actually, in Washington D.C., for a period of time, they would just blatantly follow me, and I would just invite them to come in and have coffee with me. Whenever I was in D.C., whose ever jurisdiction it was, I'd have either the Metro police, the Capitol Hill police or the Park police right on me. Sometimes they were in uniform and sometimes they were plainclothes. But they were very obvious."
Asked how her campaign is going, Sheehan replied:
"I believe the momentum is definitely on our side, especially the last couple weeks, with our signature drive.
The department of elections started to mess with our signatures and say that so many were in-valid, when we knew for a fact that they were valid, because I was checking them myself, on the computer. That really motivated people to help us-- to come to the office to help us or sign the petition (to get Cindy on the ballot) or whatever, that said that they had been meaning to help and that this was something that got them of the fence and got them to actually come into the office and volunteer. We've had ten of thousands of dollars come into the campaign since then and we really have a comfortable amount of money to get our message out-- the message that our country is in deep trouble and Nancy is definitely not the solution. She's part of the problem. And we're going to educate the people of San Francisco about this using alternative forms of media and convince them that I am the alternative-- that I will work to be the voice of the people of San Francisco. And that's something that she has not ever been. I think there is a lot of positive excitement and momentum. Her book tour didn't help her out any.
The campaign's going great. We've been able to hire more staff."
Asked about her goals for Denver, she described:
"After protesting the Republicans for so many years, the Democrats have been moving steadily to the right. We want to show that we're not okay with that, that we want to bring the party closer to the people and further from the corporate lobbyists."
So many people are waking up and starting to realize that there is very little difference in the leadership of the two parties. Working for an altenative third party or independent is one way to bring about real change.
So many people with Obama shirts and pins have come up to me and told me that they're 100% on my side and they're very distressed with the right turn of the Obama campaign and the democratic party and they're hoping that demonstrations that we were at earlier, and that will be happening all week, will bring their party to where they think it should be.
Meanwhile, Cindy's hotel room phone is in the hotel room refrigerator.
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, Impeachment, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology.
My radio show, The Rob Kall Show, runs 9-10 PM EST Wednesday evenings, on AM 1360, WNJC and is archived on www.whiterosesociety.org.
Or check the archived interviews at: whiterosesociety.org
A few declarations.
-While I'm registered as a Democrat, I consider myself to be a dynamic critic of the Democratic party, just as, well, not quite as much, but almost as much as I am a critic of Republicans.
- My articles express my personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.
August 25, 2008
Cindy Sheehan Bugged in Denver
by Rob Kall
Cindy Sheehan returned to her Denver hotel room today to find the door unlocked and ajar. She walked in to discover a man working on her phone, screw driver in hand.
Sheehan reported, in an email:
"As I walked toward my room, I noticed that the door was opened with the security bolt blocking the complete closing of the door. I knew immediately that I had not left the door open, and I double checked to make sure it was the right room because, as a frequent traveler, I have been known to forget my room number, but it was the right room.
I was upset at first thinking that housekeeping had made a mistake and left my room open and I was worried that something might be missing. So I walked into my room and bigger than life, there was a man standing by my desk holding the room phone with a screwdriver in his hand!
I immediately said; "What the hell are you doing? Are you putting a bug on my phone?" He looked like he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and stammered out: "N--no, we are having problems with the phone." I told him to get out of my room because my phone was fine and I called the front desk and the person at the front desk stammered something out about "problems" with some of the phones.
This room was reserved soon after we got to Denver last night because the room we had was inadequate for 3 people. The room was reserved under my campaign manager's name with a CFC debit card. By the time we left for the march, it could have very well been ascertained that I was the one in this room, and the room we did reserve could be bugged, also. I am confident that that's what was happening when I walked in on the "maintenance" man"
You don't come in the room with a screwdriver if there are problems with the hotel phones. You do it electronically, through the system or you hook up a new phone."
She said to me, "How many hotel rooms have I been in the past four years? It was so obvious."
I asked, "Do you think it was Pelosi's people?" since Sheehan is running against Pelosi, for her congressional seat.
She replied, "Of course, I don't know."
I asked, "Have there been any other episodes that would make you believe this kind of action is being taken against you?"
She replied:
"Not since I've been running for congress, but there were several times when I was in Crawford, or protesting in D.C., when I felt like we were being surveiled. And actually, in Washington D.C., for a period of time, they would just blatantly follow me, and I would just invite them to come in and have coffee with me. Whenever I was in D.C., whose ever jurisdiction it was, I'd have either the Metro police, the Capitol Hill police or the Park police right on me. Sometimes they were in uniform and sometimes they were plainclothes. But they were very obvious."
Asked how her campaign is going, Sheehan replied:
"I believe the momentum is definitely on our side, especially the last couple weeks, with our signature drive.
The department of elections started to mess with our signatures and say that so many were in-valid, when we knew for a fact that they were valid, because I was checking them myself, on the computer. That really motivated people to help us-- to come to the office to help us or sign the petition (to get Cindy on the ballot) or whatever, that said that they had been meaning to help and that this was something that got them of the fence and got them to actually come into the office and volunteer. We've had ten of thousands of dollars come into the campaign since then and we really have a comfortable amount of money to get our message out-- the message that our country is in deep trouble and Nancy is definitely not the solution. She's part of the problem. And we're going to educate the people of San Francisco about this using alternative forms of media and convince them that I am the alternative-- that I will work to be the voice of the people of San Francisco. And that's something that she has not ever been. I think there is a lot of positive excitement and momentum. Her book tour didn't help her out any.
The campaign's going great. We've been able to hire more staff."
Asked about her goals for Denver, she described:
"After protesting the Republicans for so many years, the Democrats have been moving steadily to the right. We want to show that we're not okay with that, that we want to bring the party closer to the people and further from the corporate lobbyists."
So many people are waking up and starting to realize that there is very little difference in the leadership of the two parties. Working for an altenative third party or independent is one way to bring about real change.
So many people with Obama shirts and pins have come up to me and told me that they're 100% on my side and they're very distressed with the right turn of the Obama campaign and the democratic party and they're hoping that demonstrations that we were at earlier, and that will be happening all week, will bring their party to where they think it should be.
Meanwhile, Cindy's hotel room phone is in the hotel room refrigerator.
Rob Kall is executive editor and publisher of OpEdNews.com, President of Futurehealth, Inc, inventor . He is also published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com. He is a frequent Speaker on Politics, Impeachment, The art, science and power of story, heroes and the hero's journey, Positive Psychology, Stress, Biofeedback and a wide range of subjects. He is a campaign consultant specializing in tapping the power of stories for issue positioning, stump speeches and debates. He recently retired as organizer of several conferences, including StoryCon, the Summit Meeting on the Art, Science and Application of Story and The Winter Brain Meeting on neurofeedback, biofeedback, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology.
My radio show, The Rob Kall Show, runs 9-10 PM EST Wednesday evenings, on AM 1360, WNJC and is archived on www.whiterosesociety.org.
Or check the archived interviews at: whiterosesociety.org
A few declarations.
-While I'm registered as a Democrat, I consider myself to be a dynamic critic of the Democratic party, just as, well, not quite as much, but almost as much as I am a critic of Republicans.
- My articles express my personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.
John Edwards and Fake Morality
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=747&Itemid=1
John Edwards and Fake Morality
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
by Mel Reeves
Big Business media are coming to resemble the National Enquirer more each day. Former senator and presidential aspirant John Edwards' marital indiscretions loomed larger in the corporate media mind than matters of war and peace, fiscal solvency or human rights. There seems to be no correlation between spousal fidelity and presidential performance. "It does appear that the current president has been faithful to his wife - yet George Bush has committed every transgression imaginable against the U.S. Constitution, and has behaved faithlessly towards to the citizenry he is sworn to protect."
"Porn posing as news is right up our alley."
Despite all the recent hoopla over when and how long former North Carolina Senator and recent Democratic party presidential contender John Edwards cheated on his wife Elizabeth and whether he and Reil Hunter have a love child or not, at the end of the day it has very little bearing on our collective wellbeing.
When someone watches Entertainment Tonight or picks up a supermarket tabloid, they do so because they are interested in the private lives of the rich and famous. They do it out of morbid curiosity, or simply to know how the other half lives.
But when one reads the "news" it is with the anticipation that you will be provided with useful information. So when we are served a menu of tabloid news - the information on Edwards's affair was initially taken from the National Enquirer - one has to ask: what does this have to do with me?
Is infidelity an indicator of how a politician will perform in office? I think not. Judging from past presidents that were philanderers it didn't seem to limit their effectiveness in office. While Bill Clinton may have been the worst of the lot, in terms of sexual discretion, he was still able to steer the US imperial ship and impose America's will on the world. John Kennedy was rumored to have shared Marilyn Monroe with his brother and was otherwise unfaithful to his wife, Jacqueline. It does appear that the current president has been faithful to his wife - yet George Bush has committed every transgression imaginable against the U.S. Constitution, and has behaved faithlessly towards to the citizenry he is sworn to protect.
"Most print and broadcast outlets do not give us actual news, but rather, their own prepackaged, prejudiced perspective on the world."
Salacious reporting about extramarital affairs and rumors of affairs is part of the pornification of the news. Most print and broadcast outlets do not give us actual news, but rather, their own prepackaged, prejudiced perspective on the world. And since the American public has been trained to be entertained more than informed - titillated rather than intellectually stimulated - porn posing as news is right up our alley.
While FOX news is little more than an infomercial for right wing ideology - and the worst offender in this race to numb our minds - the other "news" organizations are not far behind. CNN, supposedly "the most trusted name in news," and MSNBC brought in their experts to kick the John Edwards scandal around, and CBS, NBC and ABC all used up precious airtime dabbling in dirt.
Not that there is a dearth of real news. There are two big Bush wars that are barely covered beyond the airing of official press releases and Pentagon-inspired commentary. Why aren't the media scandalized by the General Accounting Office's discovery that $23 billion slated to be spent in Iraq is unaccounted for? Why does the Attorney General of the United States think that folks should go Scott-free for unlawfully filling Justice Department jobs? There are enough unanswered questions to busy any 24-hour news machine - if explicating the world were actually the objective.
But the press chose to belabor Edwards' indiscretions.
"Edwards had the nerve to run a populist campaign."
Edwards is no longer running for office, though there were rumors that he was being considered as a vice presidential candidate.
I suspect that one of the other reasons the former presidential candidate was attacked with such ferocity was because he had the nerve to run a populist campaign in an age when the ruling class feels no need to throw a bone to working people. Whatever the reason, Edwards showed real heart and compassion, touring poverty-stricken areas and speaking of the "two Americas." Like none of the other contenders, he put a spotlight on New Orleans. In some ruling circles, that's considered a crime.
If a politician came along who made sure that Johnny could read whether he lived in the Ozarks or the ghetto, kept affordable roofs over our heads, ensured that we all took home a fair and livable wage, were afforded universal health care and equal opportunity, few of us would care about the condition of his or her marriage.
Corporate media keep us focused on false morality - on the private affairs of luminaries - so that we won't confront the real forces that devalue the lives of the vast majority of us.
Mel Reeves is an activist living in Miami. He can be contacted at mellaneous19@yahoo.com
John Edwards and Fake Morality
Wednesday, 20 August 2008
by Mel Reeves
Big Business media are coming to resemble the National Enquirer more each day. Former senator and presidential aspirant John Edwards' marital indiscretions loomed larger in the corporate media mind than matters of war and peace, fiscal solvency or human rights. There seems to be no correlation between spousal fidelity and presidential performance. "It does appear that the current president has been faithful to his wife - yet George Bush has committed every transgression imaginable against the U.S. Constitution, and has behaved faithlessly towards to the citizenry he is sworn to protect."
"Porn posing as news is right up our alley."
Despite all the recent hoopla over when and how long former North Carolina Senator and recent Democratic party presidential contender John Edwards cheated on his wife Elizabeth and whether he and Reil Hunter have a love child or not, at the end of the day it has very little bearing on our collective wellbeing.
When someone watches Entertainment Tonight or picks up a supermarket tabloid, they do so because they are interested in the private lives of the rich and famous. They do it out of morbid curiosity, or simply to know how the other half lives.
But when one reads the "news" it is with the anticipation that you will be provided with useful information. So when we are served a menu of tabloid news - the information on Edwards's affair was initially taken from the National Enquirer - one has to ask: what does this have to do with me?
Is infidelity an indicator of how a politician will perform in office? I think not. Judging from past presidents that were philanderers it didn't seem to limit their effectiveness in office. While Bill Clinton may have been the worst of the lot, in terms of sexual discretion, he was still able to steer the US imperial ship and impose America's will on the world. John Kennedy was rumored to have shared Marilyn Monroe with his brother and was otherwise unfaithful to his wife, Jacqueline. It does appear that the current president has been faithful to his wife - yet George Bush has committed every transgression imaginable against the U.S. Constitution, and has behaved faithlessly towards to the citizenry he is sworn to protect.
"Most print and broadcast outlets do not give us actual news, but rather, their own prepackaged, prejudiced perspective on the world."
Salacious reporting about extramarital affairs and rumors of affairs is part of the pornification of the news. Most print and broadcast outlets do not give us actual news, but rather, their own prepackaged, prejudiced perspective on the world. And since the American public has been trained to be entertained more than informed - titillated rather than intellectually stimulated - porn posing as news is right up our alley.
While FOX news is little more than an infomercial for right wing ideology - and the worst offender in this race to numb our minds - the other "news" organizations are not far behind. CNN, supposedly "the most trusted name in news," and MSNBC brought in their experts to kick the John Edwards scandal around, and CBS, NBC and ABC all used up precious airtime dabbling in dirt.
Not that there is a dearth of real news. There are two big Bush wars that are barely covered beyond the airing of official press releases and Pentagon-inspired commentary. Why aren't the media scandalized by the General Accounting Office's discovery that $23 billion slated to be spent in Iraq is unaccounted for? Why does the Attorney General of the United States think that folks should go Scott-free for unlawfully filling Justice Department jobs? There are enough unanswered questions to busy any 24-hour news machine - if explicating the world were actually the objective.
But the press chose to belabor Edwards' indiscretions.
"Edwards had the nerve to run a populist campaign."
Edwards is no longer running for office, though there were rumors that he was being considered as a vice presidential candidate.
I suspect that one of the other reasons the former presidential candidate was attacked with such ferocity was because he had the nerve to run a populist campaign in an age when the ruling class feels no need to throw a bone to working people. Whatever the reason, Edwards showed real heart and compassion, touring poverty-stricken areas and speaking of the "two Americas." Like none of the other contenders, he put a spotlight on New Orleans. In some ruling circles, that's considered a crime.
If a politician came along who made sure that Johnny could read whether he lived in the Ozarks or the ghetto, kept affordable roofs over our heads, ensured that we all took home a fair and livable wage, were afforded universal health care and equal opportunity, few of us would care about the condition of his or her marriage.
Corporate media keep us focused on false morality - on the private affairs of luminaries - so that we won't confront the real forces that devalue the lives of the vast majority of us.
Mel Reeves is an activist living in Miami. He can be contacted at mellaneous19@yahoo.com
Friday, August 29, 2008
Whopping Fish Declared New Species
http://www.livescience.com/animals/080821-goliath-grouper.htmlWhopping Fish Declared New Species
Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer
LiveScience.com
Thu Aug 21, 11:11 AM ET
A man-sized grouper that trolls the tropical waters of the Eastern Pacific Ocean for octopuses and crabs has been identified as a new fish species after genetic tests.
Called the goliath grouper, the fish can grow to six feet (1.8 meters) in length and weigh a whopping 1,000 pounds (454 kg). Until now, scientists had grouped this species with an identical looking fish (also called the goliath grouper, or Epinephelus itajara) living in the Atlantic Ocean.
"For more than a century, ichthyologists have thought that Pacific and Atlantic goliath grouper were the same species," said lead researcher Matthew Craig of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, "and the argument was settled before the widespread use of genetic techniques."
Once upon a time, about 3.5 million years ago - before the Caribbean and the Pacific were separated by present-day Panama - they were, in fact, the same species. Now, DNA tests have revealed the two populations have distinct genes, indicating they likely evolved into two separate species after their ocean homes were divided by Central America.
Scientists disagree about how to define the term "species" and what separates species from one another biologically, though some say that a species is a group that can mate with one another and produce offspring that are not sterile. However, this biological definition doesn't always hold up, for instance, with coyotes and wolves (considered separate species), which can successfully produce fertile offspring. In this study, the scientists relied on differences in the fishes' genetic codes to establish the separate grouper species.
The new Pacific species, now designated as Epinephelus quinquefasciatus, is described in a recent issue of the journal Endangered Species Research.
The Atlantic variety, E. itajara, is currently listed as critically endangered by the IUCN, or International Union for Conservation of Nature. Due to its scarcity, E. quinquefasciatus also may be considered critically endangered.
"In light of our new findings, the Pacific goliath grouper should be treated with separate management and conservation strategies," said researcher Rachel Graham of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York.
The research was funded by Programa Petrobras Ambiental, Conservation International Brazil to Projeto Meros do Brasil, The Summit Foundation, National Science Foundation and Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.
FDA to permit irradiation of spinach, lettuce
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/22/MNAF12GA03.DTL
FDA to permit irradiation of spinach, lettuce
George Raine, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2008
Nearly two years after E. coli bacteria traced to California-grown spinach killed three people and sickened 205, the federal government says it will allow producers of fresh iceberg lettuce and spinach to use irradiation to control food-borne pathogens and extend shelf life.
The Food and Drug Administration is amending the food-additive regulations to provide what it calls the safe use of ionizing radiation for just the two leafy greens. The FDA also has received petitions seeking permission to use irradiation for other lettuces and many other foods.
The government is allowing the practice in the wake of the major E. coli outbreak in 2006 and numerous other problems with food safety and recalls. But this won't be first time such a technique has been used on food. Consumers have eaten irradiated meat for years.
Despite some consumer concern, the FDA says irradiation is safe.
"The agency has determined that this action is of a type that does not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment," reads the FDA's final rule, released Thursday and effective today.
'Expensive gimmick'
As expected, criticism of the FDA was swift.
Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer rights group that challenges what it calls corporate control and abuse of food and water resources, said that very little testing has been conducted on the safety and wholesomeness of irradiated vegetables. The group also said the action was off target.
"It is unbelievable that the FDA's first action on this issue is to turn to irradiation rather than focus on how to prevent contamination of these crops," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "Instead of beefing up its capacity to inspect food facilities or test food for contamination, all the FDA has to offer consumers is an impractical, ineffective and very expensive gimmick like irradiation."
On the industry side, there is little demand for irradiation from California growers and shippers of spinach and iceberg lettuce.
"I think that from a growers' perspective, we have to consider anything that helps us provide safety for consumers, but whether this takes off depends on consumers," said Cathy Enright, vice president for government affairs for Western Growers, which represents growers, packers and shippers of nearly half of the nation's fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts.
"In any marketing decision, we have to look at cost in adapting the technology and consumer acceptance," which will take time to develop, she said.
The petition for the voluntary use of ionizing radiation was filed in 2000 by the Grocery Manufacturers Association. At the time, said Robert Brackett, the group's chief scientist, the grocers wanted permission to use irradiation in the preparation of many foods. However, they amended the petition and asked the government to focus on iceberg lettuce and spinach after the 2006 E. coli outbreak.
The contamination was traced to spinach co-packaged by Dole and Natural Selection Foods in San Juan Bautista (San Benito County). Spinach virtually vanished from grocery stores as demand plummeted.
"That was a big motivation for us," said Brackett, in Washington, D.C.
California producers of leafy greens, in the aftermath of the case of the contaminated spinach, formed a voluntary group called the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, which developed a food safety protocol for its members - nearly all of the major leafy green producers in California. The approved business practices range from accommodating fieldworker sanitation to preventing animal contamination of leafy green vegetables.
Staved off regulation
The marketing effort also kept the producers steps ahead of attempts at government regulation of the industry.
The marketing group, said its chief executive, Scott Horsfall, was surprised by the government rule announced Thursday, saying, "It's not something we have talked about in the year and a half we have had the marketing agreement in place."
He added, "I do not know anyone clamoring for it. There has to be consumer acceptance. We do not know how big a hurdle that might be. The science needs to be looked at and the cost, too."
Others feel it is a step in the right direction.
The grocers' association's Brackett said, "It's more of a safety net. No matter how good a job you do with preventative steps - good practices, proper sanitation - there is still a small chance for contamination. This takes care of those small chances."
Feral swine
The California spinach was contaminated by feral swine, an investigation later found. Most of the victims were from Wisconsin and Utah. William Marler, a Seattle lawyer representing victims of food-borne illness, is handling lawsuits for 103 families affected by the outbreak. All the suits except four have been resolved, he said Friday.
Marler said the ionizing radiation tool "gives potential consumers more choice." He said most of the E. coli problems in recent years have been with mass-produced, bagged product, "and those products are ripe for using some kill step like irradiation to make it safer."
Marler, along with the Grocery Manufacturing Association, advocates for national food safety oversight regulation and said this week's FDA rule may prompt more of a discussion about that.
"Everyone would have to play by that rule," said Marler.
E-mail George Raine at graine@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
FDA to permit irradiation of spinach, lettuce
George Raine, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, August 22, 2008
Nearly two years after E. coli bacteria traced to California-grown spinach killed three people and sickened 205, the federal government says it will allow producers of fresh iceberg lettuce and spinach to use irradiation to control food-borne pathogens and extend shelf life.
The Food and Drug Administration is amending the food-additive regulations to provide what it calls the safe use of ionizing radiation for just the two leafy greens. The FDA also has received petitions seeking permission to use irradiation for other lettuces and many other foods.
The government is allowing the practice in the wake of the major E. coli outbreak in 2006 and numerous other problems with food safety and recalls. But this won't be first time such a technique has been used on food. Consumers have eaten irradiated meat for years.
Despite some consumer concern, the FDA says irradiation is safe.
"The agency has determined that this action is of a type that does not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment," reads the FDA's final rule, released Thursday and effective today.
'Expensive gimmick'
As expected, criticism of the FDA was swift.
Food & Water Watch, a nonprofit consumer rights group that challenges what it calls corporate control and abuse of food and water resources, said that very little testing has been conducted on the safety and wholesomeness of irradiated vegetables. The group also said the action was off target.
"It is unbelievable that the FDA's first action on this issue is to turn to irradiation rather than focus on how to prevent contamination of these crops," said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch. "Instead of beefing up its capacity to inspect food facilities or test food for contamination, all the FDA has to offer consumers is an impractical, ineffective and very expensive gimmick like irradiation."
On the industry side, there is little demand for irradiation from California growers and shippers of spinach and iceberg lettuce.
"I think that from a growers' perspective, we have to consider anything that helps us provide safety for consumers, but whether this takes off depends on consumers," said Cathy Enright, vice president for government affairs for Western Growers, which represents growers, packers and shippers of nearly half of the nation's fresh fruits, vegetables and nuts.
"In any marketing decision, we have to look at cost in adapting the technology and consumer acceptance," which will take time to develop, she said.
The petition for the voluntary use of ionizing radiation was filed in 2000 by the Grocery Manufacturers Association. At the time, said Robert Brackett, the group's chief scientist, the grocers wanted permission to use irradiation in the preparation of many foods. However, they amended the petition and asked the government to focus on iceberg lettuce and spinach after the 2006 E. coli outbreak.
The contamination was traced to spinach co-packaged by Dole and Natural Selection Foods in San Juan Bautista (San Benito County). Spinach virtually vanished from grocery stores as demand plummeted.
"That was a big motivation for us," said Brackett, in Washington, D.C.
California producers of leafy greens, in the aftermath of the case of the contaminated spinach, formed a voluntary group called the Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, which developed a food safety protocol for its members - nearly all of the major leafy green producers in California. The approved business practices range from accommodating fieldworker sanitation to preventing animal contamination of leafy green vegetables.
Staved off regulation
The marketing effort also kept the producers steps ahead of attempts at government regulation of the industry.
The marketing group, said its chief executive, Scott Horsfall, was surprised by the government rule announced Thursday, saying, "It's not something we have talked about in the year and a half we have had the marketing agreement in place."
He added, "I do not know anyone clamoring for it. There has to be consumer acceptance. We do not know how big a hurdle that might be. The science needs to be looked at and the cost, too."
Others feel it is a step in the right direction.
The grocers' association's Brackett said, "It's more of a safety net. No matter how good a job you do with preventative steps - good practices, proper sanitation - there is still a small chance for contamination. This takes care of those small chances."
Feral swine
The California spinach was contaminated by feral swine, an investigation later found. Most of the victims were from Wisconsin and Utah. William Marler, a Seattle lawyer representing victims of food-borne illness, is handling lawsuits for 103 families affected by the outbreak. All the suits except four have been resolved, he said Friday.
Marler said the ionizing radiation tool "gives potential consumers more choice." He said most of the E. coli problems in recent years have been with mass-produced, bagged product, "and those products are ripe for using some kill step like irradiation to make it safer."
Marler, along with the Grocery Manufacturing Association, advocates for national food safety oversight regulation and said this week's FDA rule may prompt more of a discussion about that.
"Everyone would have to play by that rule," said Marler.
E-mail George Raine at graine@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Feds Say They've Solved 9/11 Mystery
http://news.aol.com/article/feds-say-theyve-solved-911-mystery/143502
Feds Say They've Solved 9/11 Mystery
By DEVLIN BARRETT, AP
GAITHERSBURG, Md. (Aug. 21) - Federal investigators said Thursday they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.
The 47-story trapezoid-shaped building sat north of the World Trade Center towers, across Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. On Sept. 11, it was set on fire by falling debris from the burning towers, but skeptics have long argued that fire and debris alone should not have brought down such a big steel-and-concrete structure.
Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology say their three-year investigation of the collapse determined the demise of WTC 7 was actually the first time in the world a fire caused the total failure of a skyscraper.
"The reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery," said Dr. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator on the NIST team.
Investigators also concluded that the collapse of the nearby towers broke the city water main, leaving the sprinkler system in the bottom half of the building without water.
The building has been the subject of a wide range of conspiracy theories for the last seven years, partly because the collapse occurred about seven hours after the twin towers came down. That fueled suspicion that someone intentionally blew up the building in a controlled demolition.
Critics like Mike Berger of the group 9/11 Truth said he wasn't buying the government's explanation.
"Their explanation simply isn't sufficient. We're being lied to," he said, arguing that there is other evidence suggesting explosives were used on the building.
Sunder said his team investigated the possibility that an explosion inside the building brought it down, but found there was no large boom or other noise that would have occurred with such a detonation. Investigators also created a giant computer model of the collapse, based partly on news footage from CBS News, that they say shows internal column failure brought down the building.
Investigators also ruled out the possibility that the collapse was caused by fires from a substantial amount of diesel fuel that was stored in the building, most of it for generators for the city's emergency operations command center.
The 77-page report concluded that the fatal blow to the building came when the 13th floor collapsed, weakening a critical steel support column that led to catastrophic failure.
"When this critical column buckled due to lack of floor supports, it was the first domino in the chain," said Sunder.
The NIST investigators issued more than a dozen building recommendations as a result of their inquiry, most of which repeat earlier recommendations from their investigation into the collapse of the two large towers.
In both instances, investigators concluded that extreme heat caused some steel beams to lose strength, causing further failures throughout the buildings until the entire structure succumbed.
The recommendations include building skyscrapers with stronger connections and framing systems to resist the effects of thermal expansion, and structural systems designed to prevent damage to one part of a building from spreading to other parts.
A spokeswoman for the leaseholder of the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein, praised the government's work.
"Hopefully this thorough report puts to rest the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, which dishonor the men and women who lost their lives on that terrible day," said Silverstein spokeswoman Dara McQuillen.
In discussing the findings, the investigator Sunder acknowledged that some may still not be convinced, but insisted the science behind their findings is "incredibly conclusive."
"The public should really recognize the science is really behind what we have said," he said, adding: "The obvious stares you in the face."
Feds Say They've Solved 9/11 Mystery
By DEVLIN BARRETT, AP
GAITHERSBURG, Md. (Aug. 21) - Federal investigators said Thursday they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.
The 47-story trapezoid-shaped building sat north of the World Trade Center towers, across Vesey Street in lower Manhattan. On Sept. 11, it was set on fire by falling debris from the burning towers, but skeptics have long argued that fire and debris alone should not have brought down such a big steel-and-concrete structure.
Scientists with the National Institute of Standards and Technology say their three-year investigation of the collapse determined the demise of WTC 7 was actually the first time in the world a fire caused the total failure of a skyscraper.
"The reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery," said Dr. Shyam Sunder, the lead investigator on the NIST team.
Investigators also concluded that the collapse of the nearby towers broke the city water main, leaving the sprinkler system in the bottom half of the building without water.
The building has been the subject of a wide range of conspiracy theories for the last seven years, partly because the collapse occurred about seven hours after the twin towers came down. That fueled suspicion that someone intentionally blew up the building in a controlled demolition.
Critics like Mike Berger of the group 9/11 Truth said he wasn't buying the government's explanation.
"Their explanation simply isn't sufficient. We're being lied to," he said, arguing that there is other evidence suggesting explosives were used on the building.
Sunder said his team investigated the possibility that an explosion inside the building brought it down, but found there was no large boom or other noise that would have occurred with such a detonation. Investigators also created a giant computer model of the collapse, based partly on news footage from CBS News, that they say shows internal column failure brought down the building.
Investigators also ruled out the possibility that the collapse was caused by fires from a substantial amount of diesel fuel that was stored in the building, most of it for generators for the city's emergency operations command center.
The 77-page report concluded that the fatal blow to the building came when the 13th floor collapsed, weakening a critical steel support column that led to catastrophic failure.
"When this critical column buckled due to lack of floor supports, it was the first domino in the chain," said Sunder.
The NIST investigators issued more than a dozen building recommendations as a result of their inquiry, most of which repeat earlier recommendations from their investigation into the collapse of the two large towers.
In both instances, investigators concluded that extreme heat caused some steel beams to lose strength, causing further failures throughout the buildings until the entire structure succumbed.
The recommendations include building skyscrapers with stronger connections and framing systems to resist the effects of thermal expansion, and structural systems designed to prevent damage to one part of a building from spreading to other parts.
A spokeswoman for the leaseholder of the World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein, praised the government's work.
"Hopefully this thorough report puts to rest the various 9/11 conspiracy theories, which dishonor the men and women who lost their lives on that terrible day," said Silverstein spokeswoman Dara McQuillen.
In discussing the findings, the investigator Sunder acknowledged that some may still not be convinced, but insisted the science behind their findings is "incredibly conclusive."
"The public should really recognize the science is really behind what we have said," he said, adding: "The obvious stares you in the face."
Educators Urge Lower Drinking Age to Cut Bingeing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/19/AR2008081902836.html
Educators Urge Lower Drinking Age to Cut Bingeing
By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 20, 2008; B03
Scores of college presidents, including the head of Maryland's public university system and the president of Johns Hopkins University, have an unexpected request for legislators: Please, lower the drinking age.
The Amethyst Initiative, launched in July, is a coalition of college presidents who say that the legal drinking age of 21 encourages binge drinking on campuses. William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, William Brody, president of Johns Hopkins, C.D. Mote Jr. of the University of Maryland and the presidents of Washington and Lee, Sweet Briar, Towson, Randolph-Macon, Duke, Tufts, Dartmouth and others have signed on to the effort.
It is likely to be difficult politically to change the drinking age, which has been 21 since the mid-1980s.
In a survey released yesterday by Nationwide Insurance, which is hosting a symposium on binge drinking in Washington in November with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 75 percent of adults said they support tougher enforcement of existing drinking laws.
In Maryland, the House drug and alcohol committee chairman called on local colleges to not take part.
"Far more teens die in alcohol-related incidents than [in those caused by] all the other illicit drugs combined," said Del. William A. Bronrott (D-Montgomery), who co-founded the Washington Regional Alcohol Program, which fights drunken driving and underage drinking. "Lowering the drinking age to 18 will only make the situation worse."
Educators Urge Lower Drinking Age to Cut Bingeing
By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 20, 2008; B03
Scores of college presidents, including the head of Maryland's public university system and the president of Johns Hopkins University, have an unexpected request for legislators: Please, lower the drinking age.
The Amethyst Initiative, launched in July, is a coalition of college presidents who say that the legal drinking age of 21 encourages binge drinking on campuses. William Kirwan, chancellor of the University System of Maryland, William Brody, president of Johns Hopkins, C.D. Mote Jr. of the University of Maryland and the presidents of Washington and Lee, Sweet Briar, Towson, Randolph-Macon, Duke, Tufts, Dartmouth and others have signed on to the effort.
It is likely to be difficult politically to change the drinking age, which has been 21 since the mid-1980s.
In a survey released yesterday by Nationwide Insurance, which is hosting a symposium on binge drinking in Washington in November with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, 75 percent of adults said they support tougher enforcement of existing drinking laws.
In Maryland, the House drug and alcohol committee chairman called on local colleges to not take part.
"Far more teens die in alcohol-related incidents than [in those caused by] all the other illicit drugs combined," said Del. William A. Bronrott (D-Montgomery), who co-founded the Washington Regional Alcohol Program, which fights drunken driving and underage drinking. "Lowering the drinking age to 18 will only make the situation worse."
Just Released: 2009 Honda Fit
http://autos.yahoo.com/articles/autos_content_landing_pages/631/just-released-2009-honda-fit/Just Released: 2009 Honda Fit
The fuel-efficient, style-rich 2009 Honda Fit can be yours for only $14,550. By Douglas Kott
There was a time when economy cars were suffocatingly boring—4-wheeled penalty boxes whose main directives of low price and high mileage put a chokehold on any hint of driving excitement or style. But Honda’s Fit, along with other so-called “B-class” cars like the Nissan Versa and Toyota Yaris, represents a sea change in thinking, helped along by $4-a-gallon gasoline. Suddenly, it’s hip to be eco-square.
In its last generation, the Fit already had an edge on its competitors in the driving fun category, and the all-new model goes the extra mile with a stronger version of its 1.5-liter 4-cylinder engine. Now with 117 bhp (up from 109) with additional mid -range torque and high-end power from a more sophisticated i-VTEC valve-lift system, the Fit charges across intersections like a scalded…penguin (with 0-60-mph times likely in the high 8-second range, it doesn’t quite make “cat” status). And while some models drop by 1 mpg in the combined EPA mileage cycle, the sales volume leader—the Fit Sport—retains its 27 city/33 highway rating from last year when equipped with the excellent 5-speed paddle-shift automatic (a 5-speed manual is also available).
The new Fit is also roomier, its wheelbase stretched by 1.9 in. and overall interior width up by 1.2 in. And the cabin feels more airy, by virtue of a windshield whose base has been pulled forward by 4.7 in., and fixed front quarter windows that are three times larger than before. The dash styling is adventurous, more along the lines of the Civic, only without the double-tier instrument nonsense. The rear “Magic” seats remain…they articulate ingeniously to fold flat, or you can just tilt up and lock the lower cushions to put tall objects immediately behind the front seats. Headrests are now recessed into the seatbacks; they no longer need to be removed to fold the seats down.
While the base Fit starts at $14,550, the Fit Sport ($16,060) hits the sweet spot, its aero kit, more aggressive nose and 16-in. alloy wheels showing off the body’s forward-sloping wedge shape to best effect. The Fit Sport “Navi” ($17,910) pairs in- dash navigation with a yaw-control system. Whatever the choice, the new Fit is frugal with fuel yet rich with style.
The FRS® Healthy Energy™ Challenge
http://frs7.healthyenergy.com
The FRS® Healthy Energy™ Challenge
We challenge you to stop being a spectator and participate in your life. We challenge you to thrive rather than just survive. We challenge you to make the most of your free time to complete your “to do” list and actually find some “me” time. We challenge you to do all the things you know you should do but don’t have the energy to do- and enjoy doing them. We challenge you to do all the things you dream of doing. We challenge you to take FRS Healthy Energy every day for two weeks and see how much more you’re capable of accomplishing in your life.
How FRS Works
FRS was originally tested and refined by doctors at the Harvard University Dana Farber Cancer Institute as a fatigue fighting and general health drink. It was then discovered by endurance athletes who found that it boosted and sustained their peak athletic performance while supporting their overall health. Now FRS is used by anyone who wants a sustained boost of energy.
The key ingredient in FRS is Quercetin. (pronounced: KWAIR-suh-ten)
Quercetin is a natural antioxidant found in the skins of apples, blueberries, and onions. It protects the adrenaline that your body naturally creates to give you energy for small daily tasks like staying awake at work and big events like running a marathon.
The FRS® Healthy Energy™ Challenge
We challenge you to stop being a spectator and participate in your life. We challenge you to thrive rather than just survive. We challenge you to make the most of your free time to complete your “to do” list and actually find some “me” time. We challenge you to do all the things you know you should do but don’t have the energy to do- and enjoy doing them. We challenge you to do all the things you dream of doing. We challenge you to take FRS Healthy Energy every day for two weeks and see how much more you’re capable of accomplishing in your life.
How FRS Works
FRS was originally tested and refined by doctors at the Harvard University Dana Farber Cancer Institute as a fatigue fighting and general health drink. It was then discovered by endurance athletes who found that it boosted and sustained their peak athletic performance while supporting their overall health. Now FRS is used by anyone who wants a sustained boost of energy.
The key ingredient in FRS is Quercetin. (pronounced: KWAIR-suh-ten)
Quercetin is a natural antioxidant found in the skins of apples, blueberries, and onions. It protects the adrenaline that your body naturally creates to give you energy for small daily tasks like staying awake at work and big events like running a marathon.
My Orgasmic Orgone Accumulator
http://blog.lavacocktail.com/2008/08/23/my-groovy-orgone-accumulator.aspxMy Orgasmic Orgone Accumulator
Posted by Lava Cocktail at Saturday, August 23, 2008
A few years ago, after being sent a review copy of The Orgone Accumulator Handbook by James DeMeo, I made a portable one out of a coffee can, wool felt and plenty of steel wool. I then stuffed steel wool into a rain gauge and this serves as my accumulator wand, although the instructions call for a test tube which I couldn't find at the time of construction. I also made a two ply accumulator blanket as well, which I use in my healing work.
The most tangible orgone results have been gotten from putting flower seeds into the accumulator for approx. ten days. Not having a green thumb whatsoever, I have to confess that I was quite amazed at how robust the flowers have become. considering that I just dumped them in the dirt and raked them a few times to spread them out during an unusually cold spring in Minnesota. They continue to grow, some over waist high now-without any application of fertilizer on my part. I've done nothing other than weeding the flower bed once and watering the plants on a regular basis, making sure to praise their good growing job, out loud of course.
Flowers from seeds put into an Orgone Accumulator
First developed by Wilhelm Reich who was most likely murdered by the AMA/ FDA for coming up with something that worked, i.e. using orgone energy to do everything from dissolve people's character armor and alleviate neurosis to improving plant growing as described above, we still can benefit from his genius and insight by making accumulators of our own. It is a fun project for sure and even a sequential klutz such as myself was able to follow the directions which can be found in DeMeo's book in chapter 16.
Orgone is most likely Reich's name for what is otherwise known as prana, chi, etc. i.e. life energy that diminishes with such things as pollution, emfs from cell phone towers and chem trails. Ironically, Demeo denies the existence of chem trails. Thus prompted, I sent him several pictures of them, one of which is included in Jerry E. Smith's Weather Warfare book, but DeMeo dismissed them all. My take on this is that he is worried about losing his credibility-esp. since he is an advocate of Reich's work and has successfully continued on with it without suffering the same harassment as Reich did, as far as I know. Maybe he'll see the reality of chem trails someday and not be afraid to admit it-then apply his knowledge of Reich's work in this area.
Reich also developed cloud busting technology which is thoroughly described in Heretic's Notebook: Emotions, Protocells, Ether-Drift and Cosmic Life Energy edited by James DeMeo and which I also reviewed a few years ago (it will take some digital digging to find it but when I do I'll post it here)-certainly worth checking out. For now I'm going to stick with the flowers and be grateful for such living proof of the efficacy of orgone accumulators.
Check out James's website @: http://www.orgonelab.org/
(C)2008-Jaye Beldo
http://www.lavacocktail.com
A Toast to your Psychic Health
Orgone is most likely Reich's name for what is otherwise known as prana, chi, etc. i.e. life energy that diminishes with such things as pollution, emfs from cell phone towers and chem trails. Ironically, Demeo denies the existence of chem trails. Thus prompted, I sent him several pictures of them, one of which is included in Jerry E. Smith's Weather Warfare book, but DeMeo dismissed them all. My take on this is that he is worried about losing his credibility-esp. since he is an advocate of Reich's work and has successfully continued on with it without suffering the same harassment as Reich did, as far as I know. Maybe he'll see the reality of chem trails someday and not be afraid to admit it-then apply his knowledge of Reich's work in this area.
Reich also developed cloud busting technology which is thoroughly described in Heretic's Notebook: Emotions, Protocells, Ether-Drift and Cosmic Life Energy edited by James DeMeo and which I also reviewed a few years ago (it will take some digital digging to find it but when I do I'll post it here)-certainly worth checking out. For now I'm going to stick with the flowers and be grateful for such living proof of the efficacy of orgone accumulators.
Check out James's website @: http://www.orgonelab.org/
(C)2008-Jaye Beldo
http://www.lavacocktail.com
A Toast to your Psychic Health
Inside the Rings
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/25/sports/olympics/25clarey.html
August 25, 2008
Inside the Rings
China Fulfills Its Wish for Olympic Domination
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
BEIJING — In a country of numerologists, it was surely not lost on the Chinese that the last medal they won at their undeniably successful Olympics was also their 100th.
It came late Sunday afternoon, shortly before the Closing Ceremony, from boxer Zhang Zhilei in the super heavyweight division, and the only thing that did not seem entirely appropriate as Zhang collected his prize was that he had just finished second.
Gold, not silver, was the color that defined these Games for the Chinese. They finished with 51 gold medals, the highest figure for any nation at an Olympics in 20 years, and they won them across a wider range of sports than any team in Beijing.
“Here the message is clear; you’ve got to win,” said China’s fencing coach Christian Bauer, a Frenchman, in an interview last week with the French newspaper L’Equipe. “When you’ve got a gold medal here, you’re somebody. When you have a silver, you’re not.”
The individual most defined by gold, of course, was Michael Phelps, whose eight gold medals included dramatic, too-close-to-call finishes in the 100-meter butterfly and the 4x100 freestyle relay. It will take an unimaginable effort to trump Phelps. Who will have the ways and means to even compete in nine medal events at a future Olympics, much less win nine?
Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter, certainly did all within his preternatural power to match Phelps’s global impact: winning the 100 and the 200 and the 4x100 relay all in world-record times and giving his ailing sport its latest shot of adrenaline.
One can only hope that there is no dark epilogue to either Bolt’s or Phelps’s phenomenal success stories. This is an era when too many larger-than-life sports figures have turned out to be frauds, including Marion Jones, who has now been stripped of the five track and field medals she won in Sydney at the 2000 Games
“I know, for me, I’m clean,” Phelps said. “I purposely wanted to do more tests to prove it. People can say what they want, but the facts are the facts.”
The only prominent athlete to test positive during these Games was Lyudmila Blonska of Ukraine, who was stripped of her silver medal in the heptathlon and removed from the women’s long jump final. But the Games’ competitive landscape was also altered before the Olympics began when track’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, suspended seven Russian athletes for tampering with their doping samples, including Yelena Soboleva, the overwhelming favorite to win the women’s 1,500 in Beijing.
With Soboleva absent, the Kenyan women won their first Olympic gold medals on the track, taking the 800 and 1,500.
The Russian Olympic team showed signs of decline, dropping to third in the overall medal standings behind the United States, which finished with 110, and China with its conveniently round 100.
The Russians won 36 gold medals and 88 over all in 2000; they won 27 golds and 92 over all in Athens. This time the final tallies were 23 and 72.
It will be intriguing to see whether Russia, with its increased national wealth and intention to upgrade its sports facilities, will be able to reverse the downward trend in time for London 2012.
The Chinese, however, are clearly in the ascendancy. They continue to dominate in diving, weightlifting, badminton and table tennis. But they also won their first Olympic gold medals here in archery, rowing, boxing, sailing and the gymnastics discipline of trampoline. They won their first medals in beach volleyball, synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics and field hockey.
Remarkably, they won the gold medal count despite failing to win any golds in traditional team sports or in track and field, which awards more medals than any other sport. They also failed to win a medal in basketball, the sport that clearly generates the most passion in China, as was evident to anyone who had the earsplitting experience of watching the national teams’ games.
In track and field, the Chinese won just two bronzes and lost their biggest status symbol, Liu Xiang, to an Achilles’ tendon injury before he could even clear the first hurdle. But Chinese athletes were so successful that even the disappointment of Liu could not spoil this extraordinary national celebration.
China’s rise meant less gold for the rest of the world, with 52 nations winning gold medals here compared with 56 in Athens in 2004. But the overall spread was more balanced, with 87 nations winning at least one medal here, including Olympic minnows like Togo and Mauritius, compared with 74 in Athens.
With impeccable timing with London looming, the British were the biggest mover, climbing from 10th in the medals standings last time to fourth by any measure this time. Their 19 gold medals and 47 overall medals gave them their best overall performance at an Olympics in a century.
Rebecca Adlington, their 19-year-old surprise double gold medalist in swimming, and Chris Hoy, their triple gold medalist in track cycling, will surely not lack for attention over the next four years.
Nor, of course, will Phelps or Bolt, both of whom intend to compete in London. But they, like all future Olympians who try to match their achievements, now have an exceedingly difficult act to follow.
August 25, 2008
Inside the Rings
China Fulfills Its Wish for Olympic Domination
By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY
BEIJING — In a country of numerologists, it was surely not lost on the Chinese that the last medal they won at their undeniably successful Olympics was also their 100th.
It came late Sunday afternoon, shortly before the Closing Ceremony, from boxer Zhang Zhilei in the super heavyweight division, and the only thing that did not seem entirely appropriate as Zhang collected his prize was that he had just finished second.
Gold, not silver, was the color that defined these Games for the Chinese. They finished with 51 gold medals, the highest figure for any nation at an Olympics in 20 years, and they won them across a wider range of sports than any team in Beijing.
“Here the message is clear; you’ve got to win,” said China’s fencing coach Christian Bauer, a Frenchman, in an interview last week with the French newspaper L’Equipe. “When you’ve got a gold medal here, you’re somebody. When you have a silver, you’re not.”
The individual most defined by gold, of course, was Michael Phelps, whose eight gold medals included dramatic, too-close-to-call finishes in the 100-meter butterfly and the 4x100 freestyle relay. It will take an unimaginable effort to trump Phelps. Who will have the ways and means to even compete in nine medal events at a future Olympics, much less win nine?
Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter, certainly did all within his preternatural power to match Phelps’s global impact: winning the 100 and the 200 and the 4x100 relay all in world-record times and giving his ailing sport its latest shot of adrenaline.
One can only hope that there is no dark epilogue to either Bolt’s or Phelps’s phenomenal success stories. This is an era when too many larger-than-life sports figures have turned out to be frauds, including Marion Jones, who has now been stripped of the five track and field medals she won in Sydney at the 2000 Games
“I know, for me, I’m clean,” Phelps said. “I purposely wanted to do more tests to prove it. People can say what they want, but the facts are the facts.”
The only prominent athlete to test positive during these Games was Lyudmila Blonska of Ukraine, who was stripped of her silver medal in the heptathlon and removed from the women’s long jump final. But the Games’ competitive landscape was also altered before the Olympics began when track’s governing body, the International Association of Athletics Federations, suspended seven Russian athletes for tampering with their doping samples, including Yelena Soboleva, the overwhelming favorite to win the women’s 1,500 in Beijing.
With Soboleva absent, the Kenyan women won their first Olympic gold medals on the track, taking the 800 and 1,500.
The Russian Olympic team showed signs of decline, dropping to third in the overall medal standings behind the United States, which finished with 110, and China with its conveniently round 100.
The Russians won 36 gold medals and 88 over all in 2000; they won 27 golds and 92 over all in Athens. This time the final tallies were 23 and 72.
It will be intriguing to see whether Russia, with its increased national wealth and intention to upgrade its sports facilities, will be able to reverse the downward trend in time for London 2012.
The Chinese, however, are clearly in the ascendancy. They continue to dominate in diving, weightlifting, badminton and table tennis. But they also won their first Olympic gold medals here in archery, rowing, boxing, sailing and the gymnastics discipline of trampoline. They won their first medals in beach volleyball, synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics and field hockey.
Remarkably, they won the gold medal count despite failing to win any golds in traditional team sports or in track and field, which awards more medals than any other sport. They also failed to win a medal in basketball, the sport that clearly generates the most passion in China, as was evident to anyone who had the earsplitting experience of watching the national teams’ games.
In track and field, the Chinese won just two bronzes and lost their biggest status symbol, Liu Xiang, to an Achilles’ tendon injury before he could even clear the first hurdle. But Chinese athletes were so successful that even the disappointment of Liu could not spoil this extraordinary national celebration.
China’s rise meant less gold for the rest of the world, with 52 nations winning gold medals here compared with 56 in Athens in 2004. But the overall spread was more balanced, with 87 nations winning at least one medal here, including Olympic minnows like Togo and Mauritius, compared with 74 in Athens.
With impeccable timing with London looming, the British were the biggest mover, climbing from 10th in the medals standings last time to fourth by any measure this time. Their 19 gold medals and 47 overall medals gave them their best overall performance at an Olympics in a century.
Rebecca Adlington, their 19-year-old surprise double gold medalist in swimming, and Chris Hoy, their triple gold medalist in track cycling, will surely not lack for attention over the next four years.
Nor, of course, will Phelps or Bolt, both of whom intend to compete in London. But they, like all future Olympians who try to match their achievements, now have an exceedingly difficult act to follow.
Beijing’s Bad Faith Olympics
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/opinion/23sat1.html
August 23, 2008
Editorial
Beijing’s Bad Faith Olympics
The Beijing Olympics still have one more day to run. But the final gold medal — for authoritarian image management — can already be safely awarded to China’s Communist Party leadership.
Beijing got what it wanted out of this globally televised spectacular. It reaped a huge prestige bonanza that it will surely use to promote its international influence and, we fear, further tighten its grip at home.
It pocketed these gains without offering any concessions in return. When it increased repression — rather than loosening up — a supine International Olympic Committee barely offered a protest. Most world leaders, including President Bush, were nearly as complicit.
In Beijing for the opening ceremony, Mr. Bush seemed eager to play the role of the apolitical sports fan, instead of publicly pressing China’s leaders on the ongoing Olympics crackdown. That nicely fit into the Chinese script of talking up sports while shutting down politics.
To win the right to host these Games, China promised to honor the Olympic ideals of nonviolence, openness to the world and individual expression. Those promises were systematically broken, starting with this spring’s brutal repression in Tibet and continuing on to the ugly farce of inviting its citizens to apply for legal protest permits and then arresting them if they actually tried to do so.
Along the way, government critics were pre-emptively rounded up and jailed, domestic news outlets tightly controlled, foreign journalists denied full access to the Internet and thousands of Beijing’s least telegenic residents were evicted from their homes and out of camera range. On Friday, the Chinese police confirmed that six Americans protesting China’s rule in Tibet had been sentenced to 10 days of detention.
Surely one of the signature events of these Games was the sentencing of two women in their late 70s to “re-education through labor.” Their crime? Applying for permission to protest the inadequate compensation they felt they had received when the government seized their homes years ago for urban redevelopment.
A year ago, the I.O.C. predicted that these Games would be “a force for good” and a spur to human-rights progress. Instead, as Human Rights Watch has reported, they became a catalyst for intensified human-rights abuse.
Mr. Bush has taken some note of China’s appalling human-rights record this summer — privately meeting with Chinese dissidents in Washington just before his visit to the Games and gently nudging his hosts on religious freedom while in Beijing. With these repression-scarred Olympics now drawing to a close, Mr. Bush and other world leaders must tell Beijing that its failure to live up to its Olympic commitments will neither be ignored nor forgotten.
The medal count and DVD sales cannot be the last word on the Beijing Games.
August 23, 2008
Editorial
Beijing’s Bad Faith Olympics
The Beijing Olympics still have one more day to run. But the final gold medal — for authoritarian image management — can already be safely awarded to China’s Communist Party leadership.
Beijing got what it wanted out of this globally televised spectacular. It reaped a huge prestige bonanza that it will surely use to promote its international influence and, we fear, further tighten its grip at home.
It pocketed these gains without offering any concessions in return. When it increased repression — rather than loosening up — a supine International Olympic Committee barely offered a protest. Most world leaders, including President Bush, were nearly as complicit.
In Beijing for the opening ceremony, Mr. Bush seemed eager to play the role of the apolitical sports fan, instead of publicly pressing China’s leaders on the ongoing Olympics crackdown. That nicely fit into the Chinese script of talking up sports while shutting down politics.
To win the right to host these Games, China promised to honor the Olympic ideals of nonviolence, openness to the world and individual expression. Those promises were systematically broken, starting with this spring’s brutal repression in Tibet and continuing on to the ugly farce of inviting its citizens to apply for legal protest permits and then arresting them if they actually tried to do so.
Along the way, government critics were pre-emptively rounded up and jailed, domestic news outlets tightly controlled, foreign journalists denied full access to the Internet and thousands of Beijing’s least telegenic residents were evicted from their homes and out of camera range. On Friday, the Chinese police confirmed that six Americans protesting China’s rule in Tibet had been sentenced to 10 days of detention.
Surely one of the signature events of these Games was the sentencing of two women in their late 70s to “re-education through labor.” Their crime? Applying for permission to protest the inadequate compensation they felt they had received when the government seized their homes years ago for urban redevelopment.
A year ago, the I.O.C. predicted that these Games would be “a force for good” and a spur to human-rights progress. Instead, as Human Rights Watch has reported, they became a catalyst for intensified human-rights abuse.
Mr. Bush has taken some note of China’s appalling human-rights record this summer — privately meeting with Chinese dissidents in Washington just before his visit to the Games and gently nudging his hosts on religious freedom while in Beijing. With these repression-scarred Olympics now drawing to a close, Mr. Bush and other world leaders must tell Beijing that its failure to live up to its Olympic commitments will neither be ignored nor forgotten.
The medal count and DVD sales cannot be the last word on the Beijing Games.
IOC’s gymnastics probe falls well short
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/gymnastics/news?slug=dw-iocprobe082208IOC’s gymnastics probe falls well short
By Dan Wetzel, Yahoo! Sports
8-22-8
Finally, gold Aug 19, 2008 Johnson only sees the silver lining Aug 17, 2008
BEIJING – At least when the NCAA runs one of its bogus investigations of Big State U, it sends some people out in the field, conducts some interviews and then after a few months (or years) claims that the Ferrari Enzo the star tailback was driving really did come from grandma back home and not the booster or the agent.
The International Olympic Committee apparently sees no need for such pause or pretense.
The “investigation” it ordered into whether some Chinese gymnasts were under the minimum age of 16 was concluded after just a few hours Friday.
The not-so stunning verdict: The Chinese are innocent.
Please move along, now. Nothing to see here.
“We believe the matter will be put to rest and there’s no question … on the eligibility,” IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said. “The information we have received seems satisfactory in terms of the correct documentation – including birth certificates.”
While you slept, the IOC swept.
Sorry, the matter isn’t being put to rest no matter how many whitewash inspections are done. A real investigation does not take hours. It takes days or weeks or however long is necessary.
What exactly did they do except look at the same questionable info – government-issued passports – they had previously been presented? Did they ask He Kexin if she was 16, cross your heart and hope to die?
The Associated Press says the Chinese turned over information to the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) on Thursday evening. It included the current and former passport, ID card and family residence permit for the double-gold medalist. All had the same and proper birth date.
That was enough for FIG, which by Friday morning had declared everything fine.
No word on the old websites, interviews with friends and families, a trip to the birth hospital or discovery of old school records. Nothing.
Perhaps this would have amounted to little and perhaps He and the others are, indeed, 16 – but this was nothing but the most ridiculous kind of propaganda.
A 12-hour investigation? Really? No one at the IOC or FIG has even the sense to think, “Perhaps we should at least pretend to care before simply clearing the gymnasts?”
The investigation by FIG was so fast word of its start didn’t make the Chinese government-controlled English newspaper China Daily. No news is good news.
This in the face of mounting evidence from multiple media and citizen investigations in America and England that showed more and more old registration forms, gymnastics websites and athlete logs that showed three of the six Chinese gymnasts used to list birth dates from 1993 and 1994, which would make them too young to compete at the Olympics.
In an effort to protect young athletes before their bones and muscles fully formed, FIG mandates that to compete in the Beijing Games a gymnast must be born in 1992 or before.
First came stories in The New York Times, The Associated Press and the Times of London that listed He’s birth date as a too-young Jan. 1, 1994. Then private citizens got involved. The latest was from a New York computer expert going by the name Stryde Hax who combed old Chinese documents on the web that found even more of the same.
Just last December government controlled media wrote stories about He calling her a 13-year-old “little girl” and a “star of the future.” The future became now when she showed up at the Olympics with a Chinese passport that claimed she was born Jan. 1, 1992.
There were also suspicions about two of her teammates. The birth date of Yang Yilin was listed on official national registration lists posted by the General Administration of Sport of China website for three years from 2004 to 2006 as a too young Aug. 26, 1993, according to the AP.
On her passport her birth date is Aug. 26, 1992.
Jiang Yuyuan’s birthday was Oct. 1, 1993, as recently as a registration list for a 2007 competition. On her passport she was born Nov. 1, 1991.
Perhaps the birth date of one gymnast could be confused one time, but half the team on multiple occasions? Considering 2000 Chinese bronze medalist Yang Yun later admitted on state television she was 14 that year, the IOC or FIG should have been all over this.
Instead, they did nothing until the USOC requested action. Then they just brushed it aside.
Having younger, and presumably smaller and more nimble athletes, can be a significant advantage in some gymnastics disciplines. Romania’s Nadia Comaneci scored seven perfect 10s in the 1976 Games when she was just 14, before FIG set the age limit.
This investigation isn’t fair to the sport of gymnastics, which will forever look suspiciously on the competition here. It isn’t fair to the United States, Romania and Russia, who all deserve to move up one spot on the medal stand if China used ineligible athletes.
And it isn’t fair to China, He and her teammates, who if innocent don’t deserve this to hang over their heads forever.
The IOC and FIG have never been about fair, though. They’ve been about kowtowing to the powerful and cashing the checks. They have so lost their way, have become so insulated by the power, they can’t even fathom no one is accepting a kangaroo court investigation.
Even the NCAA is smarter than that.
First to break records in 100, 200 at same Games
http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/summer08/trackandfield/news/story?id=3544110
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Bolt is first to break records in 100, 200 at same Games
Associated Press
BEIJING -- Usain Bolt kept driving for the finish line, knowing the race was won but there was something even bigger out there.
Not just another world record, but history itself. Not just an unheard-of blowout, but the chance to be called the greatest sprinter ever.
Bolt may have done just that Wednesday night, on his sport's biggest stage.
Usain Bolt ran Wednesday's 200 meter final in 19.30 seconds, breaking Michael Johnson's 12-year-old record of 19.32.
The Jamaican wunderkind hurtled to his second world record and his second Olympic gold medal, finishing the 200-meter race in 19.30 seconds to break Michael Johnson's 12-year-old mark. In doing so he became the first man ever to break the world record in both the 100 and 200 at the same Olympics and the first since Carl Lewis in 1984 to win the sprint double.
That he did it was one thing -- how he did it was even more memorable. He beat Churandy Martina by 0.52 second -- about four body lengths -- the largest margin of victory in an Olympic 200 since the first race in 1900. Martina ended up being disqualified later, however, for running out of his lane.
The last man to hold both world records simultaneously was none other than Donald Quarrie, the 1970s Jamaican star whom Bolt said he always wanted to pattern his running after.
Now Quarrie and everyone else -- Lewis, Jesse Owens, any of the other six men to complete an Olympic 100-200 double -- takes a back seat. Nobody other than Johnson had ever run a 200 in under 19.6 and nobody had broken 9.7 in the 100 before Beijing.
Now Bolt has done both.
He had this one won about halfway through, but unlike his record-setting performance in the 100 four nights before, there was no hot-dogging, no celebrating until he crossed the line. He went hard all the way, looking at the clock down the stretch, leaning at the line, knowing that Johnson's venerable mark was within reach.
When he saw the number come up -- a number that never has before -- he raised his arms, then fell flat to his back, arms and legs outstretched, and basked in the roar of the Bird's Nest crowd.
Wallace Spearmon of the United States finished third but also was disqualified for leaving his lane. He was celebrating along with Bolt -- even picking up his friend -- carrying the American flag around the track for several minutes after the race and was shocked when an official told him of the DQ.
The U.S. team filed a protest after the race, saying Martina had run out of his lane. The protest was accepted, and that meant Shawn Crawford of the U.S., the defending Olympic champion, ended up with the silver medal. Another American, Walter Dix, ended up with the bronze medal despite being the fifth man across the finish line.
Bolt is simply a different kind of runner -- coiled power in his 6-foot-5 frame, supposedly too big for success in the 100, but certainly built to run the 200.
His move out of the starting block isn't nearly as important in the longer race, which makes this more about raw speed. But a good start certainly doesn't hurt. He got one in this race, bursting out of the blocks from Lane 5, overcoming the lag about a quarter of the way through, then beating Martina to the line by four body lengths.
Bolt's 100 record is 9.69 seconds. He averaged 9.65 per 100 meters in the longer sprint, running into a very slight headwind.
"Incredible," Johnson, now the former record-holder, said after the race. "He got an incredible start. Guys of [6-foot-5] should not be able to start like that. It's that long, massive stride. He's eating up so much more track than others. He came in focused, knowing he would likely win the gold and he's got the record."
Bolt won the race on the eve of his 22nd birthday and a version of "Happy Birthday" played over the public-address system as he took off his gold shoes and wrapped the Jamaican flag around his shoulders like a scarf.
He did another hip-swiveling dance, then raised his hands and pointed toward the scoreboard. A little later, he posed near the scoreboard -- the traditional picture that all world record-setters take. Bolt now has three of them -- this, the 100 from Saturday and the picture he took in New York in May when he broke the 100 record the first time.
"You're back there giving it everything you've got -- it's brutal," said Kim Collins, the 2003 world champ who finished seventh. "He's doing it and making it look so simple. Michael Johnson did it, and it didn't looked that easy."
Bolt's victory made Jamaica 3-for-3 in the Olympic sprints, and the women's 200 Thursday will include three Jamaicans with gold-medal potential -- Veronica Campbell-Brown, Sherone Simpson and Kerron Stewart.
None of them, however, will surpass what Bolt has done at these games. And while Michael Phelps and his eight swimming golds may be The Story of these Olympics, Bolt's sheer dominance in the most basic tests of speed there are will not soon be surpassed -- unless he does it himself.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Bolt is first to break records in 100, 200 at same Games
Associated Press
BEIJING -- Usain Bolt kept driving for the finish line, knowing the race was won but there was something even bigger out there.
Not just another world record, but history itself. Not just an unheard-of blowout, but the chance to be called the greatest sprinter ever.
Bolt may have done just that Wednesday night, on his sport's biggest stage.
Usain Bolt ran Wednesday's 200 meter final in 19.30 seconds, breaking Michael Johnson's 12-year-old record of 19.32.
The Jamaican wunderkind hurtled to his second world record and his second Olympic gold medal, finishing the 200-meter race in 19.30 seconds to break Michael Johnson's 12-year-old mark. In doing so he became the first man ever to break the world record in both the 100 and 200 at the same Olympics and the first since Carl Lewis in 1984 to win the sprint double.
That he did it was one thing -- how he did it was even more memorable. He beat Churandy Martina by 0.52 second -- about four body lengths -- the largest margin of victory in an Olympic 200 since the first race in 1900. Martina ended up being disqualified later, however, for running out of his lane.
The last man to hold both world records simultaneously was none other than Donald Quarrie, the 1970s Jamaican star whom Bolt said he always wanted to pattern his running after.
Now Quarrie and everyone else -- Lewis, Jesse Owens, any of the other six men to complete an Olympic 100-200 double -- takes a back seat. Nobody other than Johnson had ever run a 200 in under 19.6 and nobody had broken 9.7 in the 100 before Beijing.
Now Bolt has done both.
He had this one won about halfway through, but unlike his record-setting performance in the 100 four nights before, there was no hot-dogging, no celebrating until he crossed the line. He went hard all the way, looking at the clock down the stretch, leaning at the line, knowing that Johnson's venerable mark was within reach.
When he saw the number come up -- a number that never has before -- he raised his arms, then fell flat to his back, arms and legs outstretched, and basked in the roar of the Bird's Nest crowd.
Wallace Spearmon of the United States finished third but also was disqualified for leaving his lane. He was celebrating along with Bolt -- even picking up his friend -- carrying the American flag around the track for several minutes after the race and was shocked when an official told him of the DQ.
The U.S. team filed a protest after the race, saying Martina had run out of his lane. The protest was accepted, and that meant Shawn Crawford of the U.S., the defending Olympic champion, ended up with the silver medal. Another American, Walter Dix, ended up with the bronze medal despite being the fifth man across the finish line.
Bolt is simply a different kind of runner -- coiled power in his 6-foot-5 frame, supposedly too big for success in the 100, but certainly built to run the 200.
His move out of the starting block isn't nearly as important in the longer race, which makes this more about raw speed. But a good start certainly doesn't hurt. He got one in this race, bursting out of the blocks from Lane 5, overcoming the lag about a quarter of the way through, then beating Martina to the line by four body lengths.
Bolt's 100 record is 9.69 seconds. He averaged 9.65 per 100 meters in the longer sprint, running into a very slight headwind.
"Incredible," Johnson, now the former record-holder, said after the race. "He got an incredible start. Guys of [6-foot-5] should not be able to start like that. It's that long, massive stride. He's eating up so much more track than others. He came in focused, knowing he would likely win the gold and he's got the record."
Bolt won the race on the eve of his 22nd birthday and a version of "Happy Birthday" played over the public-address system as he took off his gold shoes and wrapped the Jamaican flag around his shoulders like a scarf.
He did another hip-swiveling dance, then raised his hands and pointed toward the scoreboard. A little later, he posed near the scoreboard -- the traditional picture that all world record-setters take. Bolt now has three of them -- this, the 100 from Saturday and the picture he took in New York in May when he broke the 100 record the first time.
"You're back there giving it everything you've got -- it's brutal," said Kim Collins, the 2003 world champ who finished seventh. "He's doing it and making it look so simple. Michael Johnson did it, and it didn't looked that easy."
Bolt's victory made Jamaica 3-for-3 in the Olympic sprints, and the women's 200 Thursday will include three Jamaicans with gold-medal potential -- Veronica Campbell-Brown, Sherone Simpson and Kerron Stewart.
None of them, however, will surpass what Bolt has done at these games. And while Michael Phelps and his eight swimming golds may be The Story of these Olympics, Bolt's sheer dominance in the most basic tests of speed there are will not soon be surpassed -- unless he does it himself.
Paraguayan heartthrob breaks our collective hearts
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/blog/fourth_place_medal/post/The-hot-Paraguayan-goes-cold-at-OlympicsTuesday, Aug 19, 2008
Paraguayan heartthrob breaks our collective hearts
By Chris Chase
Leryn Franco is just your run-of-the-mill javelin thrower/pageant queen/model with her own calendar. But during the Beijing Olympics the 26-year old Paraguayan became so much more to the American people; she became our javelin thrower/pageant queen/model with her own calendar. So, my fellow Americans, it is with a heavy heart that I regret to inform you that our favorite Paraguayan athlete (sorry Jose Luis Chilavert) was eliminated from the Olympics this morning after failing to qualify for the javelin finals. Take all the time you need.
Ms. Franco became the object of our attention after she was noticed by NBC cameras during the Parade of Nations at the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Fourth-Place Medal's fledgling Investigative Unit discovered her identity eight magical days ago and since then our schoolboy crush blossomed into unrequited love.
Leryn -- can we call you Leryn? -- didn't return our collective calls, but we didn't mind. We knew she was busy preparing for her event: the javelin throw. She competed this morning, finishing second-to-last in the qualifying round with a throw that was 12 meters short of her personal best. It was a disappointment, to be sure, but not altogether surprising. After all, Leryn's goal was never to medal; it was to win the hearts of men and women worldwide. And in that event, Leryn Franco won gold.
Hasbro Gives Clue Board Game A Makeover
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93417780
Hasbro Gives Clue Board Game A Makeover
The new version of Clue takes place in a modern mansion at a party of the rich and famous.
All Things Considered, August 8, 2008
The much-beloved murder mystery game Clue is getting a makeover. It's been on the shelves for 60 years, but game maker Hasbro has redesigned the game for a modern audience.
Rob Daviau, who helped design the new version, tells NPR's Melissa Block that the new game takes place at a modern mansion — at a party of the rich and famous.
The weapons have changed, the characters have bios and the mansion has new rooms, like a spa, a theater and a guesthouse. And the company added an element of suspense with a second deck of cards.
"A board game is basically a story that you're telling around the table together. In this case, it's a murder mystery," Daviau says. "So what's the pacing? How nervous should you be? How much time do people have? Because we know that people have less time now than they did before."
The new game has nine weapons instead of six. There is no more lead pipe, and the revolver is now a pistol. The company also added a trophy, an ax and a baseball bat.
"The weapons aren't in scale to each other," Daviau says. "It oddly took a very long time to get the proportions of the baseball bat right — the handle, versus the knob, versus the thickness. My engineer was ready to kill me because I kept sending him back to trim another millimeter off the barrel."
The characters have changed, too. Miss Scarlet has a first name: Cassandra. Colonel Mustard left the military; he's a former football star. Victor Plum, formerly the professor who was always known as the smartest man in the room, became recast as a self-made video game designer — a dot-com billionaire.
But what about people who cherished the classic version of Clue and may not want to see changes? Daviau says Hasbro was very conscious of that when updating the game.
"We wanted something that the mom or dad who's bringing home for the family [could say], 'This is what I remember, and this is what I want to play with my kids,' " Daviau says. "At the same time, we wanted something the kids would feel like it belonged to them. And this is something that's very appealing to them. So we tried to blend those two worlds. It plays like Clue, it feels like Clue, but it just feels like Clue that would have been created in the 21st century."
Hasbro Gives Clue Board Game A Makeover
The new version of Clue takes place in a modern mansion at a party of the rich and famous.
All Things Considered, August 8, 2008
The much-beloved murder mystery game Clue is getting a makeover. It's been on the shelves for 60 years, but game maker Hasbro has redesigned the game for a modern audience.
Rob Daviau, who helped design the new version, tells NPR's Melissa Block that the new game takes place at a modern mansion — at a party of the rich and famous.
The weapons have changed, the characters have bios and the mansion has new rooms, like a spa, a theater and a guesthouse. And the company added an element of suspense with a second deck of cards.
"A board game is basically a story that you're telling around the table together. In this case, it's a murder mystery," Daviau says. "So what's the pacing? How nervous should you be? How much time do people have? Because we know that people have less time now than they did before."
The new game has nine weapons instead of six. There is no more lead pipe, and the revolver is now a pistol. The company also added a trophy, an ax and a baseball bat.
"The weapons aren't in scale to each other," Daviau says. "It oddly took a very long time to get the proportions of the baseball bat right — the handle, versus the knob, versus the thickness. My engineer was ready to kill me because I kept sending him back to trim another millimeter off the barrel."
The characters have changed, too. Miss Scarlet has a first name: Cassandra. Colonel Mustard left the military; he's a former football star. Victor Plum, formerly the professor who was always known as the smartest man in the room, became recast as a self-made video game designer — a dot-com billionaire.
But what about people who cherished the classic version of Clue and may not want to see changes? Daviau says Hasbro was very conscious of that when updating the game.
"We wanted something that the mom or dad who's bringing home for the family [could say], 'This is what I remember, and this is what I want to play with my kids,' " Daviau says. "At the same time, we wanted something the kids would feel like it belonged to them. And this is something that's very appealing to them. So we tried to blend those two worlds. It plays like Clue, it feels like Clue, but it just feels like Clue that would have been created in the 21st century."
Jerry Wexler, producer of Aretha and Ray Charles
http://wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/wexl-a20.shtml
Jerry Wexler, producer of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, dead at 91
By Hiram Lee
20 August 2008
Jerry Wexler, the legendary music producer of Atlantic Records, died of congestive heart failure on August 15 at his home in Sarasota, Florida. He was 91.
Wexler was a significant and influential figure in American popular music. During his long career he produced and shaped the sounds of some of the most important R&B musicians of the period between the 1950s and the 1970s, including Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Donny Hathaway. Wexler is credited with coining the very term “Rhythm and Blues.”
The future producer was born in the Bronx, New York on January 10, 1917. He was raised in the mostly immigrant neighborhoods of Washington Heights in Manhattan. His father, a Polish immigrant, worked as a window washer. His mother, Elsa, was a socialist and sold copies of the Daily Worker in Harlem.
Elsa Wexler insisted that her son be cultured and have a richer life than she and her husband had known. Hoping the young boy would become a writer, she bought Jerry works of Shakespeare, Moliere and Theodore Dreiser to read. Jerry, however, would take a different path, soon embarking on various cultural pursuits of his own.
Wexler cut classes as a teenager and spent time hustling in poolrooms. After his 1932 graduation from high school, he attended, briefly, City College of New York, but dropped out. Around this time he developed a love for jazz music and constantly searched for old records in various thrift stores throughout the city.
When his mother tried to put him once more on a more studious path by sending him in 1936 to Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science, her plan backfired. The school was only 100 miles from Kansas City, with its thriving jazz and blues scene, including, perhaps most famously, the great Count Basie orchestra. The move only intensified her son’s love for the music.
After two years at Kansas State, Wexler moved back to New York, where he worked for a time alongside his father washing windows. He was drafted during the Second World War and stationed in Texas and Florida. Following his stint in the military he returned to Kansas State and earned a degree in journalism. He then returned to New York in hopes of finding a job at one of the big newspapers. Instead, he got a job with Billboard magazine.
It was at Billboard that Wexler coined the term “Rhythm and Blues.” The editors had asked their writers to come up with a new name for the black music charts which had, up until that time, still been called “race music.” Wexler casually suggested the title be changed to “Rhythm and Blues” and it stuck.
During his time as a music journalist with Billboard, Wexler established ties with performers and industry figures, eventually developing a friendship with Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson, the co-founders of the independent Atlantic Records label.
Asked to come work for the label, Wexler insisted he be made a full partner. While Ertegun first considered this an outlandish proposal, when Abramson went into the army in the early 1950s Wexler finally was brought on as a partner. It was in his role as music producer with Atlantic that Wexler made his greatest contribution to the art form he loved.
Wexler oversaw the recording sessions of a truly remarkable collection of musicians. His credits include work on songs and albums by the likes of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Big Joe Turner (including “Shake, Rattle and Roll”), Ruth Brown, the Drifters, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett (including “In the Midnight Hour”), Percy Sledge, Betty Carter, King Curtis, and many others. There is no shortage of classics attached to his name.
But it is his work with Charles and Franklin for which he is perhaps best remembered today. Wexler produced Charles’s first No. 1 R&B single, “I Got a Woman,” and a string of others, including “A Fool For You,” “Drown In My Own Tears,” and “What’d I Say.”
Wexler and engineer Tom Dowd, another of the incredibly influential and creative voices at Atlantic, gave Charles and his band room to breathe on these recordings, and the natural chemistry of the group comes through brilliantly. “I just loved it,” Charles would say in later years, “because they just let me do what I wanted to do.”
It was important to Wexler that his role be one of enhancement and support when working with artists. While his productions certainly bore his familiar fingerprint, they did not bear his signature, figuratively speaking. He was not the star producer-as-auteur in the way that a Phil Spector was. Wexler certainly knew when to take a guiding role, but he also knew when to lay out and let the artist be the artist.
In the case of Aretha Franklin, Wexler played a more significant role of shaping, or reshaping, her work and persona. Prior to signing with Atlantic, Franklin was on the roster of Columbia Records. There she sang in a more popular, cabaret style.
Wexler helped her return to a more southern, gospel and blues-rooted music. It was the music made after this important change in course that earned Franklin her iconic status.
Her Atlantic debut, the album I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), was for both Franklin and Wexler a masterpiece. This was the album that featured now legendary tracks such as “Respect” and the great Dan Penn composition “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.”
The album epitomizes the Atlantic R&B sound. There is the stomping backbeat, with a full-bodied snare drum (in contrast to the “popcorn” snare of James Brown’s funk music) snapping down hard on the 2 and 4 of the beat. The bass guitar is given a prominent role in the front of the mix. Franklin’s piano, played loud and heavy, finishes off the rhythm section, making very clear the gospel influence that was such an intimate part of her sound as well as Wexler’s. Horn sections, on this and all the great Atlantic recordings, are never recorded with undue brightness or gloss, but are allowed to retain a “dryness” and a growl, not unlike the sound of the Kansas City shout blues groups Wexler must have heard in the late 1930s.
The album is mesmerizing and justly remembered as one of the all-time great R&B classics. By no means their only memorable collaboration, Wexler produced no less than 16 of Franklin’s albums for the label.
During his Atlantic career, Wexler also fell in love with southern soul, the Stax records and Muscle Shoals sound. He worked with numerous musicians who came out of that scene. And when the great British pop and R&B singer Dusty Springfield signed with Atlantic, Wexler took her to record in Memphis. The result was another masterpiece, Dusty in Memphis. Here, Wexler’s production and his assembling of a stellar band of R&B musicians—the Memphis Cats—inspired Springfield and brought a performance out of the singer that surpassed anything she had done previously.
Apart from Wexler’s duties as music producer at Atlantic Records, he was, of course, also a businessman. While details have been hard to come by in recent tributes, perhaps for fear of speaking ill of the dead, there have been more than a few descriptions of his business practices as being “sharklike” or “ruthless.” He was certainly no stranger to “payola,” the practice of bribing radio stations and disc jockeys to play a record.
There is no need to sentimentalize the past, particularly with regards to the music industry, or to make Wexler out to be a “pure” figure in a mercenary industry. Nevertheless, one can say that while Wexler was in business, he was first and foremost in the music business. That is, he had a genuine passion for the art form and, above all, good taste. He was actively involved in the creative process. He was not an executive who was in business in a general sense, and who happened to own a music property or two. Music was Wexler’s life.
As Ray Charles once said, when contrasting a Jerry Wexler or an Ahmet Ertegun with the typical music executive of today: “There are people in the record industry today—that control it—that can not keep time to a march!” Wexler and Ertegun, he said, “were truly into the music itself. They could feel it.”
There is no doubt, in tributes following Wexler’s death, that artists and fans alike are mourning not only the man, but also the absence of a similar creative and artistic atmosphere in today’s music industry. To take note of Wexler’s contributions is also to take note of the sharp decline of the music industry and overall cultural life in the United States, which, already to be seen in Wexler’s heyday, is at such a pronounced level today.
Jerry Wexler, producer of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles, dead at 91
By Hiram Lee
20 August 2008
Jerry Wexler, the legendary music producer of Atlantic Records, died of congestive heart failure on August 15 at his home in Sarasota, Florida. He was 91.
Wexler was a significant and influential figure in American popular music. During his long career he produced and shaped the sounds of some of the most important R&B musicians of the period between the 1950s and the 1970s, including Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and Donny Hathaway. Wexler is credited with coining the very term “Rhythm and Blues.”
The future producer was born in the Bronx, New York on January 10, 1917. He was raised in the mostly immigrant neighborhoods of Washington Heights in Manhattan. His father, a Polish immigrant, worked as a window washer. His mother, Elsa, was a socialist and sold copies of the Daily Worker in Harlem.
Elsa Wexler insisted that her son be cultured and have a richer life than she and her husband had known. Hoping the young boy would become a writer, she bought Jerry works of Shakespeare, Moliere and Theodore Dreiser to read. Jerry, however, would take a different path, soon embarking on various cultural pursuits of his own.
Wexler cut classes as a teenager and spent time hustling in poolrooms. After his 1932 graduation from high school, he attended, briefly, City College of New York, but dropped out. Around this time he developed a love for jazz music and constantly searched for old records in various thrift stores throughout the city.
When his mother tried to put him once more on a more studious path by sending him in 1936 to Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science, her plan backfired. The school was only 100 miles from Kansas City, with its thriving jazz and blues scene, including, perhaps most famously, the great Count Basie orchestra. The move only intensified her son’s love for the music.
After two years at Kansas State, Wexler moved back to New York, where he worked for a time alongside his father washing windows. He was drafted during the Second World War and stationed in Texas and Florida. Following his stint in the military he returned to Kansas State and earned a degree in journalism. He then returned to New York in hopes of finding a job at one of the big newspapers. Instead, he got a job with Billboard magazine.
It was at Billboard that Wexler coined the term “Rhythm and Blues.” The editors had asked their writers to come up with a new name for the black music charts which had, up until that time, still been called “race music.” Wexler casually suggested the title be changed to “Rhythm and Blues” and it stuck.
During his time as a music journalist with Billboard, Wexler established ties with performers and industry figures, eventually developing a friendship with Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson, the co-founders of the independent Atlantic Records label.
Asked to come work for the label, Wexler insisted he be made a full partner. While Ertegun first considered this an outlandish proposal, when Abramson went into the army in the early 1950s Wexler finally was brought on as a partner. It was in his role as music producer with Atlantic that Wexler made his greatest contribution to the art form he loved.
Wexler oversaw the recording sessions of a truly remarkable collection of musicians. His credits include work on songs and albums by the likes of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Big Joe Turner (including “Shake, Rattle and Roll”), Ruth Brown, the Drifters, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett (including “In the Midnight Hour”), Percy Sledge, Betty Carter, King Curtis, and many others. There is no shortage of classics attached to his name.
But it is his work with Charles and Franklin for which he is perhaps best remembered today. Wexler produced Charles’s first No. 1 R&B single, “I Got a Woman,” and a string of others, including “A Fool For You,” “Drown In My Own Tears,” and “What’d I Say.”
Wexler and engineer Tom Dowd, another of the incredibly influential and creative voices at Atlantic, gave Charles and his band room to breathe on these recordings, and the natural chemistry of the group comes through brilliantly. “I just loved it,” Charles would say in later years, “because they just let me do what I wanted to do.”
It was important to Wexler that his role be one of enhancement and support when working with artists. While his productions certainly bore his familiar fingerprint, they did not bear his signature, figuratively speaking. He was not the star producer-as-auteur in the way that a Phil Spector was. Wexler certainly knew when to take a guiding role, but he also knew when to lay out and let the artist be the artist.
In the case of Aretha Franklin, Wexler played a more significant role of shaping, or reshaping, her work and persona. Prior to signing with Atlantic, Franklin was on the roster of Columbia Records. There she sang in a more popular, cabaret style.
Wexler helped her return to a more southern, gospel and blues-rooted music. It was the music made after this important change in course that earned Franklin her iconic status.
Her Atlantic debut, the album I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), was for both Franklin and Wexler a masterpiece. This was the album that featured now legendary tracks such as “Respect” and the great Dan Penn composition “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.”
The album epitomizes the Atlantic R&B sound. There is the stomping backbeat, with a full-bodied snare drum (in contrast to the “popcorn” snare of James Brown’s funk music) snapping down hard on the 2 and 4 of the beat. The bass guitar is given a prominent role in the front of the mix. Franklin’s piano, played loud and heavy, finishes off the rhythm section, making very clear the gospel influence that was such an intimate part of her sound as well as Wexler’s. Horn sections, on this and all the great Atlantic recordings, are never recorded with undue brightness or gloss, but are allowed to retain a “dryness” and a growl, not unlike the sound of the Kansas City shout blues groups Wexler must have heard in the late 1930s.
The album is mesmerizing and justly remembered as one of the all-time great R&B classics. By no means their only memorable collaboration, Wexler produced no less than 16 of Franklin’s albums for the label.
During his Atlantic career, Wexler also fell in love with southern soul, the Stax records and Muscle Shoals sound. He worked with numerous musicians who came out of that scene. And when the great British pop and R&B singer Dusty Springfield signed with Atlantic, Wexler took her to record in Memphis. The result was another masterpiece, Dusty in Memphis. Here, Wexler’s production and his assembling of a stellar band of R&B musicians—the Memphis Cats—inspired Springfield and brought a performance out of the singer that surpassed anything she had done previously.
Apart from Wexler’s duties as music producer at Atlantic Records, he was, of course, also a businessman. While details have been hard to come by in recent tributes, perhaps for fear of speaking ill of the dead, there have been more than a few descriptions of his business practices as being “sharklike” or “ruthless.” He was certainly no stranger to “payola,” the practice of bribing radio stations and disc jockeys to play a record.
There is no need to sentimentalize the past, particularly with regards to the music industry, or to make Wexler out to be a “pure” figure in a mercenary industry. Nevertheless, one can say that while Wexler was in business, he was first and foremost in the music business. That is, he had a genuine passion for the art form and, above all, good taste. He was actively involved in the creative process. He was not an executive who was in business in a general sense, and who happened to own a music property or two. Music was Wexler’s life.
As Ray Charles once said, when contrasting a Jerry Wexler or an Ahmet Ertegun with the typical music executive of today: “There are people in the record industry today—that control it—that can not keep time to a march!” Wexler and Ertegun, he said, “were truly into the music itself. They could feel it.”
There is no doubt, in tributes following Wexler’s death, that artists and fans alike are mourning not only the man, but also the absence of a similar creative and artistic atmosphere in today’s music industry. To take note of Wexler’s contributions is also to take note of the sharp decline of the music industry and overall cultural life in the United States, which, already to be seen in Wexler’s heyday, is at such a pronounced level today.
Free Janine!!!
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/08/22/state/n200735D95.DTLPorn star pleads guilty to tax charges
Friday, August 22, 2008
PORTLAND, CA (AP) -- An adult film actress from California faces up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine after pleading guilty to intentionally failing to pay her federal income taxes.
Federal prosecutors said Friday that 39-year-old Janine M. James, also known as Janine Lindemulder, of Huntington Beach, California, failed to pay more than $200,000 in taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service.
As part of her plea agreement, James admitted making a down payment on a $647,000 house in Eugene, and purchasing a new Jeep and recreational vehicle while knowing she owed the taxes.
Sentencing was set for October 24 in U.S. District Court in Eugene.
Portia de Rossi Will 'Cook and Clean' for Me
Robalini's Note: Finally, someone who is not afraid to say they're gonna put their bitch in her place...
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,407121,00.html
Ellen DeGeneres: Portia de Rossi Will 'Cook and Clean' for Me
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Now that they're married, Ellen DeGeneres says Portia de Rossi will "cook and clean" for her.
"What can I say? I'm the luckiest girl in the world," DeGeneres, who wed the former "Ally McBeal" actress on Saturday, told People magazine. "She's officially off the market. No one else gets her. And now she'll cook and clean for me."
DeGeneres also wrote about the nuptials on the Web site of her syndicated TV show.
"I had a big weekend," writes the "Ellen DeGeneres Show" host. "I got married to Portia de Rossi! Sorry, John Stamos ... this one's taken."
DeGeneres, 50, and de Rossi, 35, tied the knot on Saturday in the biggest celebrity union since California legalized same-sex marriage.
"It feels different," DeGeneres told People of being married. "I was already planning on spending the rest of my life with her. But until you're married, you just don't know. It fees wonderful."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,407121,00.html
Ellen DeGeneres: Portia de Rossi Will 'Cook and Clean' for Me
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Now that they're married, Ellen DeGeneres says Portia de Rossi will "cook and clean" for her.
"What can I say? I'm the luckiest girl in the world," DeGeneres, who wed the former "Ally McBeal" actress on Saturday, told People magazine. "She's officially off the market. No one else gets her. And now she'll cook and clean for me."
DeGeneres also wrote about the nuptials on the Web site of her syndicated TV show.
"I had a big weekend," writes the "Ellen DeGeneres Show" host. "I got married to Portia de Rossi! Sorry, John Stamos ... this one's taken."
DeGeneres, 50, and de Rossi, 35, tied the knot on Saturday in the biggest celebrity union since California legalized same-sex marriage.
"It feels different," DeGeneres told People of being married. "I was already planning on spending the rest of my life with her. But until you're married, you just don't know. It fees wonderful."
Singer's metal fence has heavy impact in Marin
"Bunch of assholes."
Jeff Bridges as The Dude on Metallica in The Big Lebowski.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/19/BAR512DGHR.DTL
Singer's metal fence has heavy impact in Marin
Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Marin County -- James Hetfield co-founded the influential heavy metal band Metallica and, as its chief songwriter, helped pen and perform strident songs such as "Don't Tread on Me." It might as well be his anthem for property rights in Marin County.
The Marin County resident has erected a barbed-wire fence on his property near San Rafael, cutting off a fire trail that locals say has been used for at least a half-century to access treasured hiking trails along scenic ridgelines.
Hetfield's representatives have told county officials that the metal and barbed-wire fence is a response to vandalism on the property. Nonetheless, the decision has infuriated the bikers, hikers and equestrians who use the trail. Some locals say it also threatens a century-old county tradition of property owners giving public access to open space.
"This is really a slap in the face to the community," said Connie Berto, 75, who has been using the trail since the 1960s. "It's atrocious. The fence is outrageous."
The case exemplifies a trend in Marin County: New residents are buying properties that were private ranchlands but open to hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts, said Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey, a 32-year resident of the county who said he has used the trail many times.
"As real estate values have gone up and different folks have moved into the county, there's a different sense of property rights," Kinsey said. "There's a learning curve that has to take place with new owners about the historic use of the lands, while also respecting that these are private properties."
"In every single town, from Sausalito to Novato, these historical uses exist. Many people consider them to be public. But all it takes is a change of owner to make an abrupt change, depending on the attitude of the property owner."
Messages left with Hetfield's manager, his band's record label (Warner Bros. Records) and his contractor (Redhorse Constructors Inc.) were not successful in getting a comment.
Supervisor Kinsey said the county has negotiated several agreements with property owners to allow access for the public. Kinsey cited Hetfield's neighbor George Lucas as one such example.
Hetfield bought his land in unincorporated Marin County in 1999, according to property records. He planned to make a 14,000-square-foot home as well as a 6,000-square-foot studio, which also functioned as a caretaker's home, according to a 2002 Associated Press story. Kinsey said only the studio has been built.
In 2002, Hetfield made a trade with the county that was beneficial to both sides. He traded away the right to develop 44 homes on his property, which it had been zoned for, and gave an easement for 438 1/2 acres to be maintained as public space by the county. In exchange, Hetfield received the right to build his home higher on the hillside and also larger - at a time when it was difficult to get approval for a 4,000-square-foot home, Kinsey said.
At some point, Hetfield also obtained the Luiz Ranch, which contains the fire road that is under dispute.
The Luiz family had long had an open - but ad hoc - relationship with the public. They even installed gates that latched closed behind hikers, preventing livestock from escaping. Kinsey said it was part of county tradition that dates at least to the 19th century allowing public access to wildlands.
Though the Luiz Ranch Fire Road had been used by the public for decades, Kinsey said it was made an official part of the county trail system in 1983. Still, the relationship between the property owners and the public was mostly informal.
As former ranchlands have changed hands, the county has taken steps to ensure continued public access, said Kinsey, president of the Marin County Open Space District.
Sometimes the county buys the land needing access. In other instances, the county has worked out easements where the county builds fences, puts up signs and does a certain amount of monitoring. In one case of a particularly worried property owner, Kinsey said the county pays a landowner an amount - less than $10,000 a year - for the public to walk through. In that case, the property owner has been satisfied to the extent that Kinsey hopes to secure a permanent easement.
In the case of Hetfield's property, Kinsey said members of the public can sue if they can prove that there was continuous and broad public access to the road before 1972.
"If that was necessary, there was a very well-documented history of use on this trail," he said, noting that a lawsuit is an adversarial approach that ought to be only a last resort. "We aren't even approaching that at this time.
"It makes sense to reach out to Mr. Hetfield and encourage him to meet with us and see if we can find a solution that will work for him and the community."
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
Jeff Bridges as The Dude on Metallica in The Big Lebowski.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/08/19/BAR512DGHR.DTL
Singer's metal fence has heavy impact in Marin
Matthai Kuruvila, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Marin County -- James Hetfield co-founded the influential heavy metal band Metallica and, as its chief songwriter, helped pen and perform strident songs such as "Don't Tread on Me." It might as well be his anthem for property rights in Marin County.
The Marin County resident has erected a barbed-wire fence on his property near San Rafael, cutting off a fire trail that locals say has been used for at least a half-century to access treasured hiking trails along scenic ridgelines.
Hetfield's representatives have told county officials that the metal and barbed-wire fence is a response to vandalism on the property. Nonetheless, the decision has infuriated the bikers, hikers and equestrians who use the trail. Some locals say it also threatens a century-old county tradition of property owners giving public access to open space.
"This is really a slap in the face to the community," said Connie Berto, 75, who has been using the trail since the 1960s. "It's atrocious. The fence is outrageous."
The case exemplifies a trend in Marin County: New residents are buying properties that were private ranchlands but open to hikers and other outdoors enthusiasts, said Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey, a 32-year resident of the county who said he has used the trail many times.
"As real estate values have gone up and different folks have moved into the county, there's a different sense of property rights," Kinsey said. "There's a learning curve that has to take place with new owners about the historic use of the lands, while also respecting that these are private properties."
"In every single town, from Sausalito to Novato, these historical uses exist. Many people consider them to be public. But all it takes is a change of owner to make an abrupt change, depending on the attitude of the property owner."
Messages left with Hetfield's manager, his band's record label (Warner Bros. Records) and his contractor (Redhorse Constructors Inc.) were not successful in getting a comment.
Supervisor Kinsey said the county has negotiated several agreements with property owners to allow access for the public. Kinsey cited Hetfield's neighbor George Lucas as one such example.
Hetfield bought his land in unincorporated Marin County in 1999, according to property records. He planned to make a 14,000-square-foot home as well as a 6,000-square-foot studio, which also functioned as a caretaker's home, according to a 2002 Associated Press story. Kinsey said only the studio has been built.
In 2002, Hetfield made a trade with the county that was beneficial to both sides. He traded away the right to develop 44 homes on his property, which it had been zoned for, and gave an easement for 438 1/2 acres to be maintained as public space by the county. In exchange, Hetfield received the right to build his home higher on the hillside and also larger - at a time when it was difficult to get approval for a 4,000-square-foot home, Kinsey said.
At some point, Hetfield also obtained the Luiz Ranch, which contains the fire road that is under dispute.
The Luiz family had long had an open - but ad hoc - relationship with the public. They even installed gates that latched closed behind hikers, preventing livestock from escaping. Kinsey said it was part of county tradition that dates at least to the 19th century allowing public access to wildlands.
Though the Luiz Ranch Fire Road had been used by the public for decades, Kinsey said it was made an official part of the county trail system in 1983. Still, the relationship between the property owners and the public was mostly informal.
As former ranchlands have changed hands, the county has taken steps to ensure continued public access, said Kinsey, president of the Marin County Open Space District.
Sometimes the county buys the land needing access. In other instances, the county has worked out easements where the county builds fences, puts up signs and does a certain amount of monitoring. In one case of a particularly worried property owner, Kinsey said the county pays a landowner an amount - less than $10,000 a year - for the public to walk through. In that case, the property owner has been satisfied to the extent that Kinsey hopes to secure a permanent easement.
In the case of Hetfield's property, Kinsey said members of the public can sue if they can prove that there was continuous and broad public access to the road before 1972.
"If that was necessary, there was a very well-documented history of use on this trail," he said, noting that a lawsuit is an adversarial approach that ought to be only a last resort. "We aren't even approaching that at this time.
"It makes sense to reach out to Mr. Hetfield and encourage him to meet with us and see if we can find a solution that will work for him and the community."
E-mail Matthai Kuruvila at mkuruvila@sfchronicle.com.
MEET THE NEW LARA CROFT
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/view/47188/Meet-the-new-Lara-Croft/MEET THE NEW LARA CROFT
12th August 2008 By Emily Garnham for dailystar.co.uk
MEET the feisty brunette set to dazzle video game fans with her killer high-kick and acrobatic stunts.
This sultry 23-year-old receptionist from Croydon is the brand new face and body of Tomb Raider star Lara Croft.
Elite gymnast Alison Carroll fought off hundreds of muscular hopefuls to take on the role of sexiest leading lady in the virtual world.
And here she is armed to the teeth as the world’s most famous action heroine and archaeologist.
The stunner – who has had 12 years’ experience as a display gymnast - can’t wait to dazzle her fans with her perfect body and awesome moves.
“This is my dream job - I have always wanted to be an action hero and hope to be able to use my gymnastic ability to perform all of Lara’s stunts,” she said.
The weapon-wielding heroine will be following in the footsteps of blonde bombshell Nell McAndrew and Hollywood heartthrob Angelina Jolie.
And she’s already gearing up for a host of global appearances on TV commercials, chat shows and international modelling assignments.
To make sure Alison’s up for the challenge as her hardcore alter-ego she’s already started a gruelling training regime, working up a sweat in the gym six times a week.
And with SAS survival, combat and semi-automatic weapon firing skills to master in Eastern Europe and crash courses in world archaeology, it looks like this Lara Croft will have her work cut out.
Aaay! Bronze Fonz Hits Brew Town
http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b24545_aaay_bronze_fonz_hits_brew_town.html
Aaay! Bronze Fonz Hits Brew Town
8-19-8
Gina Serpe
Finally, a Fonzie that's incapable of jumping the shark. If only he existed 30 years ago.
A statue of Arthur Fonzarelli was unveiled to a Happy Days-loving crowd on Wisconsin's Milwaukee River today, commemorating the 10-year run of the classic sitcom and its most iconic character in the city where the series was set (but, alas, never shot).
Fonzie alter ego Henry Winkler was on hand for the invite-only occasion, as were show creator-director-producer Garry Marshall, stars Anson Williams (Potsie), Don Most (Ralph), Marion Ross (Mrs. Cunningham), Tom Bosley (Mr. Cunningham) and Erin Moran (Joanie), as well as Laverne & Shirley leads Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams. Ron Howard was on location and unable to make the unveiling.
Winkler took quite a liking to his life-size leather-jacketed likeness, giving it the ultimate seal of approval: two thumbs up.
"I hope that this statue really represents in the way that this city deserves," Winkler said.
"This is one of the great cities in the United States of America, and everyone should actually come here to enjoy the theater, enjoy the good food, enjoy the warmth of the people and the Fonz!"
Obama selects Biden to reassure the US ruling elite
http://wsws.org/articles/2008/aug2008/bide-a25.shtml
Obama selects Biden to reassure the US ruling elite
By Patrick Martin
25 August 2008
The selection of Senator Joseph Biden as the vice-presidential candidate of the Democratic Party underscores the fraudulent character of the Democratic primary campaign and the undemocratic character of the entire two-party electoral system. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the supposed protagonist of “change,” has picked as his running-mate a fixture of the Washington establishment, a six-term US senator who is a proven defender of American imperialism and the interests of big business.
The rollout of the Biden selection over three days of escalating media attention, culminating in the text-message announcement early Saturday and a kickoff rally in Springfield, Illinois, is a metaphor for the entire Obama campaign. His presidential candidacy represents not an insurgency from below, but an effort to manipulate mass sentiments, using Internet technology and slick marketing techniques, aided by a compliant media, to produce a political result that is utterly conventional and in keeping with the requirements of the US ruling elite.
Long gone are the days when the selection of a vice-presidential candidate by one of the two major big business parties involved a complex balancing act between various institutional forces. In the Democratic Party, this would have involved consultations with trade union officials, civil rights organizations, congressional leaders and the heads of particularly powerful state and urban political machines.
Today, neither party has any substantial popular base. In both parties there is only one true “constituency”: the financial aristocracy that dominates economic and political life and controls the mass media, and whose interests determine government policy, both foreign and domestic. The selection of Biden, the senator from a small state with only three electoral votes, whose own presidential bids have failed miserably for lack of popular support, underscores the immense chasm separating the entire political establishment from the broad mass of the American people.
Obama has selected Biden to provide reassurance that, whatever populist rhetoric may be employed for electoral purposes in the fall campaign, the wealth and privileges of the ruling elite and the geo-strategic aims of US imperialism will be the single-minded concerns of a Democratic administration.
An establishment figure
Biden has been a leading figure in the political establishment for three decades. He was first elected to the US Senate from Delaware in 1972, when Richard Nixon was president and Obama was 11 years old, and he has held that position through seven administrations. He has headed two of the most important Senate committees: Judiciary, which vets nominations to judicial positions, including the Supreme Court, and Foreign Relations, which Biden chaired in 2001-2002 and again since the Democrats regained control of the Senate in the 2006 election. Biden ran for president 20 years ago and again this year.
In the 1990s, with Bill Clinton in the White House, Biden was one of the principal proponents of US intervention in the former Yugoslavia, a role that he describes in his campaign autobiography, published last year, as his proudest achievement in foreign policy. In the mid-1990s he called for the US to arm the Bosnian Muslim regime against Serbia, and then advocated a direct US attack on Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo crisis, joining with a like-minded Republican senator to introduce the McCain-Biden Kosovo Resolution, authorizing Clinton to use “all necessary force” against Serbia.
This legislative proposal provided a model for a 2002 congressional resolution authorizing Bush to wage war against Iraq, which Biden co-authored with Republican Senator Richard Lugar. The Bush administration opposed the Biden-Lugar resolution, because it was limited to ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, and successfully pressured the Democratic-controlled Senate to adopt a broader war resolution, for which Biden voted.
On domestic policy, Biden is a conventional liberal whose roots go back to the Cold War era. He combines occasional populist bromides about concern for the poor and downtrodden with close relations with the trade union bureaucracy and unquestioning defense of the profit system. Like every other senator, he has “looked after” the interests of those big corporations with major operations in his state, including the Delaware-based MBNA, the largest independent issuer of credit cards until it was acquired in 2005 by Bank of America.
In this capacity, Biden was one of the most fervent Democratic supporters of the reactionary 2005 legislation overhauling the consumer bankruptcy laws, making it much more difficult for working class and middle-class families to escape debt burdens exacerbated by the corrupt and misleading marketing tactics employed by companies like MBNA. The 2005 law has compounded the problems of distressed homeowners seeking to avoid foreclosure.
Biden defended the bankruptcy bill during the Senate debate and voted for the legislation along with the overwhelming majority of Republicans, including John McCain. Obama opposed the bill, and has attacked it repeatedly during the 2008 campaign as a punitive measure against working families.
Employees of MBNA were the biggest single financial supporters of Biden’s campaigns over the past two decades. In 2003, MBNA hired the senator’s son, Hunter Biden, fresh out of law school, quickly promoting him to the position of executive vice president. (While his father is not wealthy by US Senate standards, Hunter Biden has since become a hedge fund multi-millionaire).
Biden has occasionally taken positions slightly more liberal than those of Obama, most recently voting against the bill (which Obama supported) authorizing a massive expansion of government surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail, and providing legal immunity to the giant telecom firms that collaborated with such illegal spying over the past seven years. But he is a fervent supporter of the USA Patriot Act, defending it during the recent Democratic primary campaign against criticism by some of his opponents.
Biden and the war in Iraq
Senator Obama prevailed over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic nomination contest in large part because she had voted in October 2002 to authorize the Iraq war, while Obama, not then a US Senator, verbally opposed the decision to go to war. This difference in political biographies was utilized by Obama’s campaign to make an appeal to antiwar sentiment, although Obama’s record once he arrived in the Senate in January 2005 was indistinguishable from Clinton’s.
Biden’s record on Iraq makes his selection as the vice-presidential candidate all the more cynical, since he was an enthusiastic supporter of the war far longer than most Senate Democrats. He advocated measures to drastically increase the scale of the violence in order to win the war, including the dispatch of 100,000 additional US troops and the breakup of Iraq into separate Sunni, Shia and Kurdish statelets—on the model of the former Yugoslavia—which would presumably be more easy to control.
In the run-up to the launching of the unprovoked US aggression in March 2003, Biden echoed Bush administration propaganda. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just after Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious appearance before the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, Biden gushed, “I am proud to be associated with you. I think you did better than anyone could have because of your standing, your reputation and your integrity ...” Every major element of Powell’s indictment of Iraq has since proven to be false.
Once the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi connections to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks had been exposed, Biden began to express increasing alarm over the failure of the Bush administration to find an adequate rationale for maintaining public support for the war.
He bemoaned the Bush administration’s failure to sell the war effectively to the American people. In a speech to the Brookings Institution in June 2005, he declared, “I want to see the president of the United States succeed in Iraq...His success is America’s success, and his failure is America’s failure.”
Biden was particularly critical of the rosy forecasts of imminent success in Iraq being issued by the Pentagon and White House, which were at odds with the reality on the ground. “This disconnect, I believe, is fueling cynicism that is undermining the single most important weapon we need to give our troops to be able to do their job, and that is the unyielding support of the American people. That support is waning.”
Only after public opinion turned decisively against the war did Biden shift from advocating escalation to a limited pullout of US troops. A Washington Post column in late 2005—which noted the convergence of views of the longtime senator from Delaware and the newly elected senator from Illinois, Barack Obama—described Biden as “an early and consistent supporter of the US intervention against Saddam Hussein.”
Once the Democrats regained control of Congress in the November 2006, Biden became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he played a major role in the capitulation by the congressional Democrats to the Bush “surge” policy. Millions of antiwar voters had cast ballots for the Democrats seeking an end to the war, but the White House escalated the war instead, and the Democrats postured impotently and then went along.
The Democratic-controlled Congress meekly submitted after Bush vetoed modest restrictions on the conduct of the war, and in May 2007 passed full funding for military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. When several Democratic senators voted against the funding bill as a protest—including Clinton and Obama—Biden denounced them for undermining the safety of the troops.
Two weeks after this critical vote, Biden denounced antiwar critics of the Democratic Congress, claiming, “We’re busting our neck every single day” trying to end the war. There could be no end to the war, he said, until a significant number of Republican senators defected, to provide the two-thirds majority needed to override a Bush veto, or until a Democratic president was in the White House. “We’re funding the safety of those troops there till we can get 67 votes,” he declared.
By then, the Democratic presidential contest was well under way, and Biden, despite winning little support and no delegates, played an important political role. As the World Socialist Web Site noted following a candidates’ debate in August 2007, “Biden has carved out a niche as the Democratic presidential candidate most willing to publicly rebuke antiwar sentiment.”
In the course of the debate, Biden attacked those who suggested that by threatening a quick withdrawal, the US government could compel Iraqi politicians to establish a stable government in Baghdad. He denounced illusions “that there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together. That will not happen.... It will not happen in the lifetime of anyone here.” In other words, the US occupation would have to continue indefinitely.
There have been numerous suggestions from Democratic Party officials and the media over the past few days that, given Biden’s reputation for verbal confrontation, his selection signals a more aggressive attitude from the Obama campaign. On his record, however, it is quite likely that Biden will be deployed as an “attack dog” against antiwar critics of the Obama campaign.
This fact makes all the more despicable the fawning embrace of Biden by purportedly “antiwar” publications like the Nation. John Nichols, Washington editor of the left-liberal magazine, wrote that the choice of Biden was an “acceptable, perhaps even satisfying conclusion to the great veep search,” which could tip the polls back in Obama’s direction.
Commenting on the Springfield rally Saturday, Nichols gushed, “When Biden went after John McCain, with a vigor and, yes, a venom that has been missing from Obama’s stump speaking, it was a tonic for the troops who have been waiting for a campaign that is more prepared to throw punches than take them.”
This response only confirms a fundamental truth about the political crisis facing working people in the United States: it is impossible to conduct a serious struggle against American imperialism, and its program of social reaction and war, without first breaking free of the straitjacket of the Democratic Party.
Working people have no stake in the outcome of the Obama-McCain contest, which will determine, for the American ruling elite, who will be their commander-in-chief over the next four years. The task facing the working class is to break with the two-party system and build an independent political movement based on a socialist and internationalist program.
Obama selects Biden to reassure the US ruling elite
By Patrick Martin
25 August 2008
The selection of Senator Joseph Biden as the vice-presidential candidate of the Democratic Party underscores the fraudulent character of the Democratic primary campaign and the undemocratic character of the entire two-party electoral system. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the supposed protagonist of “change,” has picked as his running-mate a fixture of the Washington establishment, a six-term US senator who is a proven defender of American imperialism and the interests of big business.
The rollout of the Biden selection over three days of escalating media attention, culminating in the text-message announcement early Saturday and a kickoff rally in Springfield, Illinois, is a metaphor for the entire Obama campaign. His presidential candidacy represents not an insurgency from below, but an effort to manipulate mass sentiments, using Internet technology and slick marketing techniques, aided by a compliant media, to produce a political result that is utterly conventional and in keeping with the requirements of the US ruling elite.
Long gone are the days when the selection of a vice-presidential candidate by one of the two major big business parties involved a complex balancing act between various institutional forces. In the Democratic Party, this would have involved consultations with trade union officials, civil rights organizations, congressional leaders and the heads of particularly powerful state and urban political machines.
Today, neither party has any substantial popular base. In both parties there is only one true “constituency”: the financial aristocracy that dominates economic and political life and controls the mass media, and whose interests determine government policy, both foreign and domestic. The selection of Biden, the senator from a small state with only three electoral votes, whose own presidential bids have failed miserably for lack of popular support, underscores the immense chasm separating the entire political establishment from the broad mass of the American people.
Obama has selected Biden to provide reassurance that, whatever populist rhetoric may be employed for electoral purposes in the fall campaign, the wealth and privileges of the ruling elite and the geo-strategic aims of US imperialism will be the single-minded concerns of a Democratic administration.
An establishment figure
Biden has been a leading figure in the political establishment for three decades. He was first elected to the US Senate from Delaware in 1972, when Richard Nixon was president and Obama was 11 years old, and he has held that position through seven administrations. He has headed two of the most important Senate committees: Judiciary, which vets nominations to judicial positions, including the Supreme Court, and Foreign Relations, which Biden chaired in 2001-2002 and again since the Democrats regained control of the Senate in the 2006 election. Biden ran for president 20 years ago and again this year.
In the 1990s, with Bill Clinton in the White House, Biden was one of the principal proponents of US intervention in the former Yugoslavia, a role that he describes in his campaign autobiography, published last year, as his proudest achievement in foreign policy. In the mid-1990s he called for the US to arm the Bosnian Muslim regime against Serbia, and then advocated a direct US attack on Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo crisis, joining with a like-minded Republican senator to introduce the McCain-Biden Kosovo Resolution, authorizing Clinton to use “all necessary force” against Serbia.
This legislative proposal provided a model for a 2002 congressional resolution authorizing Bush to wage war against Iraq, which Biden co-authored with Republican Senator Richard Lugar. The Bush administration opposed the Biden-Lugar resolution, because it was limited to ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, and successfully pressured the Democratic-controlled Senate to adopt a broader war resolution, for which Biden voted.
On domestic policy, Biden is a conventional liberal whose roots go back to the Cold War era. He combines occasional populist bromides about concern for the poor and downtrodden with close relations with the trade union bureaucracy and unquestioning defense of the profit system. Like every other senator, he has “looked after” the interests of those big corporations with major operations in his state, including the Delaware-based MBNA, the largest independent issuer of credit cards until it was acquired in 2005 by Bank of America.
In this capacity, Biden was one of the most fervent Democratic supporters of the reactionary 2005 legislation overhauling the consumer bankruptcy laws, making it much more difficult for working class and middle-class families to escape debt burdens exacerbated by the corrupt and misleading marketing tactics employed by companies like MBNA. The 2005 law has compounded the problems of distressed homeowners seeking to avoid foreclosure.
Biden defended the bankruptcy bill during the Senate debate and voted for the legislation along with the overwhelming majority of Republicans, including John McCain. Obama opposed the bill, and has attacked it repeatedly during the 2008 campaign as a punitive measure against working families.
Employees of MBNA were the biggest single financial supporters of Biden’s campaigns over the past two decades. In 2003, MBNA hired the senator’s son, Hunter Biden, fresh out of law school, quickly promoting him to the position of executive vice president. (While his father is not wealthy by US Senate standards, Hunter Biden has since become a hedge fund multi-millionaire).
Biden has occasionally taken positions slightly more liberal than those of Obama, most recently voting against the bill (which Obama supported) authorizing a massive expansion of government surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail, and providing legal immunity to the giant telecom firms that collaborated with such illegal spying over the past seven years. But he is a fervent supporter of the USA Patriot Act, defending it during the recent Democratic primary campaign against criticism by some of his opponents.
Biden and the war in Iraq
Senator Obama prevailed over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic nomination contest in large part because she had voted in October 2002 to authorize the Iraq war, while Obama, not then a US Senator, verbally opposed the decision to go to war. This difference in political biographies was utilized by Obama’s campaign to make an appeal to antiwar sentiment, although Obama’s record once he arrived in the Senate in January 2005 was indistinguishable from Clinton’s.
Biden’s record on Iraq makes his selection as the vice-presidential candidate all the more cynical, since he was an enthusiastic supporter of the war far longer than most Senate Democrats. He advocated measures to drastically increase the scale of the violence in order to win the war, including the dispatch of 100,000 additional US troops and the breakup of Iraq into separate Sunni, Shia and Kurdish statelets—on the model of the former Yugoslavia—which would presumably be more easy to control.
In the run-up to the launching of the unprovoked US aggression in March 2003, Biden echoed Bush administration propaganda. At a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee just after Secretary of State Colin Powell’s notorious appearance before the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, Biden gushed, “I am proud to be associated with you. I think you did better than anyone could have because of your standing, your reputation and your integrity ...” Every major element of Powell’s indictment of Iraq has since proven to be false.
Once the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi connections to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks had been exposed, Biden began to express increasing alarm over the failure of the Bush administration to find an adequate rationale for maintaining public support for the war.
He bemoaned the Bush administration’s failure to sell the war effectively to the American people. In a speech to the Brookings Institution in June 2005, he declared, “I want to see the president of the United States succeed in Iraq...His success is America’s success, and his failure is America’s failure.”
Biden was particularly critical of the rosy forecasts of imminent success in Iraq being issued by the Pentagon and White House, which were at odds with the reality on the ground. “This disconnect, I believe, is fueling cynicism that is undermining the single most important weapon we need to give our troops to be able to do their job, and that is the unyielding support of the American people. That support is waning.”
Only after public opinion turned decisively against the war did Biden shift from advocating escalation to a limited pullout of US troops. A Washington Post column in late 2005—which noted the convergence of views of the longtime senator from Delaware and the newly elected senator from Illinois, Barack Obama—described Biden as “an early and consistent supporter of the US intervention against Saddam Hussein.”
Once the Democrats regained control of Congress in the November 2006, Biden became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he played a major role in the capitulation by the congressional Democrats to the Bush “surge” policy. Millions of antiwar voters had cast ballots for the Democrats seeking an end to the war, but the White House escalated the war instead, and the Democrats postured impotently and then went along.
The Democratic-controlled Congress meekly submitted after Bush vetoed modest restrictions on the conduct of the war, and in May 2007 passed full funding for military operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. When several Democratic senators voted against the funding bill as a protest—including Clinton and Obama—Biden denounced them for undermining the safety of the troops.
Two weeks after this critical vote, Biden denounced antiwar critics of the Democratic Congress, claiming, “We’re busting our neck every single day” trying to end the war. There could be no end to the war, he said, until a significant number of Republican senators defected, to provide the two-thirds majority needed to override a Bush veto, or until a Democratic president was in the White House. “We’re funding the safety of those troops there till we can get 67 votes,” he declared.
By then, the Democratic presidential contest was well under way, and Biden, despite winning little support and no delegates, played an important political role. As the World Socialist Web Site noted following a candidates’ debate in August 2007, “Biden has carved out a niche as the Democratic presidential candidate most willing to publicly rebuke antiwar sentiment.”
In the course of the debate, Biden attacked those who suggested that by threatening a quick withdrawal, the US government could compel Iraqi politicians to establish a stable government in Baghdad. He denounced illusions “that there is any possibility in the lifetime of anyone here of having the Iraqis get together, have a unity government in Baghdad that pulls the country together. That will not happen.... It will not happen in the lifetime of anyone here.” In other words, the US occupation would have to continue indefinitely.
There have been numerous suggestions from Democratic Party officials and the media over the past few days that, given Biden’s reputation for verbal confrontation, his selection signals a more aggressive attitude from the Obama campaign. On his record, however, it is quite likely that Biden will be deployed as an “attack dog” against antiwar critics of the Obama campaign.
This fact makes all the more despicable the fawning embrace of Biden by purportedly “antiwar” publications like the Nation. John Nichols, Washington editor of the left-liberal magazine, wrote that the choice of Biden was an “acceptable, perhaps even satisfying conclusion to the great veep search,” which could tip the polls back in Obama’s direction.
Commenting on the Springfield rally Saturday, Nichols gushed, “When Biden went after John McCain, with a vigor and, yes, a venom that has been missing from Obama’s stump speaking, it was a tonic for the troops who have been waiting for a campaign that is more prepared to throw punches than take them.”
This response only confirms a fundamental truth about the political crisis facing working people in the United States: it is impossible to conduct a serious struggle against American imperialism, and its program of social reaction and war, without first breaking free of the straitjacket of the Democratic Party.
Working people have no stake in the outcome of the Obama-McCain contest, which will determine, for the American ruling elite, who will be their commander-in-chief over the next four years. The task facing the working class is to break with the two-party system and build an independent political movement based on a socialist and internationalist program.
Motormouth Joe Biden
http://rense.com/general83/biden.htm
Motormouth Joe Biden - Warmonger, Wordmonger And Political Hit Man
By Webster G. Tarpley
8-25-8
WASHINGTON DC -- The vice presidential candidate chosen to run with Obama is Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, a discredited, sleazy, and shopworn political hack -- and therefore an anti-climax for all the callow and feckless youth who got the word via text message at 3am in the morning. The ability of the Trilateral-Bilderberg machine which controls Obama to put up a person like Biden already reflects the further degradation of US political life over the past 9-12 months, largely as a result of Obama's own demagogic, no- issues, personality cult agitation.
A year ago, there was wide agreement in the US middle class that Bush and Cheney should be impeached, that the police state be rolled back, and that the Iraq war should be ended as soon as physically possible. Thanks largely to the advent of the vapid and messianic Obama, these issues have now been thoroughly deflated. Biden is himself an incurable warmonger who voted for the Iraq war and blathered ceaselessly in favor of Bush's aggressive adventure to all who would listen. Naming Biden is a brutal insult to the antiwar majority of the Democratic Party, and Obama is obviously hoping that the Iraq war issue is dead, so nobody will care. Last year, Obama promised that he would work against the mentality that produced Iraq; if anyone incarnates that mentality, it is Biden. Biden is an incurable imperialist and an eager advocate of the discredited Bush-Cheney "war on terror." He even tried to use one of the Democratic debates last year to whip up hysteria in favor of attacking Sudan over the Darfur issue, and with some success. "I went there. I sat in the borders. I went in those camps. They're going to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people die. We've got to stop talking and act," Biden postured in Manchester New Hampshire on June 3, 2007 in an apparent call for bombing Sudan, a coup in Khartoum, or an invasion. Incredibly, the crowd applauded wildly.
Biden remains convinced that it is up to the United States to dictate the form of government and economic system of virtually every country in the world. His specialty is blatant interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, with left-cover of soft power issues like human rights and humanitarian concerns furnishing his favorite pretexts. Biden has learned nothing from the Iraq debacle except that Iraq was not the right victim; more appropriate victims and more effective methods will have to be found, argues Biden. The real lesson of Iraq (and Lebanon 2006) is that US-British imperialism and world domination are finished historically, but this is lost on Biden.
Biden is the author of the odious plan to balkanize, partition, and subdivide Iraq into three zones: a Kurdish state designed to carve up Iran, Syria and Turkey as well as Iraq; a landlocked and oil- poor Sunni desert entity; and an oil-rich Shiastan in the south that might absorb the Arabistan or Achwaz province of Iran is a later breakup scenario for Iran. Biden's plan is a continuation of the Bernard Lewis plan to break up the existing states of the Middle East in a way destined to create a mosaic of pseudo- independent, squabbling mini-states or micro-states. This approach places Biden squarely behind the Zbigniew Brzezinski "dignity" doctrine of breaking up the existing nation states of the world in favor of a crazy quilt of micro-states based on ethnic and religious parochialism and particularism; not one of these micro- states could stand up to Exxon-Mobil or JP Morgan Chase.
BIDEN IS MORALLY INSANE ON GEORGIA
Biden's ample track record as an agent provocateur against Russia goes back more than a decade to the time he mobilized his mouth to help demonize Milosevic of Serbia as part of the Albright-Holbrooke- Wesley Clark anti-Russian campaign of those years, which ended with the NATO bombing of Serbia, an act of unprecedented historical vandalism. In the past week, warmonger Biden has rushed to the side of the latest tin pot mini-Mussolini of the Brzezinski-Soros faction, the infamous war criminal and gangster Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia. "I left the country convinced that Russia's invasion of Georgia may be the one of the most significant events to occur in Europe since the end of communism," raved Biden on his return, documenting his own moral insanity by siding with the aggressor. "The claims of Georgian atrocities that provided the pretext for Russia's invasion are rapidly being disproved by international observers, and the continuing presence of Russian forces in the country has severe implications for the broader region," added the Orwellian senator.
BIDEN: $1 BILLION FOR MADMAN SAAKASHVILI
In presenting Biden, Barky reveled in Biden's "tough message" for Russia; we are sure Putin is trembling. Biden wants to prop up the madman Saakashvili with $1 billion of the US taxpayers' money, a gesture which is every bit as obscene as the worst Bush-Cheney excesses. $1 billion would get us on the road to fully funding a program like WIC (high-protein foods for expectant mothers) or Head Start, but this thought does not occur to Biden when he is trying to provoke Russia. We can see the cruel elitism of a financier- controlled Obama regime taking place before our eyes.
Obama and Biden resemble each other closely, Both are insufferable windbags besotted with their own rhetorical verbiage. Biden's celebrated gaffes will provide comic relief, as long as they do not gaffe us into World War III, which is always a distinct possibility. Obama and Biden are addicted to the sound of their own voices, and this may turn out to be the fatal flaw that sinks them when the voters get sick of the endless parade of speeches. Obama and Biden are in danger of drowning in their own endless blabber. Each one has more than a touch of megalomania, which prevents them from seeing their limits. Biden's middle name is Robinette, which is close to the term for a faucet tap in French. Biden has never been able to find the tap to turn off his own mouth.
TWO PLAGIARISTS ON THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET
Obama and Biden are both plagiarists; words are their stock in trade, and even the words are fake. It emerged this spring that Obama was spouting verbatim the canned speeches of Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, his fellow clone from the Trilateral stable. Biden is a picaresque paladin of plagiarism. His 1988 presidential campaign was aborted when he was found to have stolen paragraphs of a speech by the Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock. He had also embroidered his campaign biography. Biden had also been guilty of plagiarism at the Syracuse University law school which he attended, but he had somehow talked his way out of those charges.
BIDEN A CREATURE OF THE WORST CREDIT CARD GOUGERS
Biden represents Delaware in the US Senate. Delaware is not a state, but a giant post box for Dupont, General Motors, and many of the giant corporations and Wall Street firms. The state politics of Delaware are dictated down to the most minute detail by the bankers and their corporate lackeys, since everything depends on keeping a pro-oligarchical political climate in the state. Biden personally is a tool of MBNA, a credit card issuer that was recently absorbed by the Bank of America, which presumably now also owns Biden. Biden got at least $215,000 from MBNA over the past decade. MBNA is notoriously one of the biggest predatory lenders and interest rate gougers in the entire usurious world of credit cards, and Biden's services to them are precisely in this area: Biden was a big supporter of the 2005 bankruptcy law which makes it much harder for working families to escape debt bondage and debt slavery just what the looters at MBNA ordered. Biden has also boasted that he wrote the ban on assault weapons, a measure that is sure to cause problems among the bitter clingers of Appalachia who are concerned about gun ownership.
Obama has voted for the rotten compromise on FISA illegal wiretaps ordered by Bush that grants retroactive immunity to the telecoms. Biden is also an enthusiastic police state totalitarian. In 1995, after the Oklahoma City false flag bombing, Biden submitted an oppressive police state bill, in many ways a precursor of Bush's infamous Patriot Act. "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing," boasts Biden. "And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill." Biden's only regret is that he was not able to undermine political freedom as much as he wanted to.
Obama's drooling acolytes have argued all summer that to name Senator Clinton to the ticket would negate Barky's profile of youth, change, hope, and so forth. Clinton has been a national figure for almost twenty years, but she has been dumped in favor of Biden, who has been in the US Senate for about 36 years and is about as stale and hackneyed as a political figure could be. The difference is that Biden's track record established him as an obedient servant of the Wall Street banks that have their post box headquarters in his state; the Clintons, by contrast, represent the closest thing we have to political combination not wholly owned by Wall Street and capable of saying no to the bankers when they demand austerity and aggression, as they are assuredly doing now. Rockefeller and Soros do not want Sen. Clinton in the presidential succession under any circumstances, and this is an important positive qualification for the New York senator.
BEAU BIDEN, THE CORRUPT ATTORNEY GENERAL OF DELAWARE
Joe Biden's son is Beau Biden, the current attorney general of Delaware. Beau is involved in one of the dirtiest enemies' list operations in recent memory against Larry Sinclair, who has come forward with explosive charges of gay sex and crack cocaine use in 1999 on the part of Obama. When Sinclair came to the National Press Club in Washington on June 18 to make his case, he was arrested on a trumped-up warrant issued by Beau Biden. Sinclair is being threatened with a long jail term, essentially because he has spoken out against Obama. It was a clear bid to do a favor for Barky and get Joe Biden on the ticket in the veep slot. That has now occurred on the basis of a police state operation against an outspoken political opponent which goes beyond Nixon or Bush- Cheney, since Obama is not yet president and may well never be.
The Biden announcement was thoroughly botched and bungled by Axelrod, Plouffe, and Favreau. The text message gimmick is drawn straight from the Kiev Orange revolution of 2004 and the Tiflis Roses revolution of 2003, the models for Obama's attempt to seize power. The proceedings were a carnival of gaffes and Freudian slips, all ignored by Obama's loyal brigade of media whores. According to Barky, Joe Biden would help enact "a new energy policy to freeze ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil" a chilling prospect.
"BARACK AMERICA" AND OTHER FREUDIAN SLIPS
Barky made another revealing Freudian slip: "the next President the next Vice President Joe Biden." Does Barky know that Biden will act as his resident in-house controller? Biden, evidently mindful that he will have to sell the radical subversive Obama as a wholesome product of the heartland, returned the gaffe by calling the presumptive nominee "Barack America" or "Barack American." Perhaps he was trying to imitate the old Subliminal Man of Saturday Night Live, but was too slow.
Behind Barky's Freudian slip is the fact that Biden will evidently run foreign policy for the clueless Obama in much the same way that Brzezinski ran foreign policy above and behind Carter, or that Cheney has run foreign policy above and behind Bush. Obama is so ignorant and cognitively impaired that he could hardly understand the instructions that bankers' spokesmen like Brzezinski and Soros will be shouting to him on the phone. This is where an experienced hack like Biden is needed. The media, in a transparent attempt to portray an apostolic succession for Biden, are still feeding the illusion that Biden was chosen by Caroline Kennedy. In reality, the choice was probably made by Trilateral-Bilderberg operative Jim Johnson, who was forced to retreat from his announced role as The Vetter by revelations about a sweetheart mortgage, but probably just kept going behind the scenes.
The Obama campaign has repeated ad nauseam its mantra that McCain is running for Bush's third term. McCain has answered that Obama is running for Jimmy Carter's second term. The reality may be that Joe Biden is running for Dick Cheney's third term as the resident controller of a lazy and shallow puppet president Obama, the Manchurian candidate of the Trilateral Commission.
Webster G. Tarpley is the author of Obama: The Postmodern Coup, and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography, both published by Progressive Press of California.
Motormouth Joe Biden - Warmonger, Wordmonger And Political Hit Man
By Webster G. Tarpley
8-25-8
WASHINGTON DC -- The vice presidential candidate chosen to run with Obama is Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, a discredited, sleazy, and shopworn political hack -- and therefore an anti-climax for all the callow and feckless youth who got the word via text message at 3am in the morning. The ability of the Trilateral-Bilderberg machine which controls Obama to put up a person like Biden already reflects the further degradation of US political life over the past 9-12 months, largely as a result of Obama's own demagogic, no- issues, personality cult agitation.
A year ago, there was wide agreement in the US middle class that Bush and Cheney should be impeached, that the police state be rolled back, and that the Iraq war should be ended as soon as physically possible. Thanks largely to the advent of the vapid and messianic Obama, these issues have now been thoroughly deflated. Biden is himself an incurable warmonger who voted for the Iraq war and blathered ceaselessly in favor of Bush's aggressive adventure to all who would listen. Naming Biden is a brutal insult to the antiwar majority of the Democratic Party, and Obama is obviously hoping that the Iraq war issue is dead, so nobody will care. Last year, Obama promised that he would work against the mentality that produced Iraq; if anyone incarnates that mentality, it is Biden. Biden is an incurable imperialist and an eager advocate of the discredited Bush-Cheney "war on terror." He even tried to use one of the Democratic debates last year to whip up hysteria in favor of attacking Sudan over the Darfur issue, and with some success. "I went there. I sat in the borders. I went in those camps. They're going to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people die. We've got to stop talking and act," Biden postured in Manchester New Hampshire on June 3, 2007 in an apparent call for bombing Sudan, a coup in Khartoum, or an invasion. Incredibly, the crowd applauded wildly.
Biden remains convinced that it is up to the United States to dictate the form of government and economic system of virtually every country in the world. His specialty is blatant interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, with left-cover of soft power issues like human rights and humanitarian concerns furnishing his favorite pretexts. Biden has learned nothing from the Iraq debacle except that Iraq was not the right victim; more appropriate victims and more effective methods will have to be found, argues Biden. The real lesson of Iraq (and Lebanon 2006) is that US-British imperialism and world domination are finished historically, but this is lost on Biden.
Biden is the author of the odious plan to balkanize, partition, and subdivide Iraq into three zones: a Kurdish state designed to carve up Iran, Syria and Turkey as well as Iraq; a landlocked and oil- poor Sunni desert entity; and an oil-rich Shiastan in the south that might absorb the Arabistan or Achwaz province of Iran is a later breakup scenario for Iran. Biden's plan is a continuation of the Bernard Lewis plan to break up the existing states of the Middle East in a way destined to create a mosaic of pseudo- independent, squabbling mini-states or micro-states. This approach places Biden squarely behind the Zbigniew Brzezinski "dignity" doctrine of breaking up the existing nation states of the world in favor of a crazy quilt of micro-states based on ethnic and religious parochialism and particularism; not one of these micro- states could stand up to Exxon-Mobil or JP Morgan Chase.
BIDEN IS MORALLY INSANE ON GEORGIA
Biden's ample track record as an agent provocateur against Russia goes back more than a decade to the time he mobilized his mouth to help demonize Milosevic of Serbia as part of the Albright-Holbrooke- Wesley Clark anti-Russian campaign of those years, which ended with the NATO bombing of Serbia, an act of unprecedented historical vandalism. In the past week, warmonger Biden has rushed to the side of the latest tin pot mini-Mussolini of the Brzezinski-Soros faction, the infamous war criminal and gangster Mikhail Saakashvili of Georgia. "I left the country convinced that Russia's invasion of Georgia may be the one of the most significant events to occur in Europe since the end of communism," raved Biden on his return, documenting his own moral insanity by siding with the aggressor. "The claims of Georgian atrocities that provided the pretext for Russia's invasion are rapidly being disproved by international observers, and the continuing presence of Russian forces in the country has severe implications for the broader region," added the Orwellian senator.
BIDEN: $1 BILLION FOR MADMAN SAAKASHVILI
In presenting Biden, Barky reveled in Biden's "tough message" for Russia; we are sure Putin is trembling. Biden wants to prop up the madman Saakashvili with $1 billion of the US taxpayers' money, a gesture which is every bit as obscene as the worst Bush-Cheney excesses. $1 billion would get us on the road to fully funding a program like WIC (high-protein foods for expectant mothers) or Head Start, but this thought does not occur to Biden when he is trying to provoke Russia. We can see the cruel elitism of a financier- controlled Obama regime taking place before our eyes.
Obama and Biden resemble each other closely, Both are insufferable windbags besotted with their own rhetorical verbiage. Biden's celebrated gaffes will provide comic relief, as long as they do not gaffe us into World War III, which is always a distinct possibility. Obama and Biden are addicted to the sound of their own voices, and this may turn out to be the fatal flaw that sinks them when the voters get sick of the endless parade of speeches. Obama and Biden are in danger of drowning in their own endless blabber. Each one has more than a touch of megalomania, which prevents them from seeing their limits. Biden's middle name is Robinette, which is close to the term for a faucet tap in French. Biden has never been able to find the tap to turn off his own mouth.
TWO PLAGIARISTS ON THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET
Obama and Biden are both plagiarists; words are their stock in trade, and even the words are fake. It emerged this spring that Obama was spouting verbatim the canned speeches of Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, his fellow clone from the Trilateral stable. Biden is a picaresque paladin of plagiarism. His 1988 presidential campaign was aborted when he was found to have stolen paragraphs of a speech by the Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock. He had also embroidered his campaign biography. Biden had also been guilty of plagiarism at the Syracuse University law school which he attended, but he had somehow talked his way out of those charges.
BIDEN A CREATURE OF THE WORST CREDIT CARD GOUGERS
Biden represents Delaware in the US Senate. Delaware is not a state, but a giant post box for Dupont, General Motors, and many of the giant corporations and Wall Street firms. The state politics of Delaware are dictated down to the most minute detail by the bankers and their corporate lackeys, since everything depends on keeping a pro-oligarchical political climate in the state. Biden personally is a tool of MBNA, a credit card issuer that was recently absorbed by the Bank of America, which presumably now also owns Biden. Biden got at least $215,000 from MBNA over the past decade. MBNA is notoriously one of the biggest predatory lenders and interest rate gougers in the entire usurious world of credit cards, and Biden's services to them are precisely in this area: Biden was a big supporter of the 2005 bankruptcy law which makes it much harder for working families to escape debt bondage and debt slavery just what the looters at MBNA ordered. Biden has also boasted that he wrote the ban on assault weapons, a measure that is sure to cause problems among the bitter clingers of Appalachia who are concerned about gun ownership.
Obama has voted for the rotten compromise on FISA illegal wiretaps ordered by Bush that grants retroactive immunity to the telecoms. Biden is also an enthusiastic police state totalitarian. In 1995, after the Oklahoma City false flag bombing, Biden submitted an oppressive police state bill, in many ways a precursor of Bush's infamous Patriot Act. "I drafted a terrorism bill after the Oklahoma City bombing," boasts Biden. "And the bill John Ashcroft sent up was my bill." Biden's only regret is that he was not able to undermine political freedom as much as he wanted to.
Obama's drooling acolytes have argued all summer that to name Senator Clinton to the ticket would negate Barky's profile of youth, change, hope, and so forth. Clinton has been a national figure for almost twenty years, but she has been dumped in favor of Biden, who has been in the US Senate for about 36 years and is about as stale and hackneyed as a political figure could be. The difference is that Biden's track record established him as an obedient servant of the Wall Street banks that have their post box headquarters in his state; the Clintons, by contrast, represent the closest thing we have to political combination not wholly owned by Wall Street and capable of saying no to the bankers when they demand austerity and aggression, as they are assuredly doing now. Rockefeller and Soros do not want Sen. Clinton in the presidential succession under any circumstances, and this is an important positive qualification for the New York senator.
BEAU BIDEN, THE CORRUPT ATTORNEY GENERAL OF DELAWARE
Joe Biden's son is Beau Biden, the current attorney general of Delaware. Beau is involved in one of the dirtiest enemies' list operations in recent memory against Larry Sinclair, who has come forward with explosive charges of gay sex and crack cocaine use in 1999 on the part of Obama. When Sinclair came to the National Press Club in Washington on June 18 to make his case, he was arrested on a trumped-up warrant issued by Beau Biden. Sinclair is being threatened with a long jail term, essentially because he has spoken out against Obama. It was a clear bid to do a favor for Barky and get Joe Biden on the ticket in the veep slot. That has now occurred on the basis of a police state operation against an outspoken political opponent which goes beyond Nixon or Bush- Cheney, since Obama is not yet president and may well never be.
The Biden announcement was thoroughly botched and bungled by Axelrod, Plouffe, and Favreau. The text message gimmick is drawn straight from the Kiev Orange revolution of 2004 and the Tiflis Roses revolution of 2003, the models for Obama's attempt to seize power. The proceedings were a carnival of gaffes and Freudian slips, all ignored by Obama's loyal brigade of media whores. According to Barky, Joe Biden would help enact "a new energy policy to freeze ourselves from our dependence on foreign oil" a chilling prospect.
"BARACK AMERICA" AND OTHER FREUDIAN SLIPS
Barky made another revealing Freudian slip: "the next President the next Vice President Joe Biden." Does Barky know that Biden will act as his resident in-house controller? Biden, evidently mindful that he will have to sell the radical subversive Obama as a wholesome product of the heartland, returned the gaffe by calling the presumptive nominee "Barack America" or "Barack American." Perhaps he was trying to imitate the old Subliminal Man of Saturday Night Live, but was too slow.
Behind Barky's Freudian slip is the fact that Biden will evidently run foreign policy for the clueless Obama in much the same way that Brzezinski ran foreign policy above and behind Carter, or that Cheney has run foreign policy above and behind Bush. Obama is so ignorant and cognitively impaired that he could hardly understand the instructions that bankers' spokesmen like Brzezinski and Soros will be shouting to him on the phone. This is where an experienced hack like Biden is needed. The media, in a transparent attempt to portray an apostolic succession for Biden, are still feeding the illusion that Biden was chosen by Caroline Kennedy. In reality, the choice was probably made by Trilateral-Bilderberg operative Jim Johnson, who was forced to retreat from his announced role as The Vetter by revelations about a sweetheart mortgage, but probably just kept going behind the scenes.
The Obama campaign has repeated ad nauseam its mantra that McCain is running for Bush's third term. McCain has answered that Obama is running for Jimmy Carter's second term. The reality may be that Joe Biden is running for Dick Cheney's third term as the resident controller of a lazy and shallow puppet president Obama, the Manchurian candidate of the Trilateral Commission.
Webster G. Tarpley is the author of Obama: The Postmodern Coup, and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography, both published by Progressive Press of California.
Fourteen Reasons Why Biden Was a Stupid Choice
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/24/fourteen-reasons-why-biden-was-a-stupid-choice/
Fourteen Reasons Why Biden Was a Stupid Choice
By PatRacimora
Email: susanunpc@gmail.com
August 24, 2008
Barack Obama, Joe Biden, vice president
An Exclusive for No Quarter by Democratic Political Strategist (incognito) “Sam Copeland”
The selection of Joe Biden as the Vice Presidential nominee by Obama was a big surprise for me. Biden was not even on my list of finalists.
Why?
I didn’t think anyone – not even Obama – would make a strategic blunder of this magnitude.
For the record, I really like Joe Biden as a person and as a Senator. My analysis is simply political and doesn’t speak to his abilities as a Senator.
The typical criteria for selecting a VP include one or more of the following: (a) win a key state, (b) reinforce a message, (c) balance the ticket (cover different regions of the country), (d) bring the party together, (e) provide a contrast favorable to the candidate (Nixon selects Agnew, Bush selects weaker Quayle), and (f) enlist a hatchet man to do the dirty work. With the exception of “f”, Biden does none of these and he does “f” at a big cost.
Read the rest ->
In announcing Biden as the VP selection, New York Times summarized in a nutshell the problem with this choice:
It reflected a critical strategic choice by Mr. Obama: To go with a running mate who could reassure voters about gaps in his résumé, rather than to pick someone who could deliver a state or reinforce Mr. Obama’s message of change.
Here are my 14 reasons why this is a terrible political decision:
1. During the primary, Biden made many remarks about Obama’s lack of experience and the need for experience in order to be President. That has already given the Republicans a free round of attacks. Throughout the campaign there will be constant contrasts between Biden’s experience and Obama’s lack of it, further questioning Obama’s readiness for the office. Americans don’t care if the VP has experience; they want it in their Commander in Chief.
2. The selection of Biden sends a mixed campaign message. The Obama message was about hope and change. In politics, you must “stay on message.” This sends a mixed message — do you need hope, change, and judgment to lead the country or someone who knows what they are doing? If you say both, then you get into a nuanced discussion of when you need hope vs. experience, why can’t one leader have both hope and experience, and so on. Contrast this with the pick of Senator Gore by Governor Clinton in 2000. This reinforced the message of “A New Democrat” (since both had similar political philosophies).
3. To paraphrase James Farley — one of FDR’s ‘36 campaign managers and DNC chair, “As Delaware goes, so goes Vermont.” In other words, Delaware’s 3 electoral votes should have been in Obama’s column before this pick; it gives him no pick-up. Contrast this with picking Kaine or Bayh, who would have put Virginia or Indiana in play. (The original Farley quote was “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” Maine and Vermont were the only 2 states won by Alf Landon in 1936; up until that election Maine was considered a bellwether state in predicting the outcome of national elections).
4. Obama’s electoral strategy was to reconfigure the map by making gains in the Western states. This pick does nothing to help in that area. It actually hurts. Why would people in Colorado, Nevada, Montana, and New Mexico be impressed with a Northeasterner? Contrast with Clinton/Gore 2000 where both were Southerners and thus made the statement, “We are here to win the South.” The selection of Biden also writes off Southern states. Obama had hopes in Georgia and North Carolina; I don’t see how it helps in the border states or in Florida.
5. Obama’s election strategy has now become the equivalent of drawing to an inside straight in poker. He hasn’t secured his base states (particularly Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania), but yet he is campaigning in states like Colorado. Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are like the inside cards he needs to draw a straight. Biden helps with eastern Pennsylvania because of his roots and religion, but not with Ohio and Michigan (with fewer Catholic populations). In other words, Obama just spent a lot of political capital to win a state - Pennsylvania - that he should be winning by larger numbers anyway.
6. The argument for Biden is that he will appeal to the Hillary base of blue collar workers. This is somewhat true in Pennsylvania where there are strong Catholic ties. (Hillary’s strongest support among men came from Catholic blue collar workers, who Biden should also appeal to). However, blue collar workers in Ohio and Michigan do not have those Catholic roots and it is not clear how much Biden will help. Furthermore, Biden does little (and most likely does harm) in securing the other major portion of Hillary’s base — women. Symbolically, Biden is from the “old white boys” club and is only moderately pro-choice (a NARAL rating of 36%, although he is probably more pro-choice than this number suggests). Some women are already suspicious of Obama’s position on abortion, and Biden’s selection doesn’t help reduce those concerns. I think the selection of Biden indicates that Obama now realizes he needs to unite the party and secure the votes of traditional Democrats; this is a poor tactical play in a correct strategy that should have been executed throughout the primary and completed no later than June.
7. Biden is gaffe prone. Already, the news media is covering past Biden gaffes. This takes away from the impact this announcement was suppose to have. Further, if Biden makes one or two gaffes during the election, then that will take Obama off message for a week or two as everyone tries to cover for them. That will be costly.
Biden’s past gaffes make him look like a quarterback who has some great abilities but who fumbles the ball and throws interceptions as critical game moments. Thus, in voters’ minds, you have a situation where you are starting a high school quarterback in the Super Bowl, and this high school kid is being backed up at quarterback by a veteran who is capable of playing at a high level but is also prone to make critical fumbles. No one wants to go into the Super Bowl with this quarterback situation and, if you had to, you would go with the veteran back-up as starter and not the kid. This is not the image you want if you want to win the Presidency.
8. Biden’s strength is that he can deliver a strong blow to his opposition if need be. He is a great hatchet man. But, this comes at a cost including: (a) he also makes gaffes, (b) it undermines Obama’s claim to run a different campaign (he really boxed himself in with this promise), and (c) he spent a lot of political capital on a hatchet man. In sports metaphor, you have spent a first round draft pick on a person who comes off the bench to foul instead of a franchise player. Obama needs an attack dog. However, given that he has promised a clean campaign, the attack dog can’t be too close to Obama (say, like a VP pick). Instead of making his VP a hatchet man, he should have developed a team of surrogates and made use of his netroots for stealth attacks.
9. Biden supported the resolution to go to war. If it is about judgment and not experience– as Obama has proclaimed — then Biden does not have the qualities needed to be President. Biden also has a different plan to end the Iraq war (withdrawal vs. stay there long enough to sort the contending coalitions into their own geographic space). This mixed message can be exploited by McCain as he uses one against the other.
10. Biden supported the bankruptcy law and legislation favoring credit card companies and banks. This now neutralizes a key democratic issue in the campaign: sub-prime lending and the economy in general. Depending on how the issues in the campaign unfold, McCain can exploit this to drive a wedge to further separate blue collar workers from the Democratic Party (and thus neutralize Biden on this strength). McCain can also use Biden’s connections to the financial industry to show lobbying ties and thus neutralize Obama on this issue.
11. One of Biden’s major strengths is his patriotism. His son is leaving his post in Delaware state government to go serve in Iraq. This is an inspiration to most Americans. Obama probably thinks that it will neutralize McCain’s war record. Here is what will actually happen. McCain will praise Biden and his son for their service to America. Biden will need to reciprocate and praise McCain for his service (or else Biden looks like a jerk). With McCain and Biden praising each other for their service to America, guess who is left out of the discussion? Answer: Obama. Where is his service to America?
12. Biden was accused of plagiarism in 1988. Do I need to say more than this: “Change you can Xerox.”?
13. Biden has over 30 years of speeches, votes, and positions. The Republicans have this material indexed. This gives them an enormous amount of material to be used on a tactical basis as the campaign unfolds.
14. Last week, David Gergen noted that the Obama campaign was losing momentum and needs a game-changer. Gergen is correct in his analysis. The selection of Biden is not a game-changer.
The left-wing blogosphere is changing course and now come, not to bury Biden, but to praise him. They marvel at what a great choice this is (last week they were saying the opposite). They also are in utter admiration for how the selection was announced.
Over at Daily “I-Think-Ned Lamont-is-a-Winning-Political-Strategy” Kos, they put it this way:
This has been the best Veep rollout EVER. . . . [I]s there a better example than this that old media is getting left out in the cold?
Let me conclude by telling you why his roll-out of this announcement was actually terrible.
1. Way too much hype for the selection. Obama hyped this thing up and had everyone on pins and needles for — Joe Biden? Had it been Al Gore or Hillary Clinton or someone like that, then it would have made sense. This is like a nonstop 2 week PR blitz for the movie Gigli.
This hype comes at a cost. First, it reinforces the perception that this campaign is about Obama and not about the American people. Second, I am seeing more and more that Americans are growing fatigued –call it Obama fatigue– by all the theatrics. They want to know how their lives will be better.
2. Daily “I-think-Ned-Lamont-is-a-Winning-Political-Strategy” Kos is absolutely correct that this roll-out made the media look bad because they were not supposed to be the first to know. And this is a good thing? Who do you think will be filtering the news for most Americans during this election cycle? The media is lazy and doesn’t do its job; the one thing it likes most of all is being perceived as being in the know. This roll-out undermined that perception, which can’t help but anger the media. How do you think they will even the score?
3. The use of text messaging was a brilliant idea. It helps build excitement, involves people in the campaign, and builds a voter base. That being said, it was poorly executed, and did more harm than good. Those folks who signed up for the alert were NOT the first people to know, as promised. The media scooped Obama, anyway. This was a let-down to all those who signed up. It sends a signal that Obama really can’t change things (the media is still in control).
The media figured it out because they knew to watch the Secret Service as a tip-off. They knew that the first person to know would not be the text-messengers but the Secret Service, and that the Secret Service would show up to Biden’s house before the announcement. Obama’s people didn’t know that. Obama thought he could out-fox the media, but didn’t know enough about how the media works its sources to do so. Once again, he is the rookie high school quarterback playing in the Super Bowl. He thinks he is clever by calling the “Statute of Liberty” play, but the play gets quickly shut down by a vastly more knowledgeable and experienced press corps (at least more experienced at these sorts of games). The end result is a dissed media, disappointed supporters, and a reinforced rookie image.
Sam Copeland’s Political Rule #29: You cannot make up a political deficit by hiring a surrogate. That only makes the political deficit more apparent.
Fourteen Reasons Why Biden Was a Stupid Choice
By PatRacimora
Email: susanunpc@gmail.com
August 24, 2008
Barack Obama, Joe Biden, vice president
An Exclusive for No Quarter by Democratic Political Strategist (incognito) “Sam Copeland”
The selection of Joe Biden as the Vice Presidential nominee by Obama was a big surprise for me. Biden was not even on my list of finalists.
Why?
I didn’t think anyone – not even Obama – would make a strategic blunder of this magnitude.
For the record, I really like Joe Biden as a person and as a Senator. My analysis is simply political and doesn’t speak to his abilities as a Senator.
The typical criteria for selecting a VP include one or more of the following: (a) win a key state, (b) reinforce a message, (c) balance the ticket (cover different regions of the country), (d) bring the party together, (e) provide a contrast favorable to the candidate (Nixon selects Agnew, Bush selects weaker Quayle), and (f) enlist a hatchet man to do the dirty work. With the exception of “f”, Biden does none of these and he does “f” at a big cost.
Read the rest ->
In announcing Biden as the VP selection, New York Times summarized in a nutshell the problem with this choice:
It reflected a critical strategic choice by Mr. Obama: To go with a running mate who could reassure voters about gaps in his résumé, rather than to pick someone who could deliver a state or reinforce Mr. Obama’s message of change.
Here are my 14 reasons why this is a terrible political decision:
1. During the primary, Biden made many remarks about Obama’s lack of experience and the need for experience in order to be President. That has already given the Republicans a free round of attacks. Throughout the campaign there will be constant contrasts between Biden’s experience and Obama’s lack of it, further questioning Obama’s readiness for the office. Americans don’t care if the VP has experience; they want it in their Commander in Chief.
2. The selection of Biden sends a mixed campaign message. The Obama message was about hope and change. In politics, you must “stay on message.” This sends a mixed message — do you need hope, change, and judgment to lead the country or someone who knows what they are doing? If you say both, then you get into a nuanced discussion of when you need hope vs. experience, why can’t one leader have both hope and experience, and so on. Contrast this with the pick of Senator Gore by Governor Clinton in 2000. This reinforced the message of “A New Democrat” (since both had similar political philosophies).
3. To paraphrase James Farley — one of FDR’s ‘36 campaign managers and DNC chair, “As Delaware goes, so goes Vermont.” In other words, Delaware’s 3 electoral votes should have been in Obama’s column before this pick; it gives him no pick-up. Contrast this with picking Kaine or Bayh, who would have put Virginia or Indiana in play. (The original Farley quote was “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” Maine and Vermont were the only 2 states won by Alf Landon in 1936; up until that election Maine was considered a bellwether state in predicting the outcome of national elections).
4. Obama’s electoral strategy was to reconfigure the map by making gains in the Western states. This pick does nothing to help in that area. It actually hurts. Why would people in Colorado, Nevada, Montana, and New Mexico be impressed with a Northeasterner? Contrast with Clinton/Gore 2000 where both were Southerners and thus made the statement, “We are here to win the South.” The selection of Biden also writes off Southern states. Obama had hopes in Georgia and North Carolina; I don’t see how it helps in the border states or in Florida.
5. Obama’s election strategy has now become the equivalent of drawing to an inside straight in poker. He hasn’t secured his base states (particularly Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania), but yet he is campaigning in states like Colorado. Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are like the inside cards he needs to draw a straight. Biden helps with eastern Pennsylvania because of his roots and religion, but not with Ohio and Michigan (with fewer Catholic populations). In other words, Obama just spent a lot of political capital to win a state - Pennsylvania - that he should be winning by larger numbers anyway.
6. The argument for Biden is that he will appeal to the Hillary base of blue collar workers. This is somewhat true in Pennsylvania where there are strong Catholic ties. (Hillary’s strongest support among men came from Catholic blue collar workers, who Biden should also appeal to). However, blue collar workers in Ohio and Michigan do not have those Catholic roots and it is not clear how much Biden will help. Furthermore, Biden does little (and most likely does harm) in securing the other major portion of Hillary’s base — women. Symbolically, Biden is from the “old white boys” club and is only moderately pro-choice (a NARAL rating of 36%, although he is probably more pro-choice than this number suggests). Some women are already suspicious of Obama’s position on abortion, and Biden’s selection doesn’t help reduce those concerns. I think the selection of Biden indicates that Obama now realizes he needs to unite the party and secure the votes of traditional Democrats; this is a poor tactical play in a correct strategy that should have been executed throughout the primary and completed no later than June.
7. Biden is gaffe prone. Already, the news media is covering past Biden gaffes. This takes away from the impact this announcement was suppose to have. Further, if Biden makes one or two gaffes during the election, then that will take Obama off message for a week or two as everyone tries to cover for them. That will be costly.
Biden’s past gaffes make him look like a quarterback who has some great abilities but who fumbles the ball and throws interceptions as critical game moments. Thus, in voters’ minds, you have a situation where you are starting a high school quarterback in the Super Bowl, and this high school kid is being backed up at quarterback by a veteran who is capable of playing at a high level but is also prone to make critical fumbles. No one wants to go into the Super Bowl with this quarterback situation and, if you had to, you would go with the veteran back-up as starter and not the kid. This is not the image you want if you want to win the Presidency.
8. Biden’s strength is that he can deliver a strong blow to his opposition if need be. He is a great hatchet man. But, this comes at a cost including: (a) he also makes gaffes, (b) it undermines Obama’s claim to run a different campaign (he really boxed himself in with this promise), and (c) he spent a lot of political capital on a hatchet man. In sports metaphor, you have spent a first round draft pick on a person who comes off the bench to foul instead of a franchise player. Obama needs an attack dog. However, given that he has promised a clean campaign, the attack dog can’t be too close to Obama (say, like a VP pick). Instead of making his VP a hatchet man, he should have developed a team of surrogates and made use of his netroots for stealth attacks.
9. Biden supported the resolution to go to war. If it is about judgment and not experience– as Obama has proclaimed — then Biden does not have the qualities needed to be President. Biden also has a different plan to end the Iraq war (withdrawal vs. stay there long enough to sort the contending coalitions into their own geographic space). This mixed message can be exploited by McCain as he uses one against the other.
10. Biden supported the bankruptcy law and legislation favoring credit card companies and banks. This now neutralizes a key democratic issue in the campaign: sub-prime lending and the economy in general. Depending on how the issues in the campaign unfold, McCain can exploit this to drive a wedge to further separate blue collar workers from the Democratic Party (and thus neutralize Biden on this strength). McCain can also use Biden’s connections to the financial industry to show lobbying ties and thus neutralize Obama on this issue.
11. One of Biden’s major strengths is his patriotism. His son is leaving his post in Delaware state government to go serve in Iraq. This is an inspiration to most Americans. Obama probably thinks that it will neutralize McCain’s war record. Here is what will actually happen. McCain will praise Biden and his son for their service to America. Biden will need to reciprocate and praise McCain for his service (or else Biden looks like a jerk). With McCain and Biden praising each other for their service to America, guess who is left out of the discussion? Answer: Obama. Where is his service to America?
12. Biden was accused of plagiarism in 1988. Do I need to say more than this: “Change you can Xerox.”?
13. Biden has over 30 years of speeches, votes, and positions. The Republicans have this material indexed. This gives them an enormous amount of material to be used on a tactical basis as the campaign unfolds.
14. Last week, David Gergen noted that the Obama campaign was losing momentum and needs a game-changer. Gergen is correct in his analysis. The selection of Biden is not a game-changer.
The left-wing blogosphere is changing course and now come, not to bury Biden, but to praise him. They marvel at what a great choice this is (last week they were saying the opposite). They also are in utter admiration for how the selection was announced.
Over at Daily “I-Think-Ned Lamont-is-a-Winning-Political-Strategy” Kos, they put it this way:
This has been the best Veep rollout EVER. . . . [I]s there a better example than this that old media is getting left out in the cold?
Let me conclude by telling you why his roll-out of this announcement was actually terrible.
1. Way too much hype for the selection. Obama hyped this thing up and had everyone on pins and needles for — Joe Biden? Had it been Al Gore or Hillary Clinton or someone like that, then it would have made sense. This is like a nonstop 2 week PR blitz for the movie Gigli.
This hype comes at a cost. First, it reinforces the perception that this campaign is about Obama and not about the American people. Second, I am seeing more and more that Americans are growing fatigued –call it Obama fatigue– by all the theatrics. They want to know how their lives will be better.
2. Daily “I-think-Ned-Lamont-is-a-Winning-Political-Strategy” Kos is absolutely correct that this roll-out made the media look bad because they were not supposed to be the first to know. And this is a good thing? Who do you think will be filtering the news for most Americans during this election cycle? The media is lazy and doesn’t do its job; the one thing it likes most of all is being perceived as being in the know. This roll-out undermined that perception, which can’t help but anger the media. How do you think they will even the score?
3. The use of text messaging was a brilliant idea. It helps build excitement, involves people in the campaign, and builds a voter base. That being said, it was poorly executed, and did more harm than good. Those folks who signed up for the alert were NOT the first people to know, as promised. The media scooped Obama, anyway. This was a let-down to all those who signed up. It sends a signal that Obama really can’t change things (the media is still in control).
The media figured it out because they knew to watch the Secret Service as a tip-off. They knew that the first person to know would not be the text-messengers but the Secret Service, and that the Secret Service would show up to Biden’s house before the announcement. Obama’s people didn’t know that. Obama thought he could out-fox the media, but didn’t know enough about how the media works its sources to do so. Once again, he is the rookie high school quarterback playing in the Super Bowl. He thinks he is clever by calling the “Statute of Liberty” play, but the play gets quickly shut down by a vastly more knowledgeable and experienced press corps (at least more experienced at these sorts of games). The end result is a dissed media, disappointed supporters, and a reinforced rookie image.
Sam Copeland’s Political Rule #29: You cannot make up a political deficit by hiring a surrogate. That only makes the political deficit more apparent.
No Regrets
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2001/No-Regrets/No Regrets
Marcia Froelke Coburn
August 2001
At 55, Bill Ayers, the notorious sixties radical, still carries a whiff of that rock 'n' roll decade: the oversize wire-rim glasses that, in a certain light, reveal themselves as bifocals; a backpack over his shoulder—not some streamlined, chic job, but a funky backpack-of-the-people, complete with a photo button of abolitionist John Brown pinned to one strap.
Yet he is also a man of the moment. For example: There is his cell phone, laid casually on the tabletop of this neighborhood Taylor Street coffee shop, and his passion for double skim lattes. In conversation, he has an immediate, engaging presence; he may not have known you long but, his manner suggests, he's already fascinated. Then there is his quick laugh and his tendency to punctuate his comments by a tap on your arm.
Overall, it is not easy to imagine him as part of the Weatherman, a group that during the late sixties and early seventies openly called for revolution in America, led a violent rampaging protest in Chicago, and took credit for numerous bombings around the United States.
One of the Weatherman leaders was Bernardine Dohrn, a smart, magnetic figure who, in part because of her penchant for miniskirts and knee-high boots, was dubbed "La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left" by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. After a bomb exploded accidentally and killed three of their colleagues, Ayers and Dohrn "hooked up," in the parlance of the day, and, since 1982, they have been married. This—violence, death, and white-hot rhetoric—is his past and Ayers insists he has no regrets. "I acted appropriately in the context of those times," he says. But it's hard to reconcile this quick-witted man with that revolutionary. Today Bill Ayers seems too happy to have ever been so angry.
Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, claims to abhor nostalgia ("Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be"). But he has been thinking lately about the past—both his and the country's—and soon he will likely be engaged in what he calls "a dialogue" about the sixties, the antiwar movement, and the radical life he led. The spur for this dialogue will be the publication of Fugitive Days (Beacon Press, $24), a memoir Ayers has written about the trajectory of his life, from a pampered son of the Chicago suburbs to a young pacifist to a founder of one of the most radical political organizations in U.S. history.
In the pantheon of radicals of the sixties and seventies, Ayers's place is unique. "He was not as notorious as Bernardine Dohrn," says Don Rose, a political consultant who has written about those times. "But what made Ayers of particular interest then was that he was the son of a captain of industry. Now he's interesting because, of all the farther-out radicals, he has achieved the most scholarly reputation."
Writing the book has been "a daunting task," Ayers says, "because I want to be true to those times. I don't feel nostalgic for the sixties, but there is no doubt in my mind that the events I write about were shaping events, and they provided for me a way of seeing the world that seemed so alive and so resonant that I can't escape it, no matter what I do."
Certainly there are moments when Ayers has the sound of the sixties down pat, like when he tells me, "Imperialism or globalization—I don't have to care what it's called to hate it." And then there are moments when he sounds light-years away from his radical sensibilities, more like an old grump lamenting today's uninformed youth: He tells me a story about going into Starbucks and having the young woman behind the counter mistake his photo pin of John Brown for Walt Whitman. "And when I told her, no, it's John Brown, she said, 'Who is John Brown?'"
But I am struck by another part of that story. What are you doing in a Starbucks? I ask the man who professes to hate globalization.
"Oh," he says. "I have an addiction to caffeine."
There you have the complexity of Ayers: a man who once tried to overthrow his country's government and now works for a state university; an opponent of the bourgeoisie who has been married for 20 years; a left-wing radical who loves a good cup of imperialist coffee. Maybe he's always known how to choose his battles. Once one of his sons wanted to hear about how Ayers had been a draft card burner. "Tell me again how you burned your credit card, Pop," his son confusedly asked.
"I'm not that radical," Ayers retorted.
* * *
He grew up in Glen Ellyn, where the grass was literally always greener. His father, Thomas Ayers, was a long-time executive of Commonwealth Edison and served as chairman from 1973 to 1980. "Nice was crucially important," Bill Ayers writes of his childhood, and it's clear in his memoir that what Ayers has long been running from is not so much the law of the 1960s and 1970s but the upper-middle-class sensibility in which he was raised. He attended Lake Forest Academy, where he was the sole member of the Young Socialists of America; he hated every minute of school there. He liked what he found at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor: freewheeling thought, radicalism, and a passionate desire to stop the war in Vietnam, at almost any cost. Soon he dropped out, joined the Students for a Democratic Society, and became a full-time activist; arrests in demonstrations quickly followed, much to his family's dismay.
One of the more amusing passages in Fugitive Days comes when Ayers recounts a generations-in-conflict conversation when his father counseled caution:
"Don't close too many doors to the future," he said. "Don't take too many steps down a one-way street."
"What are you doing to end the war?" I challenged.
"Edison isn't political," he said. "That's not our business. . . . I'd be doubtful about a group calling itself Students for a Democratic Society—this is, after all, a democratic society."
"Well, I'm doubtful about a group calling itself Commonwealth Edison," I said. "There's nothing common about wealth."
He walked out of jail and into his first teaching job, at a daycare center in Ann Arbor. Soon he was the 21-year-old director of the place. It was there he met Diana Oughton, a beautiful and accomplished young woman. They fell in love and attended SDS conventions together. As the war dragged on and U.S. politics became more polarized, some of the war resisters—including Ayers, Oughton, and Dohrn—turned more militant. They started a group called the Weatherman, a name inspired by the Bob Dylan song lyric "You don't need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows."
In 1969, they decided to "bring the war home" by staging a protest in Chicago during the trial of the "Chicago Eight" radicals accused of conspiring to cross state lines to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention here. (Their conviction was later overturned.) "The Days of Rage," as the 1969 protest was called, brought several hundred members of the Weatherman—many of them attired for battle with helmets and weapons—to Lincoln Park. The tear-gassed marches, window smashing, and clashes with police lasted four days, during which 290 militants were arrested and 63 people were injured. Damage to windows, cars, and other property soared to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at."
"The rhetoric was excessive because the times were excessive," says Ayers. "The war had escalated, so naturally the language escalated. No one thought I meant that literally."
Between 1970 and 1974, the Weatherman took credit for 12 bombings, including one of the United States Capitol and another involving several police cars. The group always emphasized that their targets were property, not people. And, in fact, no one was injured—except, of course, some of the Weatherman's own.
In 1970, a bomb that was apparently being built in a Greenwich Village townhouse, occupied by at least five members of the Weatherman, accidentally exploded—killing three of the group, including Ayers's beloved Diana Oughton. In Fugitive Days, Ayers tries to imagine what happened. Maybe Diana tried to stop the others from their path? Maybe they all drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes?
Maybe Diana saw that this bomb, packed with nails and screws, would have exacted a heavy human toll if it had ever reached its destination—a New Jersey military base. Could she have, in a gesture of sacrifice, crossed the wires herself? "I'll never know what happened," he says. "That's the price I have to pay."
The deaths—and two federal indictments—sent Ayers and his remaining comrades underground. The fugitives eluded the FBI for ten years through a series of constantly changing identities and locations. In one of the most haunting scenes in Fugitive Days, Ayers wanders through remote Midwestern cemeteries, looking for the gravestones of babies who, like them, had been born between 1940 and 1950 but had died shortly thereafter. It was from those headstones that the fugitives would build their new identities. Overall, Ayers figures, he had at least 12 separate aliases while living in 15 different states. The one he used most often was "Joe." Bernardine's favorite was "Rose," and to honor her, Ayers got the rose tattoo he now sports on his forearm.
In 1980, Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in. (The first words Ayers's father said to him were, "You need a haircut.") By then they had had two children together, and the bombing conspiracy charge against the couple had been dismissed due to government misconduct.
Dohrn plea-bargained to charges of inciting to mob action and resisting police officers. She was sentenced to three years' probation and a $1,500 fine. Ayers was not charged. Even then he showed a way with words: "Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country," he said.
The next year, a Weatherman killed a Brink's guard and two state troopers in a bungled armored truck robbery. Kathy Boudin, the daughter of an esteemed New York civil rights lawyer, was sentenced to 20 years to life for her role in the crime; Ayers and Dohrn adopted her infant son. Today Ayers says it was partly because of "[the boy's] questions of who he is and what the background of his mother's life was that [Ayers] started to write this memoir."
* * *
Now, Ayers is a respected name in the field of education; his books, including To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and A Good Preschool Teacher, are hailed by some as groundbreaking and thoughtful approaches to learning. Certainly they are reactions against the popular theories of the 1950s, which held that students were empty vessels to be filled with knowledge.
"Essentially, you must see the student before you as a locus of energy," he says. "He already has a heart, a soul, a mind, interests, and dreams. You need to help him shape those interests, pursue those dreams." Ayers is distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where two years ago the university named him Senior University Scholar, an award given to outstanding faculty members. He also directs the Center for Youth and Society, an organization that brings an interdisciplinary approach to working with youth—from art education to after-school programs. One of the center's recent efforts was a symposium inspired by the book Racism Explained to My Daughter, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. "We brought together people to discuss how to address racism with kids," says Therese Quinn, associate director of the center. What strikes Quinn about Ayers is "his enthusiasm and optimism," she says. "He is just overwhelmingly generous and supportive."
"Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice," he says. "I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession."
In Fugitive Days, Ayers has a personable style that pulls the reader in from the book's start—when he describes the moment he heard about the 1970 Greenwich Village explosion. It is the moment, of course, when his own life figuratively blew apart. "In the beginning, Bill wanted to write about the Vietnam War and why he thought it was wrong," says Helene Atwan, director of Beacon Press, who edited Ayers's book. "But I told him that most Americans now believed that that war was wrong and certainly the people reading a book of memoirs would feel that. I wanted him to concentrate on his personal story."
Except for a few minor polemics along the way, Ayers does—and then some. "He very effectively captures the spirit of the times," says Bernardine Dohrn, who is now a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University School of Law. "He conjures it up and reflects on it."
Like her husband, Dohrn claims she feels no need to escape the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. "I feel it's always with me. It's taken a long time to achieve a precarious balance about it, where it's not all defining and a cartoon. But this isn't just my problem; it's a generation's problem."
For two radicals once living underground, Ayers and Dohrn have raised three accomplished children: Zayd (named for a fallen Black Liberation soldier and colleague), 24, graduated from Brown University and has an M.F.A. degree in writing from Boston University, where he now teaches; Malik (for Malcolm X), 21, is attending the University of California at San Diego; and Chesa, 20, their adopted son, just finished his sophomore year at Yale University.
Recently, Ayers himself has returned to school as a student for the first time since he earned his Ph.D. in education at Columbia University—thanks to the monetary award he received from UIC as senior university scholar. He periodically commutes to Bennington College for the school's low-residency M.F.A. program in writing, in which he is concentrating on nonfiction. So far, he has studied with essayist Philip Lopate and novelist/memoirist Susan Cheever. "It's exciting and scary and all those good things," he says. "They have been wonderful in helping me find my own voice."
That is not something you would have thought Ayers needed help with. It is a different time, though, and he is a different man. But not completely changed. Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. "I think there will be another mass political movement," he predicts, "because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night."
But the time-warp moment is over as quickly as it begins. Ayers—totally back in the present moment—pauses to sip his double skim latte, then greets a graduate student who awaits his attention. "These aren't mountain times, these are valley times," he says, acknowledging a change in the culture, the political climate, and maybe even in himself. "But you can still work the vineyard where you are."
Photograph: Jeff Sciortino
Strangely Timed Obama Response Ad
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/08/strangely-timed.html
Strangely Timed Obama Response Ad on William Ayers
August 25, 2008
ABC News' Tahman Bradley Reports: As Michelle Obama prepares for a primetime speech that will talk about her and Barack Obama's American values, the Obama campaign is using a new television ad to take on the issue of Obama's association with a 1970s radical who bombed the Capitol and Pentagon.
The release of the ad, first reported on Time.com's "The Page", could have the unintended consequence of reminding voters that Obama has in the past been friendly with William Ayers, a Chicago law professor who to this day remains unrepentant about his work with the violent Weather Underground group in the 1960s and 70s.
Obama has denounced Ayers' actions with the radical group, but has also referred to Ayers as "mainstream" and "respectable," a point that conservatives continue to pound the soon-to-be Democratic nominee about.
A 501(c) 4 group, acting independent of Republican John McCain's presidential campaign, last week, hammered Obama for his relationship with Ayers with a provocative television spot in Ohio and Michigan.
"Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama," the spot by American Issues Project says.
Some news organization, including Fox News Channel, refused to air the ad which uses images of 9/11. The Obama campaign says it has been reaching out to advertisers and sponsors to put pressure on stations to reject the ad, which it calls "despicable" and "false."
Rather than firing back at the outside group, the Obama campaign uses its new TV ad to accuse Sen. McCain of raising the Ayers issue in the presidential campaign.
"With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the sixties, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers?," an announcer says.
The spot is incorrect in insinuating that John McCain himself has brought up Ayers -- it is in fact McCain's campaign that has sought to use the Ayers association against Obama, and McCain spokesman Brian Rogers did so again upon learning about the ad.
"The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama's judgment than any TV ad ever could," Rogers said in a statement.
To the Obama campaign's point, a former McCain aide, Ed Failor Jr. is a key backer of American Issues Project, although he no longer has official ties with the campaign.
The group's sole $2.87 million funder, Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, has bundled between $50,000 and $100,000 for McCain. Simmons, along with another organizer for American Issues Project, Christian Pinkston, were both involved with the 2004 Swift Boats Veterans for Truth group that assailed Sen. John Kerry's war record.
The Obama campaign's attorney Bob Bauer sent a letter to the Justice Department arguing that American Issues Project is engaging is evading federal election law.
501(c) 4 groups are prohibited by law from coordinating with political campaigns to attack a candidate. The McCain campaign denies it has coordinated with the group.
Even with American Issues Project's possible ties to McCain, one key issue still remain. Why would the Obama campaign even want to bring up Ayers as the Democratic National Convention gets underway tonight in Denver?
Strangely Timed Obama Response Ad on William Ayers
August 25, 2008
ABC News' Tahman Bradley Reports: As Michelle Obama prepares for a primetime speech that will talk about her and Barack Obama's American values, the Obama campaign is using a new television ad to take on the issue of Obama's association with a 1970s radical who bombed the Capitol and Pentagon.
The release of the ad, first reported on Time.com's "The Page", could have the unintended consequence of reminding voters that Obama has in the past been friendly with William Ayers, a Chicago law professor who to this day remains unrepentant about his work with the violent Weather Underground group in the 1960s and 70s.
Obama has denounced Ayers' actions with the radical group, but has also referred to Ayers as "mainstream" and "respectable," a point that conservatives continue to pound the soon-to-be Democratic nominee about.
A 501(c) 4 group, acting independent of Republican John McCain's presidential campaign, last week, hammered Obama for his relationship with Ayers with a provocative television spot in Ohio and Michigan.
"Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama," the spot by American Issues Project says.
Some news organization, including Fox News Channel, refused to air the ad which uses images of 9/11. The Obama campaign says it has been reaching out to advertisers and sponsors to put pressure on stations to reject the ad, which it calls "despicable" and "false."
Rather than firing back at the outside group, the Obama campaign uses its new TV ad to accuse Sen. McCain of raising the Ayers issue in the presidential campaign.
"With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the sixties, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers?," an announcer says.
The spot is incorrect in insinuating that John McCain himself has brought up Ayers -- it is in fact McCain's campaign that has sought to use the Ayers association against Obama, and McCain spokesman Brian Rogers did so again upon learning about the ad.
"The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama's judgment than any TV ad ever could," Rogers said in a statement.
To the Obama campaign's point, a former McCain aide, Ed Failor Jr. is a key backer of American Issues Project, although he no longer has official ties with the campaign.
The group's sole $2.87 million funder, Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, has bundled between $50,000 and $100,000 for McCain. Simmons, along with another organizer for American Issues Project, Christian Pinkston, were both involved with the 2004 Swift Boats Veterans for Truth group that assailed Sen. John Kerry's war record.
The Obama campaign's attorney Bob Bauer sent a letter to the Justice Department arguing that American Issues Project is engaging is evading federal election law.
501(c) 4 groups are prohibited by law from coordinating with political campaigns to attack a candidate. The McCain campaign denies it has coordinated with the group.
Even with American Issues Project's possible ties to McCain, one key issue still remain. Why would the Obama campaign even want to bring up Ayers as the Democratic National Convention gets underway tonight in Denver?
Obama spot responds to ad tying him to 60s radical
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iByl1FPfB0D81BuAyW0Vp_9pIyRgD92PI9JG0
Obama spot responds to ad tying him to 60s radical
By JIM KUHNHENN
8-25-8
DENVER (AP) — Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has quietly begun airing a television commercial countering an outside group that is spending $2.8 million in an attempt to highlight his relationship with a former 1960s radical.
The 30-second TV spot is a response to an ad by the conservative American Issues Project, a nonprofit group that questions Obama's ties to William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground organization that took credit for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.
"With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the 60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers," the Obama ad states. "McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers' crimes, committed when Obama was just 8 years old."
Though McCain is not airing the anti-Obama ad, the group that produced and paid for it is financed by a McCain fundraiser and one of its board members is a former consultant to McCain's presidential campaign.
Harold Simmons contributed nearly $2.9 million to the American Issues Project to air the ad. He was a major contributor four years ago to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Simmons, CEO of Dallas-based Contran Corp., has also raised $50,000-$100,000 for McCain's presidential campaign.
By Monday afternoon, the American Issues Project ad has already aired about 150 times in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Michigan, according to Evan Tracey, head of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, an ad tracking firm.
An Obama response was known to be running in the Youngstown, Ohio, market, Tracey said. The Obama campaign did not announce the release of the ad, even though it publicly disclosed another anti-McCAin ad released Monday.
Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.
Obama also was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform group of which Ayers was a founder. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s.
Obama has denounced Ayers' past activities.
The ad is being aired as Republicans push for more complete disclosure of the links between Obama and Ayers.
On Tuesday, the University of Illinois at Chicago will make available records of Obama's service on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The group was set up to improve the city's schools.
"This response ad is more smoke and mirrors from a candidate desperate to obscure his long-standing relationship with admitted domestic terrorist William Ayers," said Ed Martin, American Issues Project's president. "Senator Obama is pretending to barely know the man who hosted the launch of his political career and with whom he has worked for years to advance a liberal agenda."
The McCain campaign cannot coordinate efforts with outside groups. But the campaign took advantage of being the target of the ad to respond.
"The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama's judgment than any TV ad ever could," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.
Obama spot responds to ad tying him to 60s radical
By JIM KUHNHENN
8-25-8
DENVER (AP) — Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has quietly begun airing a television commercial countering an outside group that is spending $2.8 million in an attempt to highlight his relationship with a former 1960s radical.
The 30-second TV spot is a response to an ad by the conservative American Issues Project, a nonprofit group that questions Obama's ties to William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground organization that took credit for a series of bombings, including nonfatal explosions at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol four decades ago.
"With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the 60s, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers," the Obama ad states. "McCain knows Obama denounced Ayers' crimes, committed when Obama was just 8 years old."
Though McCain is not airing the anti-Obama ad, the group that produced and paid for it is financed by a McCain fundraiser and one of its board members is a former consultant to McCain's presidential campaign.
Harold Simmons contributed nearly $2.9 million to the American Issues Project to air the ad. He was a major contributor four years ago to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Simmons, CEO of Dallas-based Contran Corp., has also raised $50,000-$100,000 for McCain's presidential campaign.
By Monday afternoon, the American Issues Project ad has already aired about 150 times in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia and Michigan, according to Evan Tracey, head of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, an ad tracking firm.
An Obama response was known to be running in the Youngstown, Ohio, market, Tracey said. The Obama campaign did not announce the release of the ad, even though it publicly disclosed another anti-McCAin ad released Monday.
Ayers is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He and Obama live in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and served together on the board of the Woods Fund, a Chicago-based charity that develops community groups to help the poor. Obama left the board in December 2002.
Obama also was the first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a school reform group of which Ayers was a founder. Ayers also held a meet-the-candidate event at his home for Obama when Obama first ran for office in the mid-1990s.
Obama has denounced Ayers' past activities.
The ad is being aired as Republicans push for more complete disclosure of the links between Obama and Ayers.
On Tuesday, the University of Illinois at Chicago will make available records of Obama's service on the board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The group was set up to improve the city's schools.
"This response ad is more smoke and mirrors from a candidate desperate to obscure his long-standing relationship with admitted domestic terrorist William Ayers," said Ed Martin, American Issues Project's president. "Senator Obama is pretending to barely know the man who hosted the launch of his political career and with whom he has worked for years to advance a liberal agenda."
The McCain campaign cannot coordinate efforts with outside groups. But the campaign took advantage of being the target of the ad to respond.
"The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama's judgment than any TV ad ever could," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.
"Know Enough?"
Full Text of Obama-Ayers Ad
"Beyond the speeches, how much do you know about Barack Obama? What does he really believe? Consider this: United 93 never hit the Capitol on 9/11.
But the Capitol was bombed thirty years before - By an American terrorist group called Weather Underground that declared 'war' on the U.S. - Targeting the Capitol, the Pentagon, police stations and more.
One of the group's leaders, William Ayers, admits to the bombings, proudly saying later: 'We didn't do enough.' Some members of the group Ayers founded even went on to kill police.
But Barack Obama is friends with Ayers, defending him as, quote, 'Respectable' and 'Mainstream.' Obama's political career was launched in Ayers' home.
And the two served together on a left-wing board.
Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol... and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama? American Issues Project is responsible for the content of this ad."
"Beyond the speeches, how much do you know about Barack Obama? What does he really believe? Consider this: United 93 never hit the Capitol on 9/11.
But the Capitol was bombed thirty years before - By an American terrorist group called Weather Underground that declared 'war' on the U.S. - Targeting the Capitol, the Pentagon, police stations and more.
One of the group's leaders, William Ayers, admits to the bombings, proudly saying later: 'We didn't do enough.' Some members of the group Ayers founded even went on to kill police.
But Barack Obama is friends with Ayers, defending him as, quote, 'Respectable' and 'Mainstream.' Obama's political career was launched in Ayers' home.
And the two served together on a left-wing board.
Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol... and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama? American Issues Project is responsible for the content of this ad."
Swift-Boat Group Sinks Nearly $3 Million Into Ad
http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/08/group_plunks_down_nearly_3_mil.php
Swift-Boat Group Sinks Nearly $3 Million Into Ad Tying Obama To Ayers
By Greg Sargent - August 25, 2008
The other day, the independent Swift-Boating outfit American Issues Project vowed to plunk down a cool $2.8 million on a slimy and vicious ad tying Obama to former Weatherman Bill Ayers.
Such vows often can be mere bluster designed to get free media and gin up contributions. Not this time, however.
The FEC report from the group is in, and it confirms that the group did in fact plunk down the nearly $3 million to air the ad.
That's a sizable buy. Meanwhile, Evan Tracey, who tracks national ad campaigns for the Campaign Media Analysis Group, confirms to me that the spot is running in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
This ad, in short, matters. The Obama campaign apparently realizes this too: They have a response ad up in Ohio that hasn't been released yet.
In other words, the spot tying Obama to Ayers is the real deal -- the first wave of the Swift-Boating that has yet to materialize in earnest.
Swift-Boat Group Sinks Nearly $3 Million Into Ad Tying Obama To Ayers
By Greg Sargent - August 25, 2008
The other day, the independent Swift-Boating outfit American Issues Project vowed to plunk down a cool $2.8 million on a slimy and vicious ad tying Obama to former Weatherman Bill Ayers.
Such vows often can be mere bluster designed to get free media and gin up contributions. Not this time, however.
The FEC report from the group is in, and it confirms that the group did in fact plunk down the nearly $3 million to air the ad.
That's a sizable buy. Meanwhile, Evan Tracey, who tracks national ad campaigns for the Campaign Media Analysis Group, confirms to me that the spot is running in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
This ad, in short, matters. The Obama campaign apparently realizes this too: They have a response ad up in Ohio that hasn't been released yet.
In other words, the spot tying Obama to Ayers is the real deal -- the first wave of the Swift-Boating that has yet to materialize in earnest.
Ayers & Obama
Whatever one thinks about Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, this is an ad that is gonna stick. And this is just the beginning of the Ayers-Obama attacks, as here's a picture that soon will be all over the news channels:
The photo is from the August 2001 issue of Chicago Magazine. The caption below the picture reads:
"Bill Ayers, August 2001, former Weatherman, stomps on U.S. flag."
In case you forgot, something happened the following month...
The title of the article featuring these photos, incidentally?
"No Regrets"
No more cute photos of Obama with Paris & Britney. Preseason is officially over...
The photo is from the August 2001 issue of Chicago Magazine. The caption below the picture reads:"Bill Ayers, August 2001, former Weatherman, stomps on U.S. flag."
In case you forgot, something happened the following month...
The title of the article featuring these photos, incidentally?
"No Regrets"
No more cute photos of Obama with Paris & Britney. Preseason is officially over...
HORNETS DISPLAY REBIRTH
http://www.nba.com/hornets/news/Hornets_Display_Rebirth_with_U-280578-2057.htmlHORNETS DISPLAY REBIRTH WITH UPDATED LOGOS AND UNIFORMS
New Designs Inspired by New Orleans Culture
August 20, 2008
To proudly showcase the images of New Orleans’ passion, heritage and future, the Hornets unveiled updated logo modifications and new team uniforms today. The new designs were created in collaboration with the Hornets, the NBA and adidas, and are inspired by the emblems, colors and textures that New Orleanians and people around the world associate with the city of New Orleans.
“We are extremely proud to be the New Orleans Hornets, and our new logos and uniforms pay tribute to the past, present and future of this great city,” said Executive Officer of the Board Chad Shinn. “These exciting new designs represent our commitment to championship performance on and off the court as we look ahead to a successful future in New Orleans.”
The Hornets primary logo has been enhanced with the team’s new colors: Creole blue, a deeper, more passionate purple and Mardi Gras gold. In addition, the arms on the primary logo have been better proportioned, the ball channels have been made more accurate and “NOLA” now appears across the chest. The wordmark “New Orleans Hornets” includes more stylization linked to the wrought iron of New Orleans architecture.
The “Fleur-de-bee”, which was introduced as a patch on the team’s uniforms last season, will continue this season as the Hornets secondary logo but will be used as a major element of the Hornets brand identity. The “Fleur-de-bee” is based on the fleur-de-lis, or “flower of life”, which is an enduring image of the region’s cultural identity and is recognized worldwide as a symbol of New Orleans’ resiliency and rebirth.
A third logo has also been introduced and depicts the familiar NOLA abbreviation with a basketball and trumpet, capturing the essence of the city, its history of music and the team, and creates one cohesive mark.
The Hornets uniforms maintain consistency with the logo identity, using the same logos, fonts and colors. “New Orleans” will still be featured on the front of the home and away jerseys, making the Hornets one of only two NBA teams to wear their city’s name on the front of both jerseys. The “Fleur-de-bee” is featured on the side of the shorts and on the center back of the neck of the jersey. The NOLA horn is placed on the back of the shorts. The home (white) and road (Creole blue) uniforms also feature pinstripes, which provide a bit of jazz flair as well as pay tribute to the 20 years the Hornets franchise has been in existence. In addition, the team’s second road uniform has been retired.
The entire launch event was featured on Hornets.com in a live stream. New merchandise featuring the new colors and logos will be available immediately at the Hornets Nest team store as well as online at NBAStore.com.
Selfish Lieberman The "Barry Bonds" Of D.C.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/08/20/politics/politico/thecrypt/main4366634.shtml
Dems: Selfish Lieberman The "Barry Bonds" Of D.C.
Aug 20, 2008
(The Politico) Sure, Democrats are furious with Joe Lieberman's decision to salute John McCain from the podium of the Republican National Convention -- but his tie-breaking role in the Senate means they can't exact revenge anytime soon.
"If you've been in Washington too long like he has the world gets turned upside down -- your opinions become firm but your principles become flexible," said Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the architect of the 2006 Democratic takeback of the House, speaking of Lieberman.
"Hey, I'll for having friendships regardless of party labels, but I'm also for my principles," he added. "And Joe has fundamental differences with McCain on the environment, a woman's right to choose... What you can't do anymore is roll your eyes and say, 'Oh, that's just Joe.' Lieberman knows what he's doing and there are consequences."
Endorsing McCain was one thing, Emanuel said, but accepting a hero's welcome in the belly of the GOP beast is "something different."
Democrats stopped just short of slapping the traitor tag on Lieberman, who was forced to run as an independent after being bested in the 2006 Democratic primary by anti-war candidate Ned Lamont.
"Ned Lamont was right," quipped Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton's former communications director and top strategist.
"Joe will be very happy in the Republican party where the dominant ethic is selfishness -- He's just like Barry Bonds when it comes to selfishness," Begala added. "If you're hanging off the edge of a cliff by a rope, you don't want to look up and see Joe Lieberman."
Yet despite widespread disdain for Lieberman's decision to endorse McCain -- Senate Democrats have been reluctant to strip Lieberman of his position as chairman of the homeland security committee or even say anything too nasty about him in public. The Obama campaign declined comment.
James Carville, Begala's compadre on the 1992 Clinton campaign, say's he not "shocked or angry" -- and was more upset at Lieberman for his oversight of the Hurricane Katrina cleanup first as ranking member of the committee, then as its head.
"I just wish he had been as passionate about FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers as he is about John McCain," said the Lousiana native, speaking from New Orleans. "Hopefully he'll tell the convention wat a great job he did on overseeing [former FEMA cheif] Michael Brown."
Still, Carville ruefully admitted there was nothing Democrats could do to punish Lieberman without huge wins in November that render Lieberman less relevant.
"They are being smart, they can't touch him yet, It's just arithmetic, buy a calculator," he added.
"Everybody's pissed at him," said one staffer for a top Senate Democrat, "but we need him."
George W Bush Presidential Library
A monument to his years in office, the George W Bush Presidential Library is now in the planning stages. The Library will include:
The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.
The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won't be able to remember anything.
The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don't even have to show up.
The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don't let you in.
The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don't let you out.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.
The National Debt Room, which is huge and has no ceiling.
The Tax Cut Room, with entry only to the wealthy.
The Economy Room, which is in the toilet.
The Iraq War Room. (After you complete your first tour, they make you to go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tour.)
The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location, complete with shotgun gallery.
The Environmental Conservation Room, still empty.
The Supremes Gift Shop, where you can buy an election.
The Airport Men's Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
The Decider Room, complete with dart board, magic 8-ball, Ouija board, dice, coins, and straws
The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction.
The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you won't be able to remember anything.
The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don't even have to show up.
The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don't let you in.
The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don't let you out.
The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room, which no one has been able to find.
The National Debt Room, which is huge and has no ceiling.
The Tax Cut Room, with entry only to the wealthy.
The Economy Room, which is in the toilet.
The Iraq War Room. (After you complete your first tour, they make you to go back for a second, third, fourth, and sometimes fifth tour.)
The Dick Cheney Room, in the famous undisclosed location, complete with shotgun gallery.
The Environmental Conservation Room, still empty.
The Supremes Gift Shop, where you can buy an election.
The Airport Men's Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
The Decider Room, complete with dart board, magic 8-ball, Ouija board, dice, coins, and straws
Bruce Ivins-Anthrax Scientist/FBI Story is a joke
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/08/07/bruce-ivins-anthrax-scientistfbi-story-is-a-joke-investigation-needed-of-the-fbi/
Bruce Ivins-Anthrax Scientist/FBI Story is a joke. Investigation needed of the FBI
By: John Amato on Thursday, August 7th, 2008
This whole story concocted by the FBI smells really, really bad. Are we supposed to believe this yarn? I’ll try to do a bunch of posts on this because it is a completely insane story. Did it really take seven years for the FBI to finally catch Bruce Ivins, a scientist who was working with anthrax and then helping the FBI to finger Steven J. Hatfill—who just so happens was wrongly accused and smeared until he happened to fight back?
June 27: The federal government awards Hatfill $5.8 million to settle his violation of privacy lawsuit against the Justice Department.
Have you ever seen a huge settlement like that right before they catch the real killer?
Did you watch the press conference yesterday? It absolutely made no sense. The feebs made it sound like there were millions of people that could have had access to anthrax. When they were asked why it took so many years to come up with Army scientist Bruce Ivins—they looked to the universe.
Q:When did you get around to him as a suspect from March 31st in 2005?
A: It’s important to remember how complex and complicated this investigation was. At the outset we had to identify the universe of persons and labs that might have access to this type of anthrax. Once we identified what type of anthrax it was, then over the years there were efforts to shrink the size of the pool…
What the hell is he talking about? I’d say the FBI was drowning in a pool of lies. Are there 8 million people and labs to check out to see who actually had anthrax? I want to see the FBI logs on this case. The day to day activity. Really, there needs to be a full investigation of this. How many hours did they spend on this case? What did they know and when did they know it? Ivins was actually helping the FBI with their own case! It’s right out a serial killer novel. I’ll have more later. There are so many layers to this story.
Bruce Ivins-Anthrax Scientist/FBI Story is a joke. Investigation needed of the FBI
By: John Amato on Thursday, August 7th, 2008
This whole story concocted by the FBI smells really, really bad. Are we supposed to believe this yarn? I’ll try to do a bunch of posts on this because it is a completely insane story. Did it really take seven years for the FBI to finally catch Bruce Ivins, a scientist who was working with anthrax and then helping the FBI to finger Steven J. Hatfill—who just so happens was wrongly accused and smeared until he happened to fight back?
June 27: The federal government awards Hatfill $5.8 million to settle his violation of privacy lawsuit against the Justice Department.
Have you ever seen a huge settlement like that right before they catch the real killer?
Did you watch the press conference yesterday? It absolutely made no sense. The feebs made it sound like there were millions of people that could have had access to anthrax. When they were asked why it took so many years to come up with Army scientist Bruce Ivins—they looked to the universe.
Q:When did you get around to him as a suspect from March 31st in 2005?
A: It’s important to remember how complex and complicated this investigation was. At the outset we had to identify the universe of persons and labs that might have access to this type of anthrax. Once we identified what type of anthrax it was, then over the years there were efforts to shrink the size of the pool…
What the hell is he talking about? I’d say the FBI was drowning in a pool of lies. Are there 8 million people and labs to check out to see who actually had anthrax? I want to see the FBI logs on this case. The day to day activity. Really, there needs to be a full investigation of this. How many hours did they spend on this case? What did they know and when did they know it? Ivins was actually helping the FBI with their own case! It’s right out a serial killer novel. I’ll have more later. There are so many layers to this story.
Iraq wants U.S. troops deal to expire in three years
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/22/AR2008082201265.html
Iraq wants U.S. troops deal to expire in three years
Friday, August 22, 2008
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq wants an agreement authorizing the continued presence of U.S. troops on its soil to expire in three years, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said on Friday.
Washington and Baghdad say they are close to signing the deal, which is required to allow U.S. forces to stay on in Iraq beyond the end of this year when a U.N. Security Council mandate ends.
A draft of the agreement is being circulated to Iraqi political leaders for their approval.
Iraqi officials say that, although the draft contains no firm schedule for a U.S. withdrawal, they want the agreement to require U.S. forces to move off of most Iraqi streets by the middle of 2009 and combat troops to go home by the end of 2011.
Dabbagh said Iraq wants to negotiate a firm date by which all U.S. forces must pull out of the country, and wants the agreement allowing them to stay to be valid for only three years.
"The Iraqi government wants this agreement to be valid just for three years," Dabbagh told Reuters. "The full withdrawal will depend on the situation on the ground and the needs of Iraqis and the decisions of the Iraqi government."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad unannounced on Thursday to help prod the deal along. She denied that a final agreement had been reached, but said it was close, and any timelines for withdrawal would have to be "feasible."
(Reporting by Wisam Mohammed; writing by Peter Graff; editing by Robert Hart)
Iraq wants U.S. troops deal to expire in three years
Friday, August 22, 2008
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq wants an agreement authorizing the continued presence of U.S. troops on its soil to expire in three years, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said on Friday.
Washington and Baghdad say they are close to signing the deal, which is required to allow U.S. forces to stay on in Iraq beyond the end of this year when a U.N. Security Council mandate ends.
A draft of the agreement is being circulated to Iraqi political leaders for their approval.
Iraqi officials say that, although the draft contains no firm schedule for a U.S. withdrawal, they want the agreement to require U.S. forces to move off of most Iraqi streets by the middle of 2009 and combat troops to go home by the end of 2011.
Dabbagh said Iraq wants to negotiate a firm date by which all U.S. forces must pull out of the country, and wants the agreement allowing them to stay to be valid for only three years.
"The Iraqi government wants this agreement to be valid just for three years," Dabbagh told Reuters. "The full withdrawal will depend on the situation on the ground and the needs of Iraqis and the decisions of the Iraqi government."
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad unannounced on Thursday to help prod the deal along. She denied that a final agreement had been reached, but said it was close, and any timelines for withdrawal would have to be "feasible."
(Reporting by Wisam Mohammed; writing by Peter Graff; editing by Robert Hart)
Credit Card Joe
http://therealjoebiden.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/credit-card-joe/
August 24, 2008
Credit Card Joe
Filed under: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Obama/Biden 08, politics
Tags: bankruptcy, Barack Obama, credit card debt, credit cards, Joe Biden, Joseph Biden, Obama, Obama/Biden 08, politics
Procrustes
In today’s repost of an article he wrote for The American Spectator in 1998, Byron York provides a detailed profile of Joe Biden, “The Senator from MBNA,” the “giant credit-card company based in his home state” of Delaware that was bought up by Bank of America in 2006.
Be sure to read York’s article, but to be brief, as described by NNDB.com, Biden’s record in regards to credit card company MBNA is enlightening, to say the least:
Over his long career in politics, Biden’s biggest financial supporter has been the giant credit card company MBNA, which was also one of George W. Bush’s biggest donors in 2000 and 2004. His son, Hunter Biden, was hired as a management trainee at MBNA straight out of law school, and was quickly promoted to executive vice president. The younger Biden has since left MBNA to establish his own lawyer-and-lobbying firm, but still receives a $100,000 per year consulting fee from the bank, which has since been swallowed by Bank of America. In 2006, Hunter Biden was appointed by President Bush to a five-year term on the Amtrak Reform Board.
OpenSecrets reports for campaign years 1998 through 2004 alone, MBNA was indeed Biden’s top contributor—$214,050. In 2006, MBNA contributed $80,625; in this campaign cycle, for 2008, Bank of America has contributed $58,000 and MBNA Corp, $56,625. More on Biden’s lobbyist cash here.
As is just about everyone else in internetdom, OpenSecrets posted its own article today about “The Money Behind Biden.”
Then, on the little matter of the proposed bankruptcy bill—for which, by the way, Joe Biden has consistently voted in favor—on March 10, 2005, Obama cheerleader Arianna Huffington wrote an opinion piece at Salon:
So what does the bill do? It makes it harder for average people to file for bankruptcy protection; it makes it easier for landlords to evict a bankrupt tenant; it endangers child-support payments by giving a wider array of creditors a shot at post-bankruptcy income; it allows millionaires to shield an unlimited amount of equity in homes and asset-protection trusts; it makes it more difficult for small businesses to reorganize while opening new loopholes for the Enrons of the world; it allows creditors to provide misleading information; and it does nothing to rein in lending abuses….
It all—ALL—benefits the credit card companies and Credit Card Joe is their BFF.
August 24, 2008
Credit Card Joe
Filed under: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Obama/Biden 08, politics
Tags: bankruptcy, Barack Obama, credit card debt, credit cards, Joe Biden, Joseph Biden, Obama, Obama/Biden 08, politics
Procrustes
In today’s repost of an article he wrote for The American Spectator in 1998, Byron York provides a detailed profile of Joe Biden, “The Senator from MBNA,” the “giant credit-card company based in his home state” of Delaware that was bought up by Bank of America in 2006.
Be sure to read York’s article, but to be brief, as described by NNDB.com, Biden’s record in regards to credit card company MBNA is enlightening, to say the least:
Over his long career in politics, Biden’s biggest financial supporter has been the giant credit card company MBNA, which was also one of George W. Bush’s biggest donors in 2000 and 2004. His son, Hunter Biden, was hired as a management trainee at MBNA straight out of law school, and was quickly promoted to executive vice president. The younger Biden has since left MBNA to establish his own lawyer-and-lobbying firm, but still receives a $100,000 per year consulting fee from the bank, which has since been swallowed by Bank of America. In 2006, Hunter Biden was appointed by President Bush to a five-year term on the Amtrak Reform Board.
OpenSecrets reports for campaign years 1998 through 2004 alone, MBNA was indeed Biden’s top contributor—$214,050. In 2006, MBNA contributed $80,625; in this campaign cycle, for 2008, Bank of America has contributed $58,000 and MBNA Corp, $56,625. More on Biden’s lobbyist cash here.
As is just about everyone else in internetdom, OpenSecrets posted its own article today about “The Money Behind Biden.”
Then, on the little matter of the proposed bankruptcy bill—for which, by the way, Joe Biden has consistently voted in favor—on March 10, 2005, Obama cheerleader Arianna Huffington wrote an opinion piece at Salon:
So what does the bill do? It makes it harder for average people to file for bankruptcy protection; it makes it easier for landlords to evict a bankrupt tenant; it endangers child-support payments by giving a wider array of creditors a shot at post-bankruptcy income; it allows millionaires to shield an unlimited amount of equity in homes and asset-protection trusts; it makes it more difficult for small businesses to reorganize while opening new loopholes for the Enrons of the world; it allows creditors to provide misleading information; and it does nothing to rein in lending abuses….
It all—ALL—benefits the credit card companies and Credit Card Joe is their BFF.
Robalini's Little Geography Lesson
Thanks to HillBuzz.wordpress.com for the following images
(Note – both maps are before the Democratic Convention, after which, due to a minor bounce, some states have moved towards Obama at least temporarily. The analysis is nonetheless still dead-on that the Democratic Party can’t ignore.)
The above is the RealClearPolitics.com map of state polls of Obama-McCain.
The above is the Politico.com map of state polls, in case you think I'm choosing a single map for effect.
Hmmm, where have I seen maps looking like this before?
Oh, yeah:
This is the 2004 map above.
(Note – both maps are before the Democratic Convention, after which, due to a minor bounce, some states have moved towards Obama at least temporarily. The analysis is nonetheless still dead-on that the Democratic Party can’t ignore.)
The above is the RealClearPolitics.com map of state polls of Obama-McCain.
The above is the Politico.com map of state polls, in case you think I'm choosing a single map for effect.Hmmm, where have I seen maps looking like this before?
Oh, yeah:
This is the 2004 map above.
This is the 2000 map.
And this is before the GOP has really done any Swiftboating. (Anything that has happened so far is pre-season. The real attacks will begin next Friday.)
Yes, Obama can indeed win, but if he's going to win, he's got to penetrate the red states, and so far, he hasn't.
And this is before the GOP has really done any Swiftboating. (Anything that has happened so far is pre-season. The real attacks will begin next Friday.)
Yes, Obama can indeed win, but if he's going to win, he's got to penetrate the red states, and so far, he hasn't.
Joke of the Week
"It's time the media started trumpeting McCain's exciting story. He's old, and no one likes him."
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert
Saturday, August 23, 2008
DREAM JOB
http://www.nypost.com/seven/08112008/jobs/dream_job_123980.htm
DREAM JOB
GERALD CELENTE TREND FORECASTER KNOWS WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS
By MICHAEL KANE
Looking Ahead: As president of the Trends Research Institute, Celente gets paid to predict.
August 11, 2008 -- If Nostradamus were alive today - and had a subscription to Fortune and a booking agent - he'd have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente. The Bronx native and current resident of upstate Rhinebeck is the founder of the Trends Research Institute, and a regular guest on TV shows such as "Oprah" and "Today" and the national nightly news.
Seeing the future of business is Celente's stock in trade. To clarify, seeing how present-day global events will affect the future of business is his real specialty. It's not just NYSE upticks and profit-taking that Celente foresees. It's what Iran-Contra had to do with Wall Street. It's what the jalapeno-pepper scare means to small-town grocers.
Wondering, "What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" Ask Celente.
And many do. His newsletter, at $185 a year, is a corporate must-read, and his itinerary is filled with speaking engagements from addressing a DeBeers diamond conference in South Africa to speaking on global economics before the governments of Norway and New Zealand.
A graduate of West Virginia University and author of the books "Trend Tracking" and "Trends 2000," Celente, 62, has converted a curiosity about the world into a career as econo-soothsayer. @work caught up with him long enough to ask about his past, present and especially the future, and why it's a dream job pointing the way to a more profitable tomorrow.
Any idea what started you down the path to trend predictor?
Well, going way back, I was one of seven kids growing up in The Bronx. Some days I'd go out with my father in his '57 Cadillac Coupe deVille. I'd be babbling along about nonsense, and he'd give me a steely look. And in Italian he'd say, "Papagallo!" or parrot - stop repeating what everybody else is saying and think for yourself.
Still, there are no want ads for "global trend analyst."
No, first I got into politics. I went to Albany to work as an assistant to the secretary of the state Senate. Which was the worst job I've ever had in my life. Imagine standing in the back of the chamber BS-ing until a senator walks in, and then you run over and pull a big leather chair out to help him sit down. I lasted one session.
You turned your back on politics?
I became a political atheist. And it was when Jimmy Carter was president. When the revolution in Iran began, I was watching it grow, and I said to myself, "This is real." And then I remember Carter on the White House lawn telling the American people that the Shah was the "island of stability" in the Middle East. I knew then that politicians would say anything.
But how did that lead to trend forecasting?
I thought, "What will be the implications?" I knew oil prices would go up, so I started trading oil. Instability would continue, so I began tradiing in gold, which is a safe-haven commodity. I realized then that current events form future trends. Everyone got caught up in ideology. I let go of that and said, what does it mean, what's going to happen in business? And with the income from gold and oil, I set up the Trends Research Institute in 1979. I was 32 years old.
What are your greatest hits?
The first call I made was there'd be a huge growth in bottled water. Back in '82, Perrier was all anyone knew. I was seeing more concern about pesticides. But I was way ahead on that one, nearly a decade.
The next one was the 1987 stock market crash. And it was for reasons that economists weren't seeing. The Teflon had started to wear off the Reagan administration, with the Iran-Contra scandal. Things were starting to fray. The market was overbought. It was all money, money, money. And a lot was merely image. I saw that cracking.
What's your best prognostication ever?
Gourmet coffee. In 1990, I was the keynote speaker at a National Coffee Association conference. At the time, Starbucks had just 35 outlets. People drank Sanka and Nescafe. But the microbrew trend was going on. I knew there was a quality market. So I gave a presentation saying gourmet coffees were the next big thing.
Did they listen to you?
I remember after the speech, I'd changed into shorts and a flowery shirt and was hanging around by the pool. No tie, no suit. I looked like a different guy, so nobody recognized me. And I overheard these two guys talking, saying, "What a bunch of bulls- - - t, that trend guy with his gourmet coffees."
And your biggest whiffs?
My biggest misses are usually political. I thought Gore would beat Bush, and that Kerry would beat Bush. Politics are tough, because you're betting on people's personalities. Also, with economics, it's tough to nail down the timing. Looking now at the top trends of 2008 - our economy will continue to unravel. I just can't pick the exact dates.
What's your secret method?
I break society down into three sectors. At the bottom, there's the crowd, that's always going to follow. At the top are the ideologues. And in middle are the informed. They're the people who read, who are aware. Once we see movement within the informed, that's when we see a trend developing.
So, you advise your clients how?
I show them new opportunities. For example, the whole global corporate model is breaking down. It was always about growing or manufacturing vast amounts of product and shipping it far distances. That doesn't work anymore because of high energy costs. As a consequence, local economies will thrive. You'll start seeing a revival in these little towns and small cities that died when the country became suburbanized. All because of increasing energy costs. Like Chief Seattle said, "All things are connected, like the blood which unites us all." Our process is making connections between different fields.
So, don't invest in major corporations?
Modell's, Lowe's, Starbucks, they're melting down. And with the market gap left by empty stores, something new is born. Without giants in control, people will use their innovative skills to thrive. We believe it's going to be the beginning of a renaissance. Something old is dying, and something new will be born from it.
What's a workday like for you?
My day-to-day is reading, about six hours a day. I read The Post, the Times and the Financial Times. And occasionally the Wall Street Journal. I read USA Today because of the audience it goes to. I want to know what they're reading, what they're watching, what they're thinking. On the Internet, I read Haaretz, I read Al-Jazeera. I go to the Drudge Report, the Independent. I scour it.
Why is this a dream job?
Because I think for myself. George Bush, Hillary, Barack, McCain - they're not my leader. I'm my leader. I look to people for information in subjects and areas I don't know about. But for things I know about, I think for myself. Before he died, Kurt Vonnegut had a great line. He said there should be a Cabinet position called secretary of the future, so we could see where we're going. No one can fully predict the future, of course. My purpose is to free people up to think for themselves and find their own innovation.
mkane@nypost.com
To college freshmen, GPS has always been there
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080819/ap_on_re_us/mindset_list
To college freshmen, GPS has always been there
By DINESH RAMDE, Associated Press Writer
8-19-8
Students entering college this fall have lived their whole lives in a digital world — where GPS has always been available, phones have always had caller ID and tax returns could always be filed online.
The incoming freshmen, born mostly in 1990, also grew up knowing only Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show."
Those are some of the 60 cultural landmarks on the Beloit College Mindset List, an annual compilation that offers a glimpse of the world as seen through the eyes of each incoming class. This year's list is being released Tuesday by the private school of 1,300 near the Wisconsin-Illinois state line.
The school started producing the list in 1998 to remind professors that references familiar to them might draw blank stares from their students.
"Watergate used to be a common reference," said Ron Nief, the school's director of public affairs, who assembles the list. "But a few years ago I asked some students if they knew what Watergate was and they said that was where Monica Lewinsky lived."
Some entries on this year's list are products that have been around for the lifetimes of the Class of 2012, including karaoke machines, plastic soft drink bottles, Windows 3.0 and higher and the Nintendo Game Boy.
Other cultural markers are all but unknown to them — IBM typewriters, Roseanne Barr's tortured version of the National Anthem, Pee-wee Herman's "Playhouse" and gas-station attendants who fix flat tires or offer to check under the hood.
The purpose of the Mindset List goes beyond reminding professors to update their references, said Tom McBride, an English professor at Beloit who helps Nief compile the list.
"It also prevents students from thinking that the way something is now is the way it's always been," he said.
For example, one entry had to be updated within the past month after the Green Bay Packers traded quarterback Brett Favre to the New York Jets after a 16-year career in Wisconsin. "The Green Bay Packers (almost) always had the same quarterback," reads the revised No. 46.
That stunned incoming freshman Ben Zook of Seattle, who said Favre is one of his generation's athletic idols, along with Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.
"I mean, for as long as I can remember, Brett Favre was the man there," said Zook, 18. "It's almost crazy to think he could retire or be with another team."
New freshman Dana Wierzbicki, 18, said her favorite item on the list was the first: "Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team."
"I'm a huge Harry Potter fan," said Wierzbicki, from Niles, Ill. "I wish it was sort of true — being on Quidditch with him would be kind of cool."
Every time the list comes out, McBride said, the school hears from people around the world who say it makes them feel as though life is passing them by.
"We say join the club. It makes us feel old, too," he said.
Time seems to pass more slowly for kids because they're doing more things for the first time, he speculated. But when a person gets older and does the same things over and over, the routine makes time seem to speed up.
When the 2006 list came out, McBride reassured people by telling them it was the trends and fashions that had grown old, not them.
This year, he struck a more philosophical tone.
"It's easy to be envious of youth," he said. "But if you've got a certain degree of wisdom and your body hasn't fallen apart yet, you may be at the best time of your life."
___
On the Net:
Beloit Mindset List: http://www.beloit.edu/publicaffairs/mindset
To college freshmen, GPS has always been there
By DINESH RAMDE, Associated Press Writer
8-19-8
Students entering college this fall have lived their whole lives in a digital world — where GPS has always been available, phones have always had caller ID and tax returns could always be filed online.
The incoming freshmen, born mostly in 1990, also grew up knowing only Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show."
Those are some of the 60 cultural landmarks on the Beloit College Mindset List, an annual compilation that offers a glimpse of the world as seen through the eyes of each incoming class. This year's list is being released Tuesday by the private school of 1,300 near the Wisconsin-Illinois state line.
The school started producing the list in 1998 to remind professors that references familiar to them might draw blank stares from their students.
"Watergate used to be a common reference," said Ron Nief, the school's director of public affairs, who assembles the list. "But a few years ago I asked some students if they knew what Watergate was and they said that was where Monica Lewinsky lived."
Some entries on this year's list are products that have been around for the lifetimes of the Class of 2012, including karaoke machines, plastic soft drink bottles, Windows 3.0 and higher and the Nintendo Game Boy.
Other cultural markers are all but unknown to them — IBM typewriters, Roseanne Barr's tortured version of the National Anthem, Pee-wee Herman's "Playhouse" and gas-station attendants who fix flat tires or offer to check under the hood.
The purpose of the Mindset List goes beyond reminding professors to update their references, said Tom McBride, an English professor at Beloit who helps Nief compile the list.
"It also prevents students from thinking that the way something is now is the way it's always been," he said.
For example, one entry had to be updated within the past month after the Green Bay Packers traded quarterback Brett Favre to the New York Jets after a 16-year career in Wisconsin. "The Green Bay Packers (almost) always had the same quarterback," reads the revised No. 46.
That stunned incoming freshman Ben Zook of Seattle, who said Favre is one of his generation's athletic idols, along with Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods.
"I mean, for as long as I can remember, Brett Favre was the man there," said Zook, 18. "It's almost crazy to think he could retire or be with another team."
New freshman Dana Wierzbicki, 18, said her favorite item on the list was the first: "Harry Potter could be a classmate, playing on their Quidditch team."
"I'm a huge Harry Potter fan," said Wierzbicki, from Niles, Ill. "I wish it was sort of true — being on Quidditch with him would be kind of cool."
Every time the list comes out, McBride said, the school hears from people around the world who say it makes them feel as though life is passing them by.
"We say join the club. It makes us feel old, too," he said.
Time seems to pass more slowly for kids because they're doing more things for the first time, he speculated. But when a person gets older and does the same things over and over, the routine makes time seem to speed up.
When the 2006 list came out, McBride reassured people by telling them it was the trends and fashions that had grown old, not them.
This year, he struck a more philosophical tone.
"It's easy to be envious of youth," he said. "But if you've got a certain degree of wisdom and your body hasn't fallen apart yet, you may be at the best time of your life."
___
On the Net:
Beloit Mindset List: http://www.beloit.edu/publicaffairs/mindset
Apple the new king of Silicon Valley
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/15/apple.apple
Google pipped - Apple the new king of Silicon Valley as market value overtakes hi-tech rival· Success of iPhone fuels huge surge in share price
· Fall in online advertising hits search engine's profits
Andrew Clark in New York The Guardian, Friday August 15 2008
Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino. Hi-tech rival Google is based only five miles away in Mountain View.
Photograph: Alamy
The sleek, touchscreen iPhone has proved so lucrative for Apple that the electronic gadgets manufacturer has unseated Google to become the most valuable company in America's cradle of technological innovation, Silicon Valley.
Queues outside Apple's stores are commonplace since the phone's launch a year ago as shoppers line up to get their hands on the prized device.
On Wall Street, the phenomenal popularity of the phone has fuelled a 44% surge in Apple's share price in 12 months. By the close of trading on Wednesday, Apple's market value had edged up to $158.8bn - a shade ahead of Google's $157.2bn.
Apple's predominance amounts to a shift in the balance of power in the hi-tech world. The company has repeatedly been able to eclipse rivals with its distinctive, easy-to-use designs. The iMac and the iPod continue to be firm favourites among laptop computer buyers and music fans.
Meanwhile, Google's once dazzling star has waned slightly as America's economic slowdown has eaten into online advertising and investors have wondered how the company can produce solid profits from expensive ventures such as the video-sharing website YouTube.
Scott Kessler, an equities analyst specialising in technology at Standard & Poor's in New York, said the twin fortunes of Apple and Google were central to the technological landscape: "These are the two companies most currently identified with the notion of innovation - not just in Silicon Valley or in this country but arguably in the world."
The milestone amounts to a reassertion of success by an older technological generation. Apple was founded by schoolfriends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 making it elderly in comparison to Google which has only existed for 10 years.
Experts say Apple's distinctive skill is its ability to reinvent itself with new products which are typically kept secret until the last possible moment.
"It's one of the few companies that has been able to internally develop a number of blockbuster products and killer applications," said Kessler.
Apple fans tend to attribute a large chunk of the company's success to the personal entrepreneurial instincts of Jobs, who is chief executive and is heavily involved in product development. When Jobs appeared to be gaunt and thinner than usual, Apple's stock briefly slumped last night before the company scotched rumours that he was ill.
While Apple and Google differ widely in their business models, they have a degree of personal overlap. Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, sits on Apple's board as a non-executive director. The companies are based barely five miles apart in a sprawling hi-tech corridor running south of San Francisco. Apple is in the town of Cupertino while Google is in neighbouring Mountain View.
Neither company offered any immediate reaction to the shift in supremacy. Apple did not return calls and a Google spokesman said: "We never comment on our stock price."
However, Apple has had few qualms about boasting of its prowess in the past. When the company's value overtook the computer maker Dell two years ago, Jobs sent out a companywide email reminding staff that Dell's founder had once predicted Apple's imminent demise.
"Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future," wrote Jobs. "Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today."
For Apple, the iPhone has provided an edge in creativity and convenience. When a 3G version of the phone came out last month, Apple sold a million of the handsets in a single weekend.
Google is comfortably the global leader in online searches but has seen slowing growth in "paid clicks" - the number of times users alight on lucrative advertisements. Google says this is because better tailored advertising has led to better quality, but less numerous, clicks.
Google's shares, which topped $700 late last year, have settled back to just over $500 - but the company's founders, Sergey Brin, 34, and Larry Page, 35, remain billionaires who travel the world on a customised Boeing 767.
The pair see conquering space as their next challenge and have put up a $20m prize to anyone who produces a privately financed spacecraft able to land on the moon.
Head-to-head
Apple
· Founded in a bedroom in Los Altos, California, by schoolfriends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976
· Recently settled a long trademark battle with the Beatles' record company Apple Corps, over use of the word "apple" to sell music
· Began as a computer manufacturer and has diversified into iPod media players, iTunes online music sales and, most recently, iPhone touchscreen mobile phones
· Apple's iTunes website has sold more than 5bn songs
· Annual sales of $24bn and profits of $3.5bn
Google
· Established by Stanford University graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998
· Based initially in a garage in Menlo Park, California
· Named after the word googol - which is the number one followed by one hundred zeros
· Has expanded from a powerful internet search engine into online applications such as word processing and spreadsheet tools, and owns the video-sharing website YouTube
· The company slogan is "don't be evil"
· Annual revenue of $16.6bn and profits of $4.2bn
Google pipped - Apple the new king of Silicon Valley as market value overtakes hi-tech rival· Success of iPhone fuels huge surge in share price
· Fall in online advertising hits search engine's profits
Andrew Clark in New York The Guardian, Friday August 15 2008
Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino. Hi-tech rival Google is based only five miles away in Mountain View.Photograph: Alamy
The sleek, touchscreen iPhone has proved so lucrative for Apple that the electronic gadgets manufacturer has unseated Google to become the most valuable company in America's cradle of technological innovation, Silicon Valley.
Queues outside Apple's stores are commonplace since the phone's launch a year ago as shoppers line up to get their hands on the prized device.
On Wall Street, the phenomenal popularity of the phone has fuelled a 44% surge in Apple's share price in 12 months. By the close of trading on Wednesday, Apple's market value had edged up to $158.8bn - a shade ahead of Google's $157.2bn.
Apple's predominance amounts to a shift in the balance of power in the hi-tech world. The company has repeatedly been able to eclipse rivals with its distinctive, easy-to-use designs. The iMac and the iPod continue to be firm favourites among laptop computer buyers and music fans.
Meanwhile, Google's once dazzling star has waned slightly as America's economic slowdown has eaten into online advertising and investors have wondered how the company can produce solid profits from expensive ventures such as the video-sharing website YouTube.
Scott Kessler, an equities analyst specialising in technology at Standard & Poor's in New York, said the twin fortunes of Apple and Google were central to the technological landscape: "These are the two companies most currently identified with the notion of innovation - not just in Silicon Valley or in this country but arguably in the world."
The milestone amounts to a reassertion of success by an older technological generation. Apple was founded by schoolfriends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 making it elderly in comparison to Google which has only existed for 10 years.
Experts say Apple's distinctive skill is its ability to reinvent itself with new products which are typically kept secret until the last possible moment.
"It's one of the few companies that has been able to internally develop a number of blockbuster products and killer applications," said Kessler.
Apple fans tend to attribute a large chunk of the company's success to the personal entrepreneurial instincts of Jobs, who is chief executive and is heavily involved in product development. When Jobs appeared to be gaunt and thinner than usual, Apple's stock briefly slumped last night before the company scotched rumours that he was ill.
While Apple and Google differ widely in their business models, they have a degree of personal overlap. Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, sits on Apple's board as a non-executive director. The companies are based barely five miles apart in a sprawling hi-tech corridor running south of San Francisco. Apple is in the town of Cupertino while Google is in neighbouring Mountain View.
Neither company offered any immediate reaction to the shift in supremacy. Apple did not return calls and a Google spokesman said: "We never comment on our stock price."
However, Apple has had few qualms about boasting of its prowess in the past. When the company's value overtook the computer maker Dell two years ago, Jobs sent out a companywide email reminding staff that Dell's founder had once predicted Apple's imminent demise.
"Team, it turned out that Michael Dell wasn't perfect at predicting the future," wrote Jobs. "Stocks go up and down, and things may be different tomorrow, but I thought it was worth a moment of reflection today."
For Apple, the iPhone has provided an edge in creativity and convenience. When a 3G version of the phone came out last month, Apple sold a million of the handsets in a single weekend.
Google is comfortably the global leader in online searches but has seen slowing growth in "paid clicks" - the number of times users alight on lucrative advertisements. Google says this is because better tailored advertising has led to better quality, but less numerous, clicks.
Google's shares, which topped $700 late last year, have settled back to just over $500 - but the company's founders, Sergey Brin, 34, and Larry Page, 35, remain billionaires who travel the world on a customised Boeing 767.
The pair see conquering space as their next challenge and have put up a $20m prize to anyone who produces a privately financed spacecraft able to land on the moon.
Head-to-head
Apple
· Founded in a bedroom in Los Altos, California, by schoolfriends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976
· Recently settled a long trademark battle with the Beatles' record company Apple Corps, over use of the word "apple" to sell music
· Began as a computer manufacturer and has diversified into iPod media players, iTunes online music sales and, most recently, iPhone touchscreen mobile phones
· Apple's iTunes website has sold more than 5bn songs
· Annual sales of $24bn and profits of $3.5bn
· Established by Stanford University graduates Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998
· Based initially in a garage in Menlo Park, California
· Named after the word googol - which is the number one followed by one hundred zeros
· Has expanded from a powerful internet search engine into online applications such as word processing and spreadsheet tools, and owns the video-sharing website YouTube
· The company slogan is "don't be evil"
· Annual revenue of $16.6bn and profits of $4.2bn
World Opinion Favors Russia
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/18-08-2008/106136-worldopinion-0
World Opinion Favors Russia - Winning the Media War
18.08.2008
Even Americans are saying, “Thank you Russia for standing up to the crackpots in control of our government.” As much as the corporate elitist media in the west blathers and carries on with lies and obfuscation about the events in Georgia and South Ossetia, as much as they try to cover up the facts and the truth and the war crimes committed by their puppet state, Georgia, they have failed to convince the world community.
Their all too numerous outlets are pummeling the world community with distortions, trying to shove the castor oil of the empire down our collective throats, but the gag reflex is well intact and their lies remain unpalatable. The empire is used to and expects everyone to jump when told to and to believe what they hear and read. They don’t expect and can’t understand when someone or some country tells them to back off with their egotistical, haughty, self important orders or pronouncements. But their “orders” and pronouncements have become irrelevant. We are again living in a multicolor world.
Comments from the World Community
In a recent Internet tally asking respondents who they favor, 75.8% were in favor of Russia and only 24.2% in favor of Georgia. Some American respondents actually came right out and thanked Russia for standing up to their government, referring to their government as “crackpots“ and “lunatics.”
One respondent said that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should become independent and the west lives under double standards. Another wrote, “the Abkhaz, Ossetian and Adjarian people will never agree to live under Georgian arrogant oppression.”
Yet another respondent said, “This is NATO's prime moment to show that it as an organization is not yet obsolete.” Of course we heard this when Yugoslavia was bombed too. In another comment he said, “I literally laughed out loud when President Bush made his speech toward Russia about how ‘bullying is unacceptable in foreign policy in the 21st century.’"
A respondent who considers himself a Republican wrote, “There is no reason that we should be antagonizing them on their border. It scares me that this oilman president will take us into another war with a much more deadly foe over an oil pipeline through Georgia. I am a registered Republican, but enough is enough. Impeach George Bush, if he gets us involved in the Russo-Georgian war.”
Some notable and succinct quotes from another:
"I feel like I am living in the bizarro world. Do you people not realize that Georgia started the conflict. Do you people not realize that Georgia attacked civilians and peacekeeping troops in an INTERNATIONAL ZONE. Do you not realize that the news media has been caught showing footage of the destroyed cities in Ossetia (destroyed by Georgians) and claims it is Gori and Russian aftermath. Do you not realize that the Caucasus Region is an oil pipeline area. Do you not realize that the US armed and trained the Georgians.”
“Georgia’s president is the new Hitler. He is invading areas and his lies are so incredibly manipulative. The American Media is really showing stupidity here in hopes for new cold war ratings. Neo-cons and globalists are thrilled because now Russia has taken its eye off of the Iran situation."
Another poll taken in Greece yielded the following results:
Who is responsible for the war:
1. Georgia who started the attack and the US who encouraged them
(77.86%, or 3559 votes)
2. The Russians
(3.22 %, 147 votes)
3. All of them
(15.99 % , 731 votes)
4. I don't know
(2.93 %, 134 votes)
South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke away from Georgia in the 1990s when Georgia itself broke away from the Soviet Union. Saaskashvili was determined not only to reincorporate them into Georgia again, entirely against the will of their inhabitants, but to punish them for wanting to be independent. There are no military installations or targets in the city of Tskhinvali, none whatsoever. It is an industrial center, with quiet civilian residential areas. It was the home to 30,000 South Ossetians.
When Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he was determined to have what he wanted and ordered the bombing anyway. What took place in South Ossetia was not merely an invasion or a siege, it was a bloody massacre, a genocide. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully equipped modern army. It was a war crime and the world community is fully aware of that fact despite the best efforts of the western corporate media to conveniently omit reporting on the crime.
By the time the Georgians along with their American and Israeli enablers were driven out, the city’s downtown area was in engulfed in flames and strewn along streets and sidewalks were the bodies of those who had been killed by sniper fire. Those who did not flee and stayed behind were simply too old, handicapped or infirm to leave. They had to seek shelter in basements waiting for the shelling to stop. It was a bloodbath. The city's only hospital was deliberately targeted and destroyed, another war crime. Over 2,000 people were killed in an operation that was clearly engineered with the full knowledge, planning and assistance of the Bush White House.
An independence referendum was held in 2006: 99% of South Ossetians said they wanted independence from Georgia. The voter turnout was 95% and the balloting was monitored by 34 international observers from the west. No one has challenged the results. The province has been under the protection of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers since 1992, and has been a de facto independent state ever since.
If Russia applied the same standard as Bush did in Kosovo, he would unilaterally declare South Ossetia independent from Georgia and then thumb his nose at the empire and anyone else objecting.
The representative of Russia to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, was quite blunt in announcing some home truths. "If we all respect the territorial integrity of Serbia in regards to its Kosovo province, then we are also going to honor the territorial integrity of Georgia. But if someone doesn't respect Serbia's territorial integrity and sovereignty over Kosovo and Metohija, then they better shut up about the territorial integrity of Georgia", Rogozin said.
Meanwhile it is absurd to listen to Bush, Rice and Gates jump up and down about borders, territorial integrity and sovereignty when they have shown no respect for any international laws, treaties or agreements they have made. Borders and sovereignty are only concepts they talk about when convenient for their interests. Hypocritically they speak of “bullying” and of the 21st Century as one where nations don’t go around invading other nations…while they themselves have done so seemingly with impunity and certainly with the complete disapproval of the world community.
Lisa KARPOVA
PRAVDA.Ru
World Opinion Favors Russia - Winning the Media War
18.08.2008
Even Americans are saying, “Thank you Russia for standing up to the crackpots in control of our government.” As much as the corporate elitist media in the west blathers and carries on with lies and obfuscation about the events in Georgia and South Ossetia, as much as they try to cover up the facts and the truth and the war crimes committed by their puppet state, Georgia, they have failed to convince the world community.
Their all too numerous outlets are pummeling the world community with distortions, trying to shove the castor oil of the empire down our collective throats, but the gag reflex is well intact and their lies remain unpalatable. The empire is used to and expects everyone to jump when told to and to believe what they hear and read. They don’t expect and can’t understand when someone or some country tells them to back off with their egotistical, haughty, self important orders or pronouncements. But their “orders” and pronouncements have become irrelevant. We are again living in a multicolor world.
Comments from the World Community
In a recent Internet tally asking respondents who they favor, 75.8% were in favor of Russia and only 24.2% in favor of Georgia. Some American respondents actually came right out and thanked Russia for standing up to their government, referring to their government as “crackpots“ and “lunatics.”
One respondent said that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should become independent and the west lives under double standards. Another wrote, “the Abkhaz, Ossetian and Adjarian people will never agree to live under Georgian arrogant oppression.”
Yet another respondent said, “This is NATO's prime moment to show that it as an organization is not yet obsolete.” Of course we heard this when Yugoslavia was bombed too. In another comment he said, “I literally laughed out loud when President Bush made his speech toward Russia about how ‘bullying is unacceptable in foreign policy in the 21st century.’"
A respondent who considers himself a Republican wrote, “There is no reason that we should be antagonizing them on their border. It scares me that this oilman president will take us into another war with a much more deadly foe over an oil pipeline through Georgia. I am a registered Republican, but enough is enough. Impeach George Bush, if he gets us involved in the Russo-Georgian war.”
Some notable and succinct quotes from another:
"I feel like I am living in the bizarro world. Do you people not realize that Georgia started the conflict. Do you people not realize that Georgia attacked civilians and peacekeeping troops in an INTERNATIONAL ZONE. Do you not realize that the news media has been caught showing footage of the destroyed cities in Ossetia (destroyed by Georgians) and claims it is Gori and Russian aftermath. Do you not realize that the Caucasus Region is an oil pipeline area. Do you not realize that the US armed and trained the Georgians.”
“Georgia’s president is the new Hitler. He is invading areas and his lies are so incredibly manipulative. The American Media is really showing stupidity here in hopes for new cold war ratings. Neo-cons and globalists are thrilled because now Russia has taken its eye off of the Iran situation."
Another poll taken in Greece yielded the following results:
Who is responsible for the war:
1. Georgia who started the attack and the US who encouraged them
(77.86%, or 3559 votes)
2. The Russians
(3.22 %, 147 votes)
3. All of them
(15.99 % , 731 votes)
4. I don't know
(2.93 %, 134 votes)
South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke away from Georgia in the 1990s when Georgia itself broke away from the Soviet Union. Saaskashvili was determined not only to reincorporate them into Georgia again, entirely against the will of their inhabitants, but to punish them for wanting to be independent. There are no military installations or targets in the city of Tskhinvali, none whatsoever. It is an industrial center, with quiet civilian residential areas. It was the home to 30,000 South Ossetians.
When Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he was determined to have what he wanted and ordered the bombing anyway. What took place in South Ossetia was not merely an invasion or a siege, it was a bloody massacre, a genocide. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully equipped modern army. It was a war crime and the world community is fully aware of that fact despite the best efforts of the western corporate media to conveniently omit reporting on the crime.
By the time the Georgians along with their American and Israeli enablers were driven out, the city’s downtown area was in engulfed in flames and strewn along streets and sidewalks were the bodies of those who had been killed by sniper fire. Those who did not flee and stayed behind were simply too old, handicapped or infirm to leave. They had to seek shelter in basements waiting for the shelling to stop. It was a bloodbath. The city's only hospital was deliberately targeted and destroyed, another war crime. Over 2,000 people were killed in an operation that was clearly engineered with the full knowledge, planning and assistance of the Bush White House.
An independence referendum was held in 2006: 99% of South Ossetians said they wanted independence from Georgia. The voter turnout was 95% and the balloting was monitored by 34 international observers from the west. No one has challenged the results. The province has been under the protection of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers since 1992, and has been a de facto independent state ever since.
If Russia applied the same standard as Bush did in Kosovo, he would unilaterally declare South Ossetia independent from Georgia and then thumb his nose at the empire and anyone else objecting.
The representative of Russia to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, was quite blunt in announcing some home truths. "If we all respect the territorial integrity of Serbia in regards to its Kosovo province, then we are also going to honor the territorial integrity of Georgia. But if someone doesn't respect Serbia's territorial integrity and sovereignty over Kosovo and Metohija, then they better shut up about the territorial integrity of Georgia", Rogozin said.
Meanwhile it is absurd to listen to Bush, Rice and Gates jump up and down about borders, territorial integrity and sovereignty when they have shown no respect for any international laws, treaties or agreements they have made. Borders and sovereignty are only concepts they talk about when convenient for their interests. Hypocritically they speak of “bullying” and of the 21st Century as one where nations don’t go around invading other nations…while they themselves have done so seemingly with impunity and certainly with the complete disapproval of the world community.
Lisa KARPOVA
PRAVDA.Ru
911 Missing Links Film Second Edit Released
911 Missing Links Film Second Edit Released
http://www.911missinglinks.com/
Friday, August 1, 2008
MISSING LINKS is the first movie to expose the identity of the criminals responsible for 9/11. Officially released in rough format on 8/18/2008
AUDIO ISSUES FIXED
http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1565381
We are well AWARE of the AUDIO ISSUES. Version 2 fixes this problem along with typos and other mistakes. Version 3 will have other adjustments made. Version 2 will be uploaded within the next 48 - 72 hours. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.
Now you will discover the definitive truth about 9/11 and learn why even the most popular movies on the subject have failed to address the evidence exhaustively presented in this video. The facts will make it abundantly clear that the so-called 9/11 “Truth” movement has been infiltrated and is ultimately controlled by the same criminals who orchestrated the attacks. As they say, 'if you want to control the dissent you lead the dissent.' Culminating evidence from the FBI, CIA, NSA, US Armed Forces Intelligence sectors, Foreign Intelligence organizations, local law enforcement agencies and independent investigators, Missing Links goes where no other 9/11 video has dared to.
VERSION TWO FIXES
Audio Levels: Background music is much lower.
Typos: Dual was Duel. Waived was Waved.
Title Correction: "Ptech: The Backdoor" was mislabeled as "Remote Control Planes"
Additional Notes: "Ptech: The Backdoor" has more text notes like other sub-chapters.
Website Plug: All domains are given at the end of the film. "www.MissingLinksMovie.com" is still having issues. "www.911missinglinks.com" will be used as the primary domain.
MissingLinksVideo.com
MissingLinksFilm.com
MissingLinksMovie.com
MissingLinksMovie.org
911MissingLinks.com
Help us spread the the HONEST TRUTH about 9/11 and fight the traitors destroying America and purchase a Prothink T-shirt today! You'll receive a FREE DVD of Missing Links with your T-shirt.
If you would just like to donate to help the makers of this film in future projects that would be appreciated too. The DVD will be a more polished version with audio levels and other mistakes corrected. Thank you for your support.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Michael and John are very much open to all criticism, factual correction and any other issue regarding the film.
And yes he is correcting the audio levels right now.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you to everyone who watched the film. Our hopes are that this film reaches many people out there and better educates them on the story of 9/11 and helps explain how others have lacked this information in their own films. We will be repairing the sound quality issues shortly but for now please help us get this message out to as many people as possible. This is shocking information to even the most avid 9/11 researcher. Thanks again from Mike and John of prothink.org & Forcemultiplication.com. The film again can be found on www.911missinglinks.com
Contact Mike Delaney:
Phone:
414-455-6606
email:
Prothink@yahoo.com
http://www.911missinglinks.com/
Friday, August 1, 2008
MISSING LINKS is the first movie to expose the identity of the criminals responsible for 9/11. Officially released in rough format on 8/18/2008
AUDIO ISSUES FIXED
http://www.vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1565381
We are well AWARE of the AUDIO ISSUES. Version 2 fixes this problem along with typos and other mistakes. Version 3 will have other adjustments made. Version 2 will be uploaded within the next 48 - 72 hours. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE.
Now you will discover the definitive truth about 9/11 and learn why even the most popular movies on the subject have failed to address the evidence exhaustively presented in this video. The facts will make it abundantly clear that the so-called 9/11 “Truth” movement has been infiltrated and is ultimately controlled by the same criminals who orchestrated the attacks. As they say, 'if you want to control the dissent you lead the dissent.' Culminating evidence from the FBI, CIA, NSA, US Armed Forces Intelligence sectors, Foreign Intelligence organizations, local law enforcement agencies and independent investigators, Missing Links goes where no other 9/11 video has dared to.
VERSION TWO FIXES
Audio Levels: Background music is much lower.
Typos: Dual was Duel. Waived was Waved.
Title Correction: "Ptech: The Backdoor" was mislabeled as "Remote Control Planes"
Additional Notes: "Ptech: The Backdoor" has more text notes like other sub-chapters.
Website Plug: All domains are given at the end of the film. "www.MissingLinksMovie.com" is still having issues. "www.911missinglinks.com" will be used as the primary domain.
MissingLinksVideo.com
MissingLinksFilm.com
MissingLinksMovie.com
MissingLinksMovie.org
911MissingLinks.com
Help us spread the the HONEST TRUTH about 9/11 and fight the traitors destroying America and purchase a Prothink T-shirt today! You'll receive a FREE DVD of Missing Links with your T-shirt.
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Thursday, August 21, 2008
A brief history of warp drives
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/15/sciwarpdrive215.xml
A brief history of warp drives
By Roger Highfield
15/08/2008
This form of warp propulsion is called an Alcubierre drive after Miguel Alcubierre, who stunned physicists when he set out the physics while studying at Cardiff University.
Alcubierre demonstrated in 1994 that if the fabric of space and time can be locally warped so that it expands behind a spacecraft and contracts in front of it, then the craft will be propelled along with the space it is in - in effect, riding the crest of the wave.
His ingenious idea was set back in 1997 Michael Pfenning and Larry Ford at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, did calculations that suggested that it needed far more than the entire energy content of the universe to work.
Fortunately, Dr Chris Van Den Broeck, then working at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1999 resurrected Alcubierre's proposal.
The trick lies in using a strange form of warped space, involving a "bubble" with a large internal volume to carry a starship but a tiny surface area, a bit like Dr Who's Tardis.
Van Den Broeck used Pfenning and Ford's results to show that a bubble big enough to contain a starship could be formed using just a gram of suitable space-warping material: the Alcubierre drive had overcome this hurdle, though Dr Van Den Broeck said problems remain.
Warp drives are studied by physicists to test the limits of physics but they have been examined by Nasa's Breakthrough Propulsion Program and by the British Aerospace Project Greenglow.
So influential is Alcubierre's idea that it has even been referred to by the writers of Star Trek. While a doctoral physics student at California Institute of Technology in January of 2044, the inventor of Star Trek's warp drive, Zefram Cochrane studied the theories of Alcubierre and Richard Obousy, On April 5, 2063 at 11:15 AM local time, Cochrane made Earth's first warp flight, playing Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" during blast-off and dedicating the first flight to Alcubierre and Obousy.
A brief history of warp drives
By Roger Highfield
15/08/2008
This form of warp propulsion is called an Alcubierre drive after Miguel Alcubierre, who stunned physicists when he set out the physics while studying at Cardiff University.
Alcubierre demonstrated in 1994 that if the fabric of space and time can be locally warped so that it expands behind a spacecraft and contracts in front of it, then the craft will be propelled along with the space it is in - in effect, riding the crest of the wave.
His ingenious idea was set back in 1997 Michael Pfenning and Larry Ford at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, did calculations that suggested that it needed far more than the entire energy content of the universe to work.
Fortunately, Dr Chris Van Den Broeck, then working at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, in 1999 resurrected Alcubierre's proposal.
The trick lies in using a strange form of warped space, involving a "bubble" with a large internal volume to carry a starship but a tiny surface area, a bit like Dr Who's Tardis.
Van Den Broeck used Pfenning and Ford's results to show that a bubble big enough to contain a starship could be formed using just a gram of suitable space-warping material: the Alcubierre drive had overcome this hurdle, though Dr Van Den Broeck said problems remain.
Warp drives are studied by physicists to test the limits of physics but they have been examined by Nasa's Breakthrough Propulsion Program and by the British Aerospace Project Greenglow.
So influential is Alcubierre's idea that it has even been referred to by the writers of Star Trek. While a doctoral physics student at California Institute of Technology in January of 2044, the inventor of Star Trek's warp drive, Zefram Cochrane studied the theories of Alcubierre and Richard Obousy, On April 5, 2063 at 11:15 AM local time, Cochrane made Earth's first warp flight, playing Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride" during blast-off and dedicating the first flight to Alcubierre and Obousy.
Star Trek warp drive is a possibility, say scientists
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/08/15/sciwarpdrive115.xml
Star Trek warp drive is a possibility, say scientists
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
15/08/2008
Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light.
The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.
In the long running television series created by Gene Roddenberry, the warp drive was invented by Zefram Cochrane, who began his epic project in 2053 in Bozeman, Montana.
Now Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.
In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could "warp" space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.
By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds.
All this extraordinary feat requires, says the new study, is for scientists to harness a mysterious and poorly understood cosmic antigravity force, called dark energy.
Dark energy is thought responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of our universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time.
This may come as a surprise since, according to relativity theory, matter cannot move through space faster than the speed of light, which is almost 300,000,000 metres per second. But that theory applies only to unwarped 'flat' space.
And there is no limit on the speed with which space itself can move: the spaceship can sit at rest in a small bubble of space that flows at "superluminal" - faster than light - velocities through normal space because the fabric of space and time itself (scientists refer to spacetime) is stretching.
In the scheme outlined by Dr Cleaver dark energy would be used to create the bubble: if dark energy can be made negative in front of the ship, then that patch of space would contract in response.
"Think of it like a surfer riding a wave," said Dr Cleaver. "The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would be travelling faster than the speed of light."
The new warp drive work also draws on "string theory", which suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. We are used to four dimensions - height, width, length and time but string theorists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions and it is by changing the size of this 10th spatial dimension in front of the space ship that the Baylor researchers believe could alter the strength of the dark energy in such a manner to propel the ship faster than the speed of light.
They conclude by recommending that it would be "prudent to research this area further."
But hold the dilithium crystals: Dr Chris Van Den Broeck of Cardiff University commented: "The problem with this and previous schemes (including my own) is that part of the exotic matter would have to travel faster than the *local* speed of light (roughly speaking, it would need to go faster than the speed of light with respect to the portion of space it occupies), and that's not allowed by any established physical theory."
And even if this criticism can be met, Richard Obousy computed the amount of energy required to start up a "warp" process (but not the total energy required to travel a specific distance) around a 10x10x10 metre-cube ship based on the required change in dark energy in a space equal to the volume of the ship.
The energy to kick start the drive turned out to be equivalent to turning the entire mass of Jupiter into energy, by Einstein's famous E equals Mc squared equation, where c is the speed of light. Given the mass of Jupiter is around 2000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms, that is a big number.
"That is an enormous amount of energy," Dr Cleaver said. "We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy."
Star Trek warp drive is a possibility, say scientists
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
15/08/2008
Two physicists have boldly gone where no reputable scientists should go and devised a new scheme to travel faster than the speed of light.
The advance could mean that Star Trek fantasies of interstellar civilisations and voyages powered by warp drive are now no longer the exclusive domain of science fiction writers.
In the long running television series created by Gene Roddenberry, the warp drive was invented by Zefram Cochrane, who began his epic project in 2053 in Bozeman, Montana.
Now Dr Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Richard Obousy have come up with a new twist on an existing idea to produce a warp drive that they believe can travel faster than the speed of light, without breaking the laws of physics.
In their scheme, in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, a starship could "warp" space so that it shrinks ahead of the vessel and expands behind it.
By pushing the departure point many light years backwards while simultaneously bringing distant stars and other destinations closer, the warp drive effectively transports the starship from place to place at faster-than-light speeds.
All this extraordinary feat requires, says the new study, is for scientists to harness a mysterious and poorly understood cosmic antigravity force, called dark energy.
Dark energy is thought responsible for speeding up the expansion rate of our universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light for a very brief time.
This may come as a surprise since, according to relativity theory, matter cannot move through space faster than the speed of light, which is almost 300,000,000 metres per second. But that theory applies only to unwarped 'flat' space.
And there is no limit on the speed with which space itself can move: the spaceship can sit at rest in a small bubble of space that flows at "superluminal" - faster than light - velocities through normal space because the fabric of space and time itself (scientists refer to spacetime) is stretching.
In the scheme outlined by Dr Cleaver dark energy would be used to create the bubble: if dark energy can be made negative in front of the ship, then that patch of space would contract in response.
"Think of it like a surfer riding a wave," said Dr Cleaver. "The ship would be pushed by the spatial bubble and the bubble would be travelling faster than the speed of light."
The new warp drive work also draws on "string theory", which suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. We are used to four dimensions - height, width, length and time but string theorists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions and it is by changing the size of this 10th spatial dimension in front of the space ship that the Baylor researchers believe could alter the strength of the dark energy in such a manner to propel the ship faster than the speed of light.
They conclude by recommending that it would be "prudent to research this area further."
But hold the dilithium crystals: Dr Chris Van Den Broeck of Cardiff University commented: "The problem with this and previous schemes (including my own) is that part of the exotic matter would have to travel faster than the *local* speed of light (roughly speaking, it would need to go faster than the speed of light with respect to the portion of space it occupies), and that's not allowed by any established physical theory."
And even if this criticism can be met, Richard Obousy computed the amount of energy required to start up a "warp" process (but not the total energy required to travel a specific distance) around a 10x10x10 metre-cube ship based on the required change in dark energy in a space equal to the volume of the ship.
The energy to kick start the drive turned out to be equivalent to turning the entire mass of Jupiter into energy, by Einstein's famous E equals Mc squared equation, where c is the speed of light. Given the mass of Jupiter is around 2000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilograms, that is a big number.
"That is an enormous amount of energy," Dr Cleaver said. "We are still a very long ways off before we could create something to harness that type of energy."
Star Trek technology: The reality
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2563841/Star-Trek-technology-The-reality.htmlStar Trek technology: The reality
Much of the technology featured in the Star Trek films is either already a reality or under development. Here are some examples:
By Richard Alleyne
15 Aug 2008
Phaser guns
The Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHASR) gun is under development at the US Air Force Research Laboratory which like its science fiction counterpart can "stun" assailants. The real PHASR is a non-lethal, portable deterrent weapon which uses a laser system to blind the enemy temporarily.
The handheld Communicator
Like their Star Trek equivalent modern mobile phones often have flip top lids and can - thanks to satellite navigation technology - be used to pinpoint your position. Unfortunately using them to "beam you up" remains a scientific dream.
The Universal Translator
Like the Star Trek device which translates alien languages, the US military is using the Phraselator in Iraq for speech translation. The website Google, among others, can translate web sites and phone manufacturer NEC is launching the first mobile phone with speech translation.
Medical Tricorder
MRI and CAT scans can like Dr McCoy's hand-held tricorder device diagnose diseases by scanning the body. A San Diego-based company is developing a smaller portable device that when it touches the skin can detect illnesses.
Tractor Beam
Optical tweezers are a scientific instrument that uses a focused laser beam to provide an attractive or repulsive force. Unfortunately unlike the Enterprises tractor beam which can trap and pull in space ships they only work on a microscopic level.
Cloaking device
Scientists in the real world have come up with all sorts of devices to copy the technology that renders Klingon ships invisible, from "stealth" radar-absorbing dark paint to active camouflage. In the long run they are looking at a special "meta" materials, that theoretically could make light curve around an object and so make it appear as if it were not there at all.
Flying saucer that can plant explosives or bugs
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/2559279/Flying-saucer-that-can-plant-explosives-or-bugs-set-for-frontline.html
Flying saucer that can plant explosives or bugs set for frontline
A flying saucer that can sneak into buildings to spot enemy gunmen or plant explosive devices or bugs could be used by British troops on the frontline within a year.
By Thomas Harding Defence Correspondent
14 Aug 2008
The Fenstar flying saucer is considered one of the front runners to win the RJ Mitchell prize
The UFO-like object is among a range of gadgets that have been developed by schools, universities and small companies as part of a Ministry of Defence competition to develop everyday technology to help troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Eleven teams enlisted from the "anorak brigade" have made it to the final week of competition to demonstrate their machines at the Army's purpose-built urban warfare town in Copehill Down, Salisbury Plain.
The Fenstar flying saucer is considered one of the front runners to win the RJ Mitchell prize - named after the Spitfire's inventor - next Tuesday.
Without any external blades and using a two stroke petrol engine, the unmanned aerial vehicle can enter a building either through a window or door and send back high-quality images on its video camera feed.
With efforts being made to make an electric engine that generates little noise, the Fenstar's inventors, hope it could be quiet enough to snoop into rooms and plant listening devices without being seen or heard. Similarly it could also plant explosive devices to kill the enemy.
Controlled using a Playstation joystick the 20kg (44lbs) machine is designed to be easily handled by soldiers and is equipped with an infra-red camera, laser scanners and has a top speed of 40mph.
It can operate autonomously after being given "way points" on its GPS system and can hover or land at will.
The Fenstar was built by Team MIRA, that includes students from Warwick University and the Royal Grammar School Guildford, who have already developed a Frisbee like device that weighs just a few ounces.
The public may soon be confronted by flying saucers over cathedral spires as surveyors consider using the device to spots for cracks or erosion on high or inaccessible buildings.
Similarly it could drop buoyancy aides to struggling swimmers or mobile phones to stranded climbers. Discussions are already underway with geologists to see if it could be used to hover over steep rock faces to examine strata.
Other technology devices at the competition include mini-buggies that are equipped with cameras and can move at 40mph or sit at night near a cross-roads spying on terrorists planting bombs.
Camera technology is also being deployed onto model aircraft or helicopters that can tell the difference between children and adults or a gunman and a cameraman.
The Grand Challenge idea was developed by the former procurement minister Lord Drayson who wanted to get "box-room inventors" to see if high street technology could be used on the battlefield.
The MoD invested £4.5 million in the project last year and the return on the money had been "enormous", said Prof Phil Sutton, the MoD's head of science and technology strategy.
"Britain has a strong and rich history of inventors and innovators and they do work extremely well under the pressure of a challenge," he said. "We now need to put these ideas to good use."
Major Phil Nathan, an infantry officer who has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, said: "Aircraft that can look over walls or into compounds in Afghanistan will prove a real asset to the troops. Your situational awareness is drastically reduced in Afghanistan so anything that can get above it or see around corners could be a major life saver."
Flying saucer that can plant explosives or bugs set for frontline
A flying saucer that can sneak into buildings to spot enemy gunmen or plant explosive devices or bugs could be used by British troops on the frontline within a year.
By Thomas Harding Defence Correspondent
14 Aug 2008
The Fenstar flying saucer is considered one of the front runners to win the RJ Mitchell prize
The UFO-like object is among a range of gadgets that have been developed by schools, universities and small companies as part of a Ministry of Defence competition to develop everyday technology to help troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Eleven teams enlisted from the "anorak brigade" have made it to the final week of competition to demonstrate their machines at the Army's purpose-built urban warfare town in Copehill Down, Salisbury Plain.
The Fenstar flying saucer is considered one of the front runners to win the RJ Mitchell prize - named after the Spitfire's inventor - next Tuesday.
Without any external blades and using a two stroke petrol engine, the unmanned aerial vehicle can enter a building either through a window or door and send back high-quality images on its video camera feed.
With efforts being made to make an electric engine that generates little noise, the Fenstar's inventors, hope it could be quiet enough to snoop into rooms and plant listening devices without being seen or heard. Similarly it could also plant explosive devices to kill the enemy.
Controlled using a Playstation joystick the 20kg (44lbs) machine is designed to be easily handled by soldiers and is equipped with an infra-red camera, laser scanners and has a top speed of 40mph.
It can operate autonomously after being given "way points" on its GPS system and can hover or land at will.
The Fenstar was built by Team MIRA, that includes students from Warwick University and the Royal Grammar School Guildford, who have already developed a Frisbee like device that weighs just a few ounces.
The public may soon be confronted by flying saucers over cathedral spires as surveyors consider using the device to spots for cracks or erosion on high or inaccessible buildings.
Similarly it could drop buoyancy aides to struggling swimmers or mobile phones to stranded climbers. Discussions are already underway with geologists to see if it could be used to hover over steep rock faces to examine strata.
Other technology devices at the competition include mini-buggies that are equipped with cameras and can move at 40mph or sit at night near a cross-roads spying on terrorists planting bombs.
Camera technology is also being deployed onto model aircraft or helicopters that can tell the difference between children and adults or a gunman and a cameraman.
The Grand Challenge idea was developed by the former procurement minister Lord Drayson who wanted to get "box-room inventors" to see if high street technology could be used on the battlefield.
The MoD invested £4.5 million in the project last year and the return on the money had been "enormous", said Prof Phil Sutton, the MoD's head of science and technology strategy.
"Britain has a strong and rich history of inventors and innovators and they do work extremely well under the pressure of a challenge," he said. "We now need to put these ideas to good use."
Major Phil Nathan, an infantry officer who has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan, said: "Aircraft that can look over walls or into compounds in Afghanistan will prove a real asset to the troops. Your situational awareness is drastically reduced in Afghanistan so anything that can get above it or see around corners could be a major life saver."
Future wars 'to be fought with mind drugs'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/2557025/Future-wars-to-be-fought-with-mind-drugs.html
Future wars 'to be fought with mind drugs'
Future wars could see opponents attacking each other's minds, according to a report for the US military.
By Jon Swaine
14 Aug 2008
It is thought that some US soldiers are already taking drugs prescribed for narcolepsy in an attempt to combat fatigue
Landmines releasing brain-altering chemicals, scanners reading soldiers' minds and devices boosting eyesight and hearing could all one figure in arsenals, suggests the study.
Sophisticated drugs, designed for dementia patients but also allowing troops to stay awake and alert for several days are expected to be developed, according to the report. It is thought that some US soldiers are already taking drugs prescribed for narcolepsy in an attempt to combat fatigue.
As well as those physically and mentally boosting one's own troops, substances could also be developed to deplete an opponents' forces, it says.
"How can we disrupt the enemy's motivation to fight?" It asks. "Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?" Research shows that "drugs can be utilized to achieve abnormal, diseased, or disordered psychology" among one's enemy, it concludes.
Research is particularly encouraging in the area of functional neuroimaging, or understanding the relationships between brain activity and actions, the report says, raising hopes that scanners able to read the intentions or memories of soldiers could soon be developed.
Some military chiefs and law enforcement officials hope that a new generation of polygraphs, or lie detectors, which spot lie-telling by observing changes in brain activity, can be built.
"Pharmacological landmines," which release drugs to incapacitate soldiers upon their contact with them, could also be developed, according to the report's authors.
The report, which was commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, contained the work of scientists asked to examine how better understanding of how the human mind works was likely to affect the development of technology.
It finds that "great progress has been made" in neuroscience over the last decade, and that continuing advances offered the prospect of a dramatic impact on military equipment and the way in which wars are fought.
It also explains that the concept of torture could be transformed in the future. "It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," it states. One technique being developed involves the delivery of electrical pulses into a suspect's brain and delay their ability to lie by interfering with its neurons.
Research into "distributed human-machine systems", including robots and military hardware controlled by an operator's mind, is another particular area for optimism among researchers, according to the report. It says significant progress has already been made and that prospects for use of the field are "limited only by the creative imagination."
Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist and the author of 'Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense', said "It's too early to know which, if any, of these technologies is going to be practical. But it's important for us to get ahead of the curve. Soldiers are always on the cutting edge of new technologies."
Future wars 'to be fought with mind drugs'
Future wars could see opponents attacking each other's minds, according to a report for the US military.
By Jon Swaine
14 Aug 2008
It is thought that some US soldiers are already taking drugs prescribed for narcolepsy in an attempt to combat fatigue
Landmines releasing brain-altering chemicals, scanners reading soldiers' minds and devices boosting eyesight and hearing could all one figure in arsenals, suggests the study.
Sophisticated drugs, designed for dementia patients but also allowing troops to stay awake and alert for several days are expected to be developed, according to the report. It is thought that some US soldiers are already taking drugs prescribed for narcolepsy in an attempt to combat fatigue.
As well as those physically and mentally boosting one's own troops, substances could also be developed to deplete an opponents' forces, it says.
"How can we disrupt the enemy's motivation to fight?" It asks. "Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?" Research shows that "drugs can be utilized to achieve abnormal, diseased, or disordered psychology" among one's enemy, it concludes.
Research is particularly encouraging in the area of functional neuroimaging, or understanding the relationships between brain activity and actions, the report says, raising hopes that scanners able to read the intentions or memories of soldiers could soon be developed.
Some military chiefs and law enforcement officials hope that a new generation of polygraphs, or lie detectors, which spot lie-telling by observing changes in brain activity, can be built.
"Pharmacological landmines," which release drugs to incapacitate soldiers upon their contact with them, could also be developed, according to the report's authors.
The report, which was commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency, contained the work of scientists asked to examine how better understanding of how the human mind works was likely to affect the development of technology.
It finds that "great progress has been made" in neuroscience over the last decade, and that continuing advances offered the prospect of a dramatic impact on military equipment and the way in which wars are fought.
It also explains that the concept of torture could be transformed in the future. "It is possible that some day there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects," it states. One technique being developed involves the delivery of electrical pulses into a suspect's brain and delay their ability to lie by interfering with its neurons.
Research into "distributed human-machine systems", including robots and military hardware controlled by an operator's mind, is another particular area for optimism among researchers, according to the report. It says significant progress has already been made and that prospects for use of the field are "limited only by the creative imagination."
Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist and the author of 'Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense', said "It's too early to know which, if any, of these technologies is going to be practical. But it's important for us to get ahead of the curve. Soldiers are always on the cutting edge of new technologies."
Clinical trials test potential of hallucinogenic drugs
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/aug/12/medicalresearch.drugs
Clinical trials test potential of hallucinogenic drugs to help patients with terminal illnesses
· First test of 'psychedelic psychotherapy' since 70s
· Researchers hope effects will improve quality of life
James Randerson The Guardian, Tuesday August 12 2008
Scientists are exploring the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to treat a range of ailments from depression to cluster headaches and obsessive compulsive disorder.
The first clinical trial using LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland in June. It aims to use "psychedelic psychotherapy" to help patients with terminal illnesses come to terms with their imminent mortality and so improve their quality of life.
Another psychedelic substance, psilocybin - the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has shown promising results in trials for treating symptoms of terminal cancer patients. And researchers are using MDMA (ecstasy) as an experimental treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
In the Swiss trial eight subjects will receive a dose of 200 microgrammes of LSD. This is enough to induce a powerful psychedelic experience and is comparable to what would be found in an "acid tab" bought from a street drug dealer. A further four subjects will receive a dose of 20 microgrammes. Every participant will know they have received some LSD, but neither the subjects nor the researchers observing them will know for certain who received the full dose. During the course of therapy researchers will assess the patients' anxiety levels, quality of life and pain levels.
Before hallucinogenic drugs became popular with the counter culture, they were at the forefront of brain science. They were used to help scientists understand the nature of consciousness and how the brain works and as treatments for a range of conditions including alcohol dependence.
Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Centre, is in the vanguard of the resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelics, having recently completed a trial that used psilocybin to help patients with terminal cancer come to terms with their illness. "I think there's a perception these compounds hold untapped potential to help us understand the human mind," he said.
The way hallucinogens such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), psilocybin and mescaline (the active ingredient in the peyote cactus) act on the brain is reasonably well understood by scientists. The drugs stick to chemical receptors on nerve cells that normally bind the neurotransmitter serotonin, which affects a broad range of brain activities. But how this leads to the profoundly altered states of consciousness, perception and mood that typically accompany a "trip" is not known.
Prof Roland Griffiths at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore Maryland recently published a study of 36 healthy volunteers who were given psilocybin and then observed in the lab. The participants' ages ranged from 24 to 64 and none had taken hallucinogens before. When the group were interviewed again 14 months later 58% said they rated the experience as being among the five most personally meaningful of their lives, 67% said it was in their top five spiritual experiences, and 64% said it had increased their well-being or life satisfaction.
"The working hypothesis is that if psilocybin or LSD can occasion these experiences of great personal meaning and spiritual significance ... then it would allow [patients with terminal illnesses] hopefully to face their own demise completely differently - to restructure some of the psychological angst that so often occurs concurrently with severe disease," said Griffiths. So by expanding their consciousness during a session on the drug, the patient is able to comprehend their thoughts and feelings from a new perspective. This can lead to a release of negative emotions that leaves them in a much more positive state of mind.
Twelve patients with terminal cancer have already helped Grob to test this idea and, although the research is not yet published, anecdotal reports from some subjects are encouraging. Pamela Sakuda (see below) was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer in December 2002. Her husband, Norbert Litzinger, said the psilocybin treatment transformed her outlook.
"Pamela had lost hope. She wasn't able to make plans for the future. She wasn't able to engage the day as if she had a future left," he said. Her "epiphany" during the treatment was the realisation that her fear about the disease was destroying the remaining time she had left, he said.
Despite fears that psychedelic drugs can induce psychosis, they are comparatively safe when administered with the proper precautions and with trained medical professionals present, according to a manual for studying their effects, which was recently published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
They do have a powerful effect on a person's perception and consciousness and cannot be considered "safe", but they are almost entirely nontoxic, they virtually never lead to addiction and they only rarely lead to long-lasting psychosis (usually in people with a family history of mental illness). The main danger is that the person taking the drug injures him or herself while in a mind-altered state, for example because they think they can fly. The manual states, for example, that, "investigators need to be confident that the volunteer could not exit the window if in a delusional state". Griffiths does not advocate recreational use.
Since the 1970s, scientific research into the effects hallucinogenic drugs have on the brain and their potential benefits has become a pariah field for any scientist who wanted to keep their reputation - and funding - intact. The psychologist Timothy Leary was the most famous advocate of the scientific and recreational use of psychedelic drugs. He conducted experiments at Harvard that were widely criticised and he was accused of faking data.
"The way I view it is we experienced some kind of broad cultural trauma back in the 60s and these drugs became demonised in that context," said Griffiths. "As a culture we just decided clinical research shouldn't be done with this class of compounds," he said. "This was partly the federal regulatory authorities, it was partly the funding agencies and it was partly the academics themselves ... Leary had so discredited a scientific approach to studying these compounds that anyone who expressed an interest in doing so was automatically discredited."
Dr Rick Doblin is president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in California, a nonprofit organisation which funds clinical studies into psychedelic drugs, including the Swiss LSD trial. "These drugs, these experiences are not for the mystic who wants to sit on the mountain top and meditate. They are not for the counter-culture rebel. They are for everybody," he said.
Clinical trials test potential of hallucinogenic drugs to help patients with terminal illnesses
· First test of 'psychedelic psychotherapy' since 70s
· Researchers hope effects will improve quality of life
James Randerson The Guardian, Tuesday August 12 2008
Scientists are exploring the use of psychedelic drugs such as LSD to treat a range of ailments from depression to cluster headaches and obsessive compulsive disorder.
The first clinical trial using LSD since the 1970s began in Switzerland in June. It aims to use "psychedelic psychotherapy" to help patients with terminal illnesses come to terms with their imminent mortality and so improve their quality of life.
Another psychedelic substance, psilocybin - the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has shown promising results in trials for treating symptoms of terminal cancer patients. And researchers are using MDMA (ecstasy) as an experimental treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.
In the Swiss trial eight subjects will receive a dose of 200 microgrammes of LSD. This is enough to induce a powerful psychedelic experience and is comparable to what would be found in an "acid tab" bought from a street drug dealer. A further four subjects will receive a dose of 20 microgrammes. Every participant will know they have received some LSD, but neither the subjects nor the researchers observing them will know for certain who received the full dose. During the course of therapy researchers will assess the patients' anxiety levels, quality of life and pain levels.
Before hallucinogenic drugs became popular with the counter culture, they were at the forefront of brain science. They were used to help scientists understand the nature of consciousness and how the brain works and as treatments for a range of conditions including alcohol dependence.
Charles Grob, a professor of psychiatry at the Harbor-UCLA Medical Centre, is in the vanguard of the resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelics, having recently completed a trial that used psilocybin to help patients with terminal cancer come to terms with their illness. "I think there's a perception these compounds hold untapped potential to help us understand the human mind," he said.
The way hallucinogens such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), psilocybin and mescaline (the active ingredient in the peyote cactus) act on the brain is reasonably well understood by scientists. The drugs stick to chemical receptors on nerve cells that normally bind the neurotransmitter serotonin, which affects a broad range of brain activities. But how this leads to the profoundly altered states of consciousness, perception and mood that typically accompany a "trip" is not known.
Prof Roland Griffiths at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore Maryland recently published a study of 36 healthy volunteers who were given psilocybin and then observed in the lab. The participants' ages ranged from 24 to 64 and none had taken hallucinogens before. When the group were interviewed again 14 months later 58% said they rated the experience as being among the five most personally meaningful of their lives, 67% said it was in their top five spiritual experiences, and 64% said it had increased their well-being or life satisfaction.
"The working hypothesis is that if psilocybin or LSD can occasion these experiences of great personal meaning and spiritual significance ... then it would allow [patients with terminal illnesses] hopefully to face their own demise completely differently - to restructure some of the psychological angst that so often occurs concurrently with severe disease," said Griffiths. So by expanding their consciousness during a session on the drug, the patient is able to comprehend their thoughts and feelings from a new perspective. This can lead to a release of negative emotions that leaves them in a much more positive state of mind.
Twelve patients with terminal cancer have already helped Grob to test this idea and, although the research is not yet published, anecdotal reports from some subjects are encouraging. Pamela Sakuda (see below) was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer in December 2002. Her husband, Norbert Litzinger, said the psilocybin treatment transformed her outlook.
"Pamela had lost hope. She wasn't able to make plans for the future. She wasn't able to engage the day as if she had a future left," he said. Her "epiphany" during the treatment was the realisation that her fear about the disease was destroying the remaining time she had left, he said.
Despite fears that psychedelic drugs can induce psychosis, they are comparatively safe when administered with the proper precautions and with trained medical professionals present, according to a manual for studying their effects, which was recently published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
They do have a powerful effect on a person's perception and consciousness and cannot be considered "safe", but they are almost entirely nontoxic, they virtually never lead to addiction and they only rarely lead to long-lasting psychosis (usually in people with a family history of mental illness). The main danger is that the person taking the drug injures him or herself while in a mind-altered state, for example because they think they can fly. The manual states, for example, that, "investigators need to be confident that the volunteer could not exit the window if in a delusional state". Griffiths does not advocate recreational use.
Since the 1970s, scientific research into the effects hallucinogenic drugs have on the brain and their potential benefits has become a pariah field for any scientist who wanted to keep their reputation - and funding - intact. The psychologist Timothy Leary was the most famous advocate of the scientific and recreational use of psychedelic drugs. He conducted experiments at Harvard that were widely criticised and he was accused of faking data.
"The way I view it is we experienced some kind of broad cultural trauma back in the 60s and these drugs became demonised in that context," said Griffiths. "As a culture we just decided clinical research shouldn't be done with this class of compounds," he said. "This was partly the federal regulatory authorities, it was partly the funding agencies and it was partly the academics themselves ... Leary had so discredited a scientific approach to studying these compounds that anyone who expressed an interest in doing so was automatically discredited."
Dr Rick Doblin is president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in California, a nonprofit organisation which funds clinical studies into psychedelic drugs, including the Swiss LSD trial. "These drugs, these experiences are not for the mystic who wants to sit on the mountain top and meditate. They are not for the counter-culture rebel. They are for everybody," he said.
Get Rielle
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/08/16/rielle_hunter/Get Rielle
The life of John Edwards flame Rielle Hunter has been a novel, literally, with Bolivian marching powder, movie scripts called "It's All About Uranus" and electrocuted horses.
By Justin Jouvenal
Aug. 16, 2008 Before John Edwards' mistress was a journalistic curiosity, she was a literary inspiration. Rielle Hunter was the model for the drug-addled Alison Poole, a vapid and endearing Manhattan party girl who appeared in at least three novels by two of the bright lights on the '80s literary scene, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis.
We can only guess what attracted Edwards to Hunter. He told Bob Woodruff in the now famous ABC interview that he shared the details of the affair with his wife, Elizabeth, and that was all he was saying. By the time Edwards met Hunter in 2006, she had put down the coke spoon and picked up "The Power of Now," a self-help book by Eckhart Tolle. She had remade herself into a New Age guru and was on a mission to help "people wake up in their lives." Whatever the reason for it, the attraction between the well-coiffed Southern politician and the once wild New York party girl has granted added intrigue to this year's political sex scandal.
McInerney, made famous by "Bright Lights, Big City," his highly entertaining descent into the dark side of yuppiedom, briefly dated Hunter in the '80s. He has said he was so "intrigued and appalled" by the hedonistic Hunter and her friends that they became the raw material for his 1988 novel, "Story of My Life." At the time, Hunter was an aspiring Manhattan actress, who ran with a crowd as devoted to cocaine as art. She made the rounds with Ellis and partied with artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
"I still remember the first time I saw her," Pigeon O'Brien, a friend of Hunter's in New York, told Salon. "I was going to a party. As I approached, the doors of this 1920s building burst open. [Hunter] and Jay were laughing hysterically and collapsed on the sidewalk together. They looked like Scott and Zelda to me." In fact, like one of F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous characters, Hunter was hiding her own dark family secret.
Hunter, whose given name was Lisa Druck, was born in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in 1964. Her father, James Druck, was a wealthy attorney, who ABC News reported flew his own plane and owned a horse farm called Eagle Crest in Ocala, Fla. In her youth, according to ESPN, Hunter loved riding and competed in shows across the state on her favorite horse, Henry the Hawk.
But after James Druck got into financial trouble, he allegedly hired a man named Tommy "The Sandman" Burns in 1982 to electrocute Henry the Hawk, so Druck could collect a $150,000 life insurance policy he had taken out on the horse.
In a 1992 story in Sports Illustrated, Burns claimed Druck showed him the technique: slice an extension cord into strands, attach alligator clips to the exposed end of each strand, stick the alligator clips on the horse's ear and rectum and then plug the extension cord into a wall socket. Burns went on to execute a number of horses this way as part of insurance scams for other wealthy equestrians.
"You better get out of the way," Burns told Sports Illustrated. "They go down immediately. One horse dropped so fast in the stall, he must have broken his neck when he hit the floor. It's a sick thing, I know, but it was quick and it was painless."
Burns was among a group of 35 people, who were arrested and convicted in the '90s of crimes related to the killings. After Henry the Hawk's death, Hunter reportedly completed high school in Florida and then studied for less than two years at the University of Tampa, before dropping out.
At some point in the '80s, Hunter made her way to New York to pursue acting and fell in with McInerney's social circle. O'Brien described Hunter, who was still going by the name Lisa Druck, as "intense" and a "firecracker." "She was kind of a little unsophisticated," O'Brien said. "She was like a horse just getting its legs. She had this great intellect but hadn't yet harnessed or focused it." In a 2005 discussion between Hunter and McInerney in the now defunct Breathe Magazine, McInerney recalled meeting Hunter at Nell's, a famous New York club. She disputes that they met there, but confesses that "so much of ["Story of My Life"] was real."
"For me you're a little bit frozen in time, a little bit Alison Poole, the 21-year-old party girl in that book who runs around New York going to night clubs, doing drugs, and abusing credit cards," McInerney told Hunter. "And I'm sure that your life wasn't that simple or that extreme or that wasteable." Via a publicist, McInerney declined to be interviewed.
In "Story of My Life," Poole is exactly how McInerney describes her. She is a jaded aspiring actress, who lives off an allowance from her rich father, while flitting between clubs, coke and acting classes. "Men. I've never met any," she laments. "They're all boys. I wish I didn't want them so much. I've had a few dreams about making it with girls, but it's kind of like -- sure I'd love to visit Norway sometime."
In one scene, Poole scams $1,000 from a Wall Street type with whom she had an affair -- who gave her a sexually transmitted disease -- by claiming she is pregnant by him and needs money for an abortion. Later, Poole falls in love with a commodities trader with a thing for Shakespeare, but ultimately they betray each other. Poole is not totally unredeemed. She has a blunt, unflinching honesty that McInerney told Hunter in the Breathe interview he drew directly from her.
The novel also echoes Hunter's past and, in some eerie ways, the Edwards affair. In the final chapter, Poole reveals that her father may have killed her prize horse, Dangerous Dan, by poisoning him. And like the current scandal, Poole finds out she is pregnant, but there are two separate men that could be the father. The type of man Poole is attracted to seems strikingly like Edwards. "I like straight guys, I'd never go out with anybody who's as irresponsible as me," she says. "Most of the guys I know have really high powered jobs and make up for lost time when they're not in the office. The Berserk After Work Club. I seem to attract them in a big way, all these boys in Paul Stuart suits with six-figure salaries and hellfire on a dimmer switch in their eyes."
Alison Poole makes return appearances in Bret Easton Ellis' "American Psycho" and "Glamorama" reprising the same Manhattan siren who captivates men and repels women. In one scene in "American Psycho," a woman snipes about Alison, "If you had an American Express card she'd give you a blow job."
Ready for something new, Hunter left New York for Los Angeles to escape the drugs and pursue her acting career. In 1991, she married attorney Alexander M. Hunter III, whose father was the prosecutor in the JonBenet Ramsey case, and the couple lived in Beverly Hills.
Ensconced in the movie industry, Hunter assumed a new role for herself. She legally dropped Lisa Druck for Rielle Hunter and penned scripts for TV and movies with oddball titles such as "Jupiter Where Are You?" "Shit Happens: The Never Ending Search for the Perfect Diaper," and the seemingly porn ready "It's All About Uranus." None of these treatments appears to have made it into production. Nor did a later idea to create a television series about women who have affairs with men to help them get out of loveless marriages. Hunter's marriage was equally a flop. She divorced Alexander in 1999.
In 2000, Hunter shot her only film credit, a short comedy called "Billy Bob and Them," which she wrote, produced, acted in and directed. The film's cinematographer, George Mooradian, told Fox News that the movie, which was shot in Hunter's home, had little plot and featured New Age-style altars, temples and crystals. Mooradian's agent said he was not giving further interviews.
"She definitely had some connection to the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, and there was an offer to meet the Dalai Lama," Mooradian has said. With her move to California, Hunter had discovered a new high in New Age spirituality. In Breathe Magazine, she described a dramatic encounter with a healer, who cleared her "energy field," snuffing out her desire for drugs and alcohol. "I became sober overnight," she told McInerney. "And then I became a spiritual seeker -- addicted to higher consciousness, addicted to enlightenment."
Hunter pursued spirituality with the same abandon that she had once pursued drugs. On her Web site, Hunter wrote she spent "thousands and thousands" of dollars on gurus. At one point, she hocked a rare statue of one of her favorites -- Baba Muktananda -- to raise money for a retreat. Hunter said at the 2004 retreat she had a spiritual breakthrough, or, as she later put it: "Shift happens."
In 2005, Hunter and her friend O'Brien crossed paths again. "The first thing she said to me was, 'I am awake,'" O'Brien told Salon. "She said she had achieved some higher level of consciousness."
Hunter set up a nonprofit foundation called Being Is Free to spread her spiritual ideas. The foundation's Web site has been scrubbed from the Internet, although parts of it have been preserved at Deceiver.com. Salon contacted the foundation's directors by e-mail and phone, but they did not respond to inquiries. On the site, Hunter effuses about her spiritual journey, Prada backpacks and her relationships, exhibiting the sense of humor of the old party girl: "I've come to realize through a lot of experience that men are in fact good for a couple of things. Three things to be specific. Penetration, moving heavy objects and causing enlightenment."
Just as she met McInerney, Hunter, in 2006, met Edwards in a New York bar. While he may have been smitten with her in the obvious ways, she was on a messianic mission. Jonathan Darman, a Newsweek reporter, who befriended Hunter while he was covering Edwards, wrote that Edwards was Hunter's latest enlightenment project. "Edwards, she said, was an old soul who had barely tapped into any of his potential." He had the power to "change the world." If Edwards could only tap into his heart more, Hunter believed he could be a leader on par with Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr.
Hunter set up a video production company and received $100,000 from Edwards' campaign to film a series of short Web films about him. The candid movies were supposed to present John Edwards uncut -- a loose, spontaneous version of the candidate. In the first "Webisode," Edwards jokes and lounges on a plane as he prepares a speech. "I've come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am," Edwards said. "But I don't know what the result of that will be."
Hunter, who once sought the media spotlight like a moth does a flame, has fluttered into the shadows since the scandal broke. Her phone number is unlisted and e-mail sent to her personal address bounces back.
How The Democrats Can Blow It...
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/22249602/how_the_democrats_can_blow_it_in_six_easy_steps/print
How The Democrats Can Blow It ...In Six Easy Steps
A blueprint for losing the most winnable presidential election in American history
MICHAEL MOORE
Aug 21, 2008
For years now, nearly every poll has shown that the American people are right in sync with the platform of the Democratic Party. They are pro-environment, pro-women's rights and pro-choice. They don't like war. They want the minimum wage raised, and they want a single-payer universal health-care system. The American public agrees with the Republican Party on only one major issue: They support the death penalty.
So you would think the Democrats would be cleaning up, election after election. Obviously not. The Democrats appear to be professional losers. They are so pathetic in their ability to win elections, they even lose when they win! So when you hear Democrats and liberals and supporters of Barack Obama say they are worried that John McCain has a good chance of winning, they ain't a-kidding. Who would know better than the very people who have handed the Republicans one election after another on a silver platter? Yes, be afraid, be very afraid.
In an effort to help the party doofuses and pundits — and the candidate himself — spare all of us another suicide-inducing election night, as the results giving the election to the Republican pour in, here is the blueprint from the Democrats' past losing campaigns. Just follow each of these steps and you, the Democratic Party establishment, can help elect John Sidney McCain III to a four-year extension of the Bush Era.
1. Keep saying nice things about McCain.
If you want to help elect McCain, keep blessing him as if he were the white knight who accidentally hopped on the wrong horse. Keep reminding a country at war that he, and he alone, is a war hero. That he's been "good on global warming" and campaign finance. Say that enough, and you know what happens? People start to believe it! You've sold them on the idea that McCain isn't a bad egg, and they do not hear the rest of what you have to say: "But John McCain is four more years of George W. Bush."
Don't remind people that McCain wants to help the oil companies even more than Bush did. Don't bring up that he wants to outlaw abortion. Back away from painting him as the guy who thinks it's a good idea to stay in Iraq until pigs fly. That way, if you keep praising him, you can send a mixed message to the less informed, who are simply not going to figure it out. When they walk into a voting booth, they will see two names on the ballot:
BARACK OBAMA
WAR HERO
Trust me, this ain't Sweden you're living in. War Hero wins every time.
2. Pick a running mate who is a conservative white guy or a general or a Republican.
Yes, it will seem like smart politics at first. Shore up Obama's lack of military experience with a hawk. Be true to Obama's message that he'll be a president for everybody by having him run with a Republican. Make a pitch to the purple states of Virginia and Indiana by putting one of their own on the ticket. Or make the red state of Ohio happy by handing the vice presidential slot to its governor. Just so long as Obama's running mate screams "same old, same old," making it harder for him to attract the new voters he needs to win.
There is nothing wrong with picking someone who can help him win a swing state or someone who has more experience than he does in certain areas. But when I hear pundits say things like, "He has to pick a Catholic," well, John Kerry was a total Catholic, and the Catholic vote went to Mr. W. I mean, here's one of the largest groups in the country — 66 million Catholics — and they/we have only allowed one Catholic to be president in 219 years. You would think they would have been flocking to Kerry in 2004. THAT IS NOT THE WAY PEOPLE THINK. IT IS THE WAY PUNDITS THINK. Keep listening to them and you can help elect John McCain the next President of the United States.
3. Keep writing speeches for Obama that make him sound like a hawk.
Here's what Obama said in front of the American-Israeli lobbying group the day after the final primaries:
"The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat."
And: "Let there be no doubt — I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation."
Sounds like a speech McCain would give. Sounds like he's ready to invade Iran. Obama staked out an even worse position for the Palestinians vis-Ã -vis Jerusalem than the one held by George W. Bush. Keep that up, and more and more supporters will be less and less enthused. He also says he wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. The implied message of all of this is that the Republican plan is a good plan. So why would voters want to elect the candidate imitating the Republican when they can get the real thing?
4. Forget that this was a historic year for women.
Obama should be making a speech about gender like the brilliant one he gave on race back in March. Millions of people, especially women, had high hopes for the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Attention must be paid. And you don't pay attention to it by having your advisers run your wife through the makeover machine, trying to soften her up and pipe her down. Michelle Obama has been one of the most refreshing things about this election year. But within weeks of the end of the primary season, the handlers stepped in to deal with the "Michelle problem."
What problem? She speaks her mind? She wears what she wants? Her biggest sin, according to the punditocracy, was to say that, as a black woman, this may be the first time in her adult life she's been really proud of her country. Shock! Surprise! Outrage! But not from any of the black women I know.
You have to be white and stupid to not know what she was really saying. If you don't understand, let me ask you this: Have you been proud of what this country has been doing in the past few years? Are you proud your neighbors had their house taken from them? Are you proud to be sending a good chunk of your paycheck to the oil companies so they can post record profits? Are you proud to know your vice president outed one of our spies and put her life and the lives of others at risk?
That's all she was saying — what we are all feeling.
Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both lost the white-male vote but won the White House. They did so by winning the black, Hispanic and female vote. That HAS to be Obama's strategy to win. Otherwise, Cindy McCain will be our new First Lady.
5. Show up to a gunfight with a peashooter.
Convince yourself that the Republicans are just going to roll over and play dead because there is simply no life left in their party. Convince yourself this one is in the bag! Convince yourself that if you play by the rules, the Republicans will too.
And when McCain and his people roll out their nuclear arsenal on you, just go all sweet and sensitive and logical. Believe that the truth shall prevail, that good people will see what the Republicans are up to. As they smear you, your family, your religious beliefs — cower, back down, go on the defensive.
If they say you should quit your church, quit your church! If they explode over your speaking the truth about the anger and despair of the white working class, take it all back! If they ask you to stand on your head and do the hokeypokey, snap to it and do it with a smile on your face — and don't forget to apologize for not doing the hokeypokey earlier; you meant no disrespect, and please don't take it as any indication that you do not love your country, your flag and your Christian God.
Do all of that and then listen for that sound — the sound of your supporters shuffling away in silence. They'll stop showing up at campaign headquarters. They'll say they're too busy to go on another door-to-door literature drop. On Election Day, they'll do their duty and vote, but they will not be up at 6 a.m. driving around the city's neighborhoods, picking up strangers who need a ride to the polls.
And on the way to the polls, some of them might just come to a stoplight, turn around and go home. Maybe they'll pick up a six-pack on the way. Maybe there's a new episode of Deal or No Deal on tonight. That would be nice. The girls are pretty, especially the blonde in the third row. Wait, they're all blond. No, not that one — THAT one! Oh yes, I see her. She is pretty. But the Man in the Booth has picked up the phone! He's calling down to you. Deal? Or no deal? No deal! No deal! Don't do it! Hey, I'm outta beer! Why didn't I pick up a case? Now I gotta spend eight bucks on gas to go buy more beer! Aaaaarrrggggghhhhhh!!!! HOWIE MANDEL ISN'T WEARING A FLAG PIN!! U-S-A! U-S-A!
6. Denounce me!
Obama, at some point, might be asked this question: "Michael Moore has endorsed you. But he recently said (fill in the blank with some outrageously offensive line taken out of context). Will you still accept his endorsement, or do you denounce him?"
And he better denounce me, or they will tear him to shreds. He had better back away not only from me but from anyone and everyone who veers a bit too far to the left of where his advisers have told him is the sweet spot for all those red-state voters. I won't take it personally. After all, I'm not the guy who married him or baptized his kids. I'm just the idiot who went to the same terrorist, Muslim school of flag-pin desecrators he went to.
I remember poor John Kerry not even being able to admit, when asked by Larry King, if he had seen Fahrenheit 9/11. "No," he said, "I haven't. . . . I don't plan to, right now." But he had indeed seen it. I sat there watching him say this, and I just felt sorry for him and for the election he was about to lose.
We can't take four more years of this madness, Barack. We need you to be a candidate who will fight back every time they attack you. Actually, don't even wait till you have to fight back. Fight first! Show some vision and courage and smoke them out. Keep asking why these lobbyists are McCain's best friends. Let's finally have a Democrat who's got the balls to fire first.
So Barack, by denouncing me, you can help McCain get elected. Because when you denounce me, it's not really me you're distancing yourself from — it's the millions upon millions of people who feel the same way about things as I do. And many of them are the kind of crazy voters who have no problem voting for a Nader just to prove a point.
Elections have been lost by just 537 votes. I don't want that to happen to you.
From the forthcoming book "Mike's Election Guide," by Michael Moore. Copyright © 2008 by Michael Moore. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY.
How The Democrats Can Blow It ...In Six Easy Steps
A blueprint for losing the most winnable presidential election in American history
MICHAEL MOORE
Aug 21, 2008
For years now, nearly every poll has shown that the American people are right in sync with the platform of the Democratic Party. They are pro-environment, pro-women's rights and pro-choice. They don't like war. They want the minimum wage raised, and they want a single-payer universal health-care system. The American public agrees with the Republican Party on only one major issue: They support the death penalty.
So you would think the Democrats would be cleaning up, election after election. Obviously not. The Democrats appear to be professional losers. They are so pathetic in their ability to win elections, they even lose when they win! So when you hear Democrats and liberals and supporters of Barack Obama say they are worried that John McCain has a good chance of winning, they ain't a-kidding. Who would know better than the very people who have handed the Republicans one election after another on a silver platter? Yes, be afraid, be very afraid.
In an effort to help the party doofuses and pundits — and the candidate himself — spare all of us another suicide-inducing election night, as the results giving the election to the Republican pour in, here is the blueprint from the Democrats' past losing campaigns. Just follow each of these steps and you, the Democratic Party establishment, can help elect John Sidney McCain III to a four-year extension of the Bush Era.
1. Keep saying nice things about McCain.
If you want to help elect McCain, keep blessing him as if he were the white knight who accidentally hopped on the wrong horse. Keep reminding a country at war that he, and he alone, is a war hero. That he's been "good on global warming" and campaign finance. Say that enough, and you know what happens? People start to believe it! You've sold them on the idea that McCain isn't a bad egg, and they do not hear the rest of what you have to say: "But John McCain is four more years of George W. Bush."
Don't remind people that McCain wants to help the oil companies even more than Bush did. Don't bring up that he wants to outlaw abortion. Back away from painting him as the guy who thinks it's a good idea to stay in Iraq until pigs fly. That way, if you keep praising him, you can send a mixed message to the less informed, who are simply not going to figure it out. When they walk into a voting booth, they will see two names on the ballot:
BARACK OBAMA
WAR HERO
Trust me, this ain't Sweden you're living in. War Hero wins every time.
2. Pick a running mate who is a conservative white guy or a general or a Republican.
Yes, it will seem like smart politics at first. Shore up Obama's lack of military experience with a hawk. Be true to Obama's message that he'll be a president for everybody by having him run with a Republican. Make a pitch to the purple states of Virginia and Indiana by putting one of their own on the ticket. Or make the red state of Ohio happy by handing the vice presidential slot to its governor. Just so long as Obama's running mate screams "same old, same old," making it harder for him to attract the new voters he needs to win.
There is nothing wrong with picking someone who can help him win a swing state or someone who has more experience than he does in certain areas. But when I hear pundits say things like, "He has to pick a Catholic," well, John Kerry was a total Catholic, and the Catholic vote went to Mr. W. I mean, here's one of the largest groups in the country — 66 million Catholics — and they/we have only allowed one Catholic to be president in 219 years. You would think they would have been flocking to Kerry in 2004. THAT IS NOT THE WAY PEOPLE THINK. IT IS THE WAY PUNDITS THINK. Keep listening to them and you can help elect John McCain the next President of the United States.
3. Keep writing speeches for Obama that make him sound like a hawk.
Here's what Obama said in front of the American-Israeli lobbying group the day after the final primaries:
"The danger from Iran is grave, it is real, and my goal will be to eliminate this threat."
And: "Let there be no doubt — I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend our security and our ally Israel. Sometimes there are no alternatives to confrontation."
Sounds like a speech McCain would give. Sounds like he's ready to invade Iran. Obama staked out an even worse position for the Palestinians vis-Ã -vis Jerusalem than the one held by George W. Bush. Keep that up, and more and more supporters will be less and less enthused. He also says he wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. The implied message of all of this is that the Republican plan is a good plan. So why would voters want to elect the candidate imitating the Republican when they can get the real thing?
4. Forget that this was a historic year for women.
Obama should be making a speech about gender like the brilliant one he gave on race back in March. Millions of people, especially women, had high hopes for the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Attention must be paid. And you don't pay attention to it by having your advisers run your wife through the makeover machine, trying to soften her up and pipe her down. Michelle Obama has been one of the most refreshing things about this election year. But within weeks of the end of the primary season, the handlers stepped in to deal with the "Michelle problem."
What problem? She speaks her mind? She wears what she wants? Her biggest sin, according to the punditocracy, was to say that, as a black woman, this may be the first time in her adult life she's been really proud of her country. Shock! Surprise! Outrage! But not from any of the black women I know.
You have to be white and stupid to not know what she was really saying. If you don't understand, let me ask you this: Have you been proud of what this country has been doing in the past few years? Are you proud your neighbors had their house taken from them? Are you proud to be sending a good chunk of your paycheck to the oil companies so they can post record profits? Are you proud to know your vice president outed one of our spies and put her life and the lives of others at risk?
That's all she was saying — what we are all feeling.
Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both lost the white-male vote but won the White House. They did so by winning the black, Hispanic and female vote. That HAS to be Obama's strategy to win. Otherwise, Cindy McCain will be our new First Lady.
5. Show up to a gunfight with a peashooter.
Convince yourself that the Republicans are just going to roll over and play dead because there is simply no life left in their party. Convince yourself this one is in the bag! Convince yourself that if you play by the rules, the Republicans will too.
And when McCain and his people roll out their nuclear arsenal on you, just go all sweet and sensitive and logical. Believe that the truth shall prevail, that good people will see what the Republicans are up to. As they smear you, your family, your religious beliefs — cower, back down, go on the defensive.
If they say you should quit your church, quit your church! If they explode over your speaking the truth about the anger and despair of the white working class, take it all back! If they ask you to stand on your head and do the hokeypokey, snap to it and do it with a smile on your face — and don't forget to apologize for not doing the hokeypokey earlier; you meant no disrespect, and please don't take it as any indication that you do not love your country, your flag and your Christian God.
Do all of that and then listen for that sound — the sound of your supporters shuffling away in silence. They'll stop showing up at campaign headquarters. They'll say they're too busy to go on another door-to-door literature drop. On Election Day, they'll do their duty and vote, but they will not be up at 6 a.m. driving around the city's neighborhoods, picking up strangers who need a ride to the polls.
And on the way to the polls, some of them might just come to a stoplight, turn around and go home. Maybe they'll pick up a six-pack on the way. Maybe there's a new episode of Deal or No Deal on tonight. That would be nice. The girls are pretty, especially the blonde in the third row. Wait, they're all blond. No, not that one — THAT one! Oh yes, I see her. She is pretty. But the Man in the Booth has picked up the phone! He's calling down to you. Deal? Or no deal? No deal! No deal! Don't do it! Hey, I'm outta beer! Why didn't I pick up a case? Now I gotta spend eight bucks on gas to go buy more beer! Aaaaarrrggggghhhhhh!!!! HOWIE MANDEL ISN'T WEARING A FLAG PIN!! U-S-A! U-S-A!
6. Denounce me!
Obama, at some point, might be asked this question: "Michael Moore has endorsed you. But he recently said (fill in the blank with some outrageously offensive line taken out of context). Will you still accept his endorsement, or do you denounce him?"
And he better denounce me, or they will tear him to shreds. He had better back away not only from me but from anyone and everyone who veers a bit too far to the left of where his advisers have told him is the sweet spot for all those red-state voters. I won't take it personally. After all, I'm not the guy who married him or baptized his kids. I'm just the idiot who went to the same terrorist, Muslim school of flag-pin desecrators he went to.
I remember poor John Kerry not even being able to admit, when asked by Larry King, if he had seen Fahrenheit 9/11. "No," he said, "I haven't. . . . I don't plan to, right now." But he had indeed seen it. I sat there watching him say this, and I just felt sorry for him and for the election he was about to lose.
We can't take four more years of this madness, Barack. We need you to be a candidate who will fight back every time they attack you. Actually, don't even wait till you have to fight back. Fight first! Show some vision and courage and smoke them out. Keep asking why these lobbyists are McCain's best friends. Let's finally have a Democrat who's got the balls to fire first.
So Barack, by denouncing me, you can help McCain get elected. Because when you denounce me, it's not really me you're distancing yourself from — it's the millions upon millions of people who feel the same way about things as I do. And many of them are the kind of crazy voters who have no problem voting for a Nader just to prove a point.
Elections have been lost by just 537 votes. I don't want that to happen to you.
From the forthcoming book "Mike's Election Guide," by Michael Moore. Copyright © 2008 by Michael Moore. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY.
“President Bush, why don’t you shut up?”
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3618.shtml
“President Bush, why don’t you shut up?”
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 14, 2008
The neoconned Bush Regime and the Israeli-occupied American media are heading the innocent world toward nuclear war.
Back in the Reagan years, the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a Cold War tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states.
The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union.
The NED was also used to dismember the former Yugoslavia with its interventions in Slovakia, Serbia, and Montenegro.
Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, told the Washington Post in 1991 that much of what the NED does “today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The Bush Regime, having established a puppet, Mikheil Saakashvili, as president of Georgia, tried to bring Georgia into NATO.
For readers too young to know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a military alliance between the US and Western European countries to resist any Soviet move into Western Europe (and to ensure European countries lined up behind the US, and bought its weapons systems. Editors). There has been no reason for NATO since the Soviet Union’s internal political collapse almost two decades ago. The neocons turned NATO into another tool, like the NED, for US world hegemony. Subsequent US administrations violated the understandings that President Reagan had reached with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and have incorporated former parts of the Soviet empire into NATO. The neocon goal of ringing Russia with a hostile military alliance has been proclaimed many times.
Western European members of NATO balked at the admission of Georgia, as they understood it as a provocative affront to Russia, on whom Western Europe is dependent for natural gas. Western Europeans are also disturbed at the Bush Regime’s intentions to install ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic as the consequence will be Russian nuclear cruise missiles targeted on European capitals. Europeans don’t see the advantage of helping the US block Russian nuclear retaliation against the US at the expense of their own existence. Ballistic missile defenses are not useful against cruise missiles.
Every country is tired of war except for the US. War, including nuclear war, is the neoconservative strategy for world hegemony.
The entire world, except for Americans, knows that the outbreak of armed conflict between Russian and Georgian forces in South Ossetia was entirely due to the US and its Georgia puppet, Saakashvili. Americans, alone in the world, are unaware that the hostilities were initiated by Saakashvili, because Bush, Cheney and the Israeli-occupied American media have again lied to them.
Everyone else in the world knows that the unstable and corrupt Saakashvili, who proclaims democracy and runs a police state, would not have taken on Russia by attacking South Ossetia unless given the go-ahead by Washington.
The purpose of the Georgian attack on the Russian population of South Ossetia is twofold:
To convince Europeans that their action in delaying Georgia’s NATO membership is the cause of “the Russian aggression” and that to save Georgia from conquest Georgia must be given NATO membership.
To ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of its Russian population. Two thousand Russian civilians were targeted and killed by the US-equipped and trained Georgian Army, and tens of thousands fled into Russia. Having achieved this goal, Saakashvili and his puppet-masters in Washington quickly called for a cease fire and a halt to “the Russian invasion.” The hope is that the Russian population will be afraid to return or can be prevented from returning, thus removing the secessionist threat.
No doubt the Bush Regime can con the American population, just as it did with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, and 9/11 itself, but the rest of the world is not buying it, not even America’s bought-and-paid-for European allies.
Writing in the Asia Times, Ambassador M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, notes the disinformation that is being peddled by the Bush Regime and the US media and reports that “at the outbreak of violence, Russia had tried to have the United Nations Security Council issue a statement calling on Georgia and South Ossetia to immediately lay down weapons. However, Washington was disinterested.”
Amb. Bhadrakumar notes that the American and Georgian resort to violence and propaganda has brought an end to the Russian government’s belief that diplomacy and good will can bring about a settlement of the South Ossetia issue. If Russia wished, Russia could terminate Georgia’s existence as a separate country at will, and there is nothing the US could do about it.
It is certain that the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was a Bush Regime orchestrated event. The American media and the neocon think tanks were ready with their propaganda blitzes. Neocons had ready a Wall Street Journal editorial page article for Saakashvili that declares “the war in Georgia is a war for the West.”
Faced with the collapse of his army when Russia sent in troops to protect South Ossetians from the Georgian troops, Saakashvili declared: “This is not about Georgia any more. It is about America, its values.”
The neocon Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., quickly called a conference hosted by warmonger Ariel Cohen, “Urgent! Event: Russian-Georgian War: A Challenge for the U.S. and the World.”
The Washington Post hosted neocon Robert Kagen’s war drums, “Putin Makes His Move.”
Only a fool like Kagen could think that if Putin intended to invade Georgia he would do so from Beijing, or that after sending the American-trained Georgian army in flight, he would not continue and conquer all of Georgia in order to put an end to American machinations on Russia’s most sensitive border, machinations that are likely to eventually end in nuclear war.
The New York Tiimes hosted Billy Kristol’s rant, “Will Russia Get Away With It?” Kristol thunders against “dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes” that “seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies.” Kristol presents a new axis of evil--Russia, China, North Korea and Iran--and warns against “delay and irresolution” that “simply invite future threats and graver dangers.”
In other words, “attack Russia now.”
Dick Cheney, the insane American vice president, telephoned Saakashvili to express US solidarity with Georgia in the conflict with Russia and declared, “Russian aggression must not go unanswered. Only an idiot would tell Saakashvili anything other than “to cease immediately.”
What must be the effect on US Intelligence services and the US military of Cheney’s propagandistic and irresponsible statement of US support for Georgia’s war crimes? Does anyone really believe that the CIA or any US intelligence service told the vice president that Russia opened the conflict with an invasion? Russian troops arrived in South Ossetia after thousands of Ossetians had been killed by the Georgian attack and after tens of thousands of Ossetians had fled into Russia to escape the Georgian attack. According to news reports, Russian forces have captured Americans who were with the Georgian troops directing their attack on civilians.
The US military certainly has no resources for a war against Russia on top of lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a planned war with Iran.
With its Georgian venture, the Bush Regime is guilty of a new round of war crimes. What will be the consequence?
Many will reply that having got away with 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and with its preparations for attacking Iran, the Bush Regime will get away with its Georgian venture as well.
Possibly, however, this time the Bush Regime has overreached.
Certainly Russia now recognizes that the US is determined to exert hegemony over Russia and is Russia’s worst enemy.
China realizes the US threat to its own energy supply and, thereby, economy.
Even America’s European allies, chafing under their role of supplying troops for America’s Empire, must now realize that being an American ally is dangerous and has no benefits. If Georgia becomes a NATO member and renews its attack on South Ossetia, it must drag Europe into a war with Russia, a main supplier of energy to Europe.
Moreover, if Russian troops are sent across European frontiers, there is nothing to stop them.
What does America offer Europe, aside from the millions of dollars it pays to buy off Europe’s political leaders to insure that they betray their own peoples? Nothing whatsoever.
The only military threat that Europe faces comes from being dragged into America’s wars for American hegemony.
The US is financially bankrupt, with budget and trade deficits that exceed the combined deficits of the rest of the world together. The dollar has wilted. The American consumer market is dying from the offshoring of American jobs and, thereby, incomes, and from the wealth effect of the real estate and derivatives collapses. The US has nothing to offer Europe. Indeed, American economic decline is killing European exports by driving up the value of the euro.
America long ago lost the moral high ground. Hypocrisy has become America’s best known hallmark. Bush, the invader of Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies and deception, thunders at Russia for coming to the defense of its peacekeepers and Russian citizens in South Ossetia. Bush who ripped Kosovo out of Serbia’s heart and handed it to the Muslims, has taken an adamant stand against other separatist movements, especially the South Ossetians who wish to be part of the Russian Federation.
The neoconned Bush Regime is furious that the Russian bear was not intimidated by the US supported aggression of the American puppet state, Georgia. Instead of accepting the act of American hegemony that the neocon script called for, Russia sent the Americanized Georgian army fleeing in fear.
Having failed with weapons, the Bush Regime now unleashes the rhetoric. The White House is warning Russia that failure to acquiesce to US hegemony could have a “significant, long-term impact on relations between Washington and Moscow.”
Do the morons who comprise the Bush Regime really not understand that short of a surprise nuclear attack on Russia there is nothing whatsoever the US can do to Moscow?
The Bush Regime owns no Russian currency that it can dump. The Russians own US dollars.
The Bush Regime owns no Russian bonds that it can dump. The Russians own US bonds.
The US can cut Russia off from no energy supplies. Russia can cut America’s European allies off from energy.
President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The neoconservatives, whom Reagan fired and drove from his administration, were furious. The neocons had hoped to win the Cold War, thereby establishing American hegemony.
The Republican Establishment reestablished its hegemony under Bush 1st that it had lost to Ronald Reagan. With this feat, intelligence was driven from the Republican Party.
The neocons engineered their comeback with the First Gulf War and their propaganda, pure lies, that Iraqi troops bayoneted Kuwait babies in hospitals.
The neocons made a further comeback with President Clinton, whom they convinced to bomb Serbia in order to permit separatist movements to become independent states dependent on America.
With Bush 2nd, the neocons took over. Their agenda, American world hegemony, includes Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
So far the schemes of these ignorant and dangerous ideologues have come a cropper. Iraq, formerly in the hands of secular Sunnis who were a check on Iran, is, after the American invasion and occupation, in the hands of religious Shi’ites allied with Iran.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are resurgent, and a large NATO/US army there is unable to control the situation.
One consequence of the neocons’ Afghan war has been the loss of power of the American puppet president of Pakistan, a Muslim country armed with nuclear weapons. The puppet president now faces impeachment, and the Pakistani military has informed the Americans to stop conducting military operations in Pakistani territory.
The American puppets in Egypt and Jordan might be next to fall.
In Iraq, the Shi’ites, having completed their ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from neighborhoods, have declared a cease fire in order to contradict the US propaganda that American withdrawal would lead to a blood bath. Negotiations on withdrawal dates are now underway between the Americans and the Iraqi government, which is no longer behaving like a puppet.
Last year Hugo Chavez ridiculed Bush before the UN. Russia’s Putin ridiculed Bush as Comrade Wolf.
On August 12, Pravda ridiculed Bush, “Bush: Why don’t you shut up?”
Americans may think they are a superpower before whose presence the world trembles. But not the Russians.
Those Americans stupid enough to think that America’s “superpower” insures its citizens from danger need to read the total contempt shown for President Bush in Pravda:
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? In your statement on Monday regarding the legitimate actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia, you failed to mention the war crimes perpetrated by Georgian military forces, which American advisors support, against Russian and Ossetian civilians
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your faithful ally, Mikhail Saakashvili, was announcing a ceasefire deal while his troops, with your advisors, were massing on Ossetia’s border, which they crossed under cover of night and destroyed Tskhinvali, targeting civilian structures just like your forces did in Iraq.
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your American transport aircraft gave a ride home to thousands of Georgian soldiers from Iraq directly into the combat zone.
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? How do you account for the fact that among the Georgian soldiers fleeing the fighting yesterday you could clearly hear officers using American English giving orders to “Get back inside” and how do you account for the fact that there are reports of American soldiers among the Georgian casualties?
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Do you really think anyone gives any importance whatsoever to your words after 8 years of your criminal and murderous regime and policies? Do you really believe you have any moral ground whatsoever and do you really imagine there is a single human being anywhere on this planet who does not stick up his middle finger every time you appear on a TV screen?
Do you really believe you have the right to give any opinion or advice after Abu Ghraib? After Guantanamo? After the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens? After the torture by CIA operatives?
Do you really believe you have any right to make a statement on any point of international law after your trumped-up charges against Iraq and the subsequent criminal invasion?
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Suppose Russia for instance declares that Georgia has weapons of mass destruction? And that Russia knows where these WMD are, namely in Tblisi and Poti and north, south, east and west of there? And that it must be true because there is ‘magnificent foreign intelligenc’ such as satellite photos of milk powder factories and baby cereals producing chemical weapons and which are currently being ‘driven around the country in vehicles’? Suppose Russia declares for instance that ‘Saakashvili stiffed the world’ and it is ‘time for regime change’?
Nice and simple, isn’t it, President Bush?
So, why don’t you shut up? Oh and by the way, send some more of your military advisors to Georgia, they are doing a sterling job. And they look all funny down the night sight, all green.
The US is not a superpower. It is a bankrupt farce run by imbeciles who were installed by stolen elections arranged by Karl Rove and Diebold. It is a laughing stock, that ignorantly affronts and attempts to bully an enormous country equipped with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
“President Bush, why don’t you shut up?”
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 14, 2008
The neoconned Bush Regime and the Israeli-occupied American media are heading the innocent world toward nuclear war.
Back in the Reagan years, the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a Cold War tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states.
The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union.
The NED was also used to dismember the former Yugoslavia with its interventions in Slovakia, Serbia, and Montenegro.
Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, told the Washington Post in 1991 that much of what the NED does “today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The Bush Regime, having established a puppet, Mikheil Saakashvili, as president of Georgia, tried to bring Georgia into NATO.
For readers too young to know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a military alliance between the US and Western European countries to resist any Soviet move into Western Europe (and to ensure European countries lined up behind the US, and bought its weapons systems. Editors). There has been no reason for NATO since the Soviet Union’s internal political collapse almost two decades ago. The neocons turned NATO into another tool, like the NED, for US world hegemony. Subsequent US administrations violated the understandings that President Reagan had reached with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and have incorporated former parts of the Soviet empire into NATO. The neocon goal of ringing Russia with a hostile military alliance has been proclaimed many times.
Western European members of NATO balked at the admission of Georgia, as they understood it as a provocative affront to Russia, on whom Western Europe is dependent for natural gas. Western Europeans are also disturbed at the Bush Regime’s intentions to install ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic as the consequence will be Russian nuclear cruise missiles targeted on European capitals. Europeans don’t see the advantage of helping the US block Russian nuclear retaliation against the US at the expense of their own existence. Ballistic missile defenses are not useful against cruise missiles.
Every country is tired of war except for the US. War, including nuclear war, is the neoconservative strategy for world hegemony.
The entire world, except for Americans, knows that the outbreak of armed conflict between Russian and Georgian forces in South Ossetia was entirely due to the US and its Georgia puppet, Saakashvili. Americans, alone in the world, are unaware that the hostilities were initiated by Saakashvili, because Bush, Cheney and the Israeli-occupied American media have again lied to them.
Everyone else in the world knows that the unstable and corrupt Saakashvili, who proclaims democracy and runs a police state, would not have taken on Russia by attacking South Ossetia unless given the go-ahead by Washington.
The purpose of the Georgian attack on the Russian population of South Ossetia is twofold:
To convince Europeans that their action in delaying Georgia’s NATO membership is the cause of “the Russian aggression” and that to save Georgia from conquest Georgia must be given NATO membership.
To ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of its Russian population. Two thousand Russian civilians were targeted and killed by the US-equipped and trained Georgian Army, and tens of thousands fled into Russia. Having achieved this goal, Saakashvili and his puppet-masters in Washington quickly called for a cease fire and a halt to “the Russian invasion.” The hope is that the Russian population will be afraid to return or can be prevented from returning, thus removing the secessionist threat.
No doubt the Bush Regime can con the American population, just as it did with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, and 9/11 itself, but the rest of the world is not buying it, not even America’s bought-and-paid-for European allies.
Writing in the Asia Times, Ambassador M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, notes the disinformation that is being peddled by the Bush Regime and the US media and reports that “at the outbreak of violence, Russia had tried to have the United Nations Security Council issue a statement calling on Georgia and South Ossetia to immediately lay down weapons. However, Washington was disinterested.”
Amb. Bhadrakumar notes that the American and Georgian resort to violence and propaganda has brought an end to the Russian government’s belief that diplomacy and good will can bring about a settlement of the South Ossetia issue. If Russia wished, Russia could terminate Georgia’s existence as a separate country at will, and there is nothing the US could do about it.
It is certain that the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was a Bush Regime orchestrated event. The American media and the neocon think tanks were ready with their propaganda blitzes. Neocons had ready a Wall Street Journal editorial page article for Saakashvili that declares “the war in Georgia is a war for the West.”
Faced with the collapse of his army when Russia sent in troops to protect South Ossetians from the Georgian troops, Saakashvili declared: “This is not about Georgia any more. It is about America, its values.”
The neocon Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., quickly called a conference hosted by warmonger Ariel Cohen, “Urgent! Event: Russian-Georgian War: A Challenge for the U.S. and the World.”
The Washington Post hosted neocon Robert Kagen’s war drums, “Putin Makes His Move.”
Only a fool like Kagen could think that if Putin intended to invade Georgia he would do so from Beijing, or that after sending the American-trained Georgian army in flight, he would not continue and conquer all of Georgia in order to put an end to American machinations on Russia’s most sensitive border, machinations that are likely to eventually end in nuclear war.
The New York Tiimes hosted Billy Kristol’s rant, “Will Russia Get Away With It?” Kristol thunders against “dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes” that “seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies.” Kristol presents a new axis of evil--Russia, China, North Korea and Iran--and warns against “delay and irresolution” that “simply invite future threats and graver dangers.”
In other words, “attack Russia now.”
Dick Cheney, the insane American vice president, telephoned Saakashvili to express US solidarity with Georgia in the conflict with Russia and declared, “Russian aggression must not go unanswered. Only an idiot would tell Saakashvili anything other than “to cease immediately.”
What must be the effect on US Intelligence services and the US military of Cheney’s propagandistic and irresponsible statement of US support for Georgia’s war crimes? Does anyone really believe that the CIA or any US intelligence service told the vice president that Russia opened the conflict with an invasion? Russian troops arrived in South Ossetia after thousands of Ossetians had been killed by the Georgian attack and after tens of thousands of Ossetians had fled into Russia to escape the Georgian attack. According to news reports, Russian forces have captured Americans who were with the Georgian troops directing their attack on civilians.
The US military certainly has no resources for a war against Russia on top of lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a planned war with Iran.
With its Georgian venture, the Bush Regime is guilty of a new round of war crimes. What will be the consequence?
Many will reply that having got away with 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and with its preparations for attacking Iran, the Bush Regime will get away with its Georgian venture as well.
Possibly, however, this time the Bush Regime has overreached.
Certainly Russia now recognizes that the US is determined to exert hegemony over Russia and is Russia’s worst enemy.
China realizes the US threat to its own energy supply and, thereby, economy.
Even America’s European allies, chafing under their role of supplying troops for America’s Empire, must now realize that being an American ally is dangerous and has no benefits. If Georgia becomes a NATO member and renews its attack on South Ossetia, it must drag Europe into a war with Russia, a main supplier of energy to Europe.
Moreover, if Russian troops are sent across European frontiers, there is nothing to stop them.
What does America offer Europe, aside from the millions of dollars it pays to buy off Europe’s political leaders to insure that they betray their own peoples? Nothing whatsoever.
The only military threat that Europe faces comes from being dragged into America’s wars for American hegemony.
The US is financially bankrupt, with budget and trade deficits that exceed the combined deficits of the rest of the world together. The dollar has wilted. The American consumer market is dying from the offshoring of American jobs and, thereby, incomes, and from the wealth effect of the real estate and derivatives collapses. The US has nothing to offer Europe. Indeed, American economic decline is killing European exports by driving up the value of the euro.
America long ago lost the moral high ground. Hypocrisy has become America’s best known hallmark. Bush, the invader of Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies and deception, thunders at Russia for coming to the defense of its peacekeepers and Russian citizens in South Ossetia. Bush who ripped Kosovo out of Serbia’s heart and handed it to the Muslims, has taken an adamant stand against other separatist movements, especially the South Ossetians who wish to be part of the Russian Federation.
The neoconned Bush Regime is furious that the Russian bear was not intimidated by the US supported aggression of the American puppet state, Georgia. Instead of accepting the act of American hegemony that the neocon script called for, Russia sent the Americanized Georgian army fleeing in fear.
Having failed with weapons, the Bush Regime now unleashes the rhetoric. The White House is warning Russia that failure to acquiesce to US hegemony could have a “significant, long-term impact on relations between Washington and Moscow.”
Do the morons who comprise the Bush Regime really not understand that short of a surprise nuclear attack on Russia there is nothing whatsoever the US can do to Moscow?
The Bush Regime owns no Russian currency that it can dump. The Russians own US dollars.
The Bush Regime owns no Russian bonds that it can dump. The Russians own US bonds.
The US can cut Russia off from no energy supplies. Russia can cut America’s European allies off from energy.
President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The neoconservatives, whom Reagan fired and drove from his administration, were furious. The neocons had hoped to win the Cold War, thereby establishing American hegemony.
The Republican Establishment reestablished its hegemony under Bush 1st that it had lost to Ronald Reagan. With this feat, intelligence was driven from the Republican Party.
The neocons engineered their comeback with the First Gulf War and their propaganda, pure lies, that Iraqi troops bayoneted Kuwait babies in hospitals.
The neocons made a further comeback with President Clinton, whom they convinced to bomb Serbia in order to permit separatist movements to become independent states dependent on America.
With Bush 2nd, the neocons took over. Their agenda, American world hegemony, includes Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
So far the schemes of these ignorant and dangerous ideologues have come a cropper. Iraq, formerly in the hands of secular Sunnis who were a check on Iran, is, after the American invasion and occupation, in the hands of religious Shi’ites allied with Iran.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are resurgent, and a large NATO/US army there is unable to control the situation.
One consequence of the neocons’ Afghan war has been the loss of power of the American puppet president of Pakistan, a Muslim country armed with nuclear weapons. The puppet president now faces impeachment, and the Pakistani military has informed the Americans to stop conducting military operations in Pakistani territory.
The American puppets in Egypt and Jordan might be next to fall.
In Iraq, the Shi’ites, having completed their ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from neighborhoods, have declared a cease fire in order to contradict the US propaganda that American withdrawal would lead to a blood bath. Negotiations on withdrawal dates are now underway between the Americans and the Iraqi government, which is no longer behaving like a puppet.
Last year Hugo Chavez ridiculed Bush before the UN. Russia’s Putin ridiculed Bush as Comrade Wolf.
On August 12, Pravda ridiculed Bush, “Bush: Why don’t you shut up?”
Americans may think they are a superpower before whose presence the world trembles. But not the Russians.
Those Americans stupid enough to think that America’s “superpower” insures its citizens from danger need to read the total contempt shown for President Bush in Pravda:
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? In your statement on Monday regarding the legitimate actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia, you failed to mention the war crimes perpetrated by Georgian military forces, which American advisors support, against Russian and Ossetian civilians
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your faithful ally, Mikhail Saakashvili, was announcing a ceasefire deal while his troops, with your advisors, were massing on Ossetia’s border, which they crossed under cover of night and destroyed Tskhinvali, targeting civilian structures just like your forces did in Iraq.
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your American transport aircraft gave a ride home to thousands of Georgian soldiers from Iraq directly into the combat zone.
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? How do you account for the fact that among the Georgian soldiers fleeing the fighting yesterday you could clearly hear officers using American English giving orders to “Get back inside” and how do you account for the fact that there are reports of American soldiers among the Georgian casualties?
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Do you really think anyone gives any importance whatsoever to your words after 8 years of your criminal and murderous regime and policies? Do you really believe you have any moral ground whatsoever and do you really imagine there is a single human being anywhere on this planet who does not stick up his middle finger every time you appear on a TV screen?
Do you really believe you have the right to give any opinion or advice after Abu Ghraib? After Guantanamo? After the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens? After the torture by CIA operatives?
Do you really believe you have any right to make a statement on any point of international law after your trumped-up charges against Iraq and the subsequent criminal invasion?
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Suppose Russia for instance declares that Georgia has weapons of mass destruction? And that Russia knows where these WMD are, namely in Tblisi and Poti and north, south, east and west of there? And that it must be true because there is ‘magnificent foreign intelligenc’ such as satellite photos of milk powder factories and baby cereals producing chemical weapons and which are currently being ‘driven around the country in vehicles’? Suppose Russia declares for instance that ‘Saakashvili stiffed the world’ and it is ‘time for regime change’?
Nice and simple, isn’t it, President Bush?
So, why don’t you shut up? Oh and by the way, send some more of your military advisors to Georgia, they are doing a sterling job. And they look all funny down the night sight, all green.
The US is not a superpower. It is a bankrupt farce run by imbeciles who were installed by stolen elections arranged by Karl Rove and Diebold. It is a laughing stock, that ignorantly affronts and attempts to bully an enormous country equipped with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
Putin's Winning Hand
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20535.htm
Putin's Winning Hand:
Once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered, America's lifeline to the world is kaput
By Mike Whitney
16/08/08 "ICH" -- - There are no military installations in the city of Tskhinvali. In fact, there are no military targets at all. It is an industrial center consisting of lumber mills, manufacturing plants and residential areas. It is also the home to 30,000 South Ossetians. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery last Thursday, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he ordered the bombing anyway.
There was no "Battle of Tskhinvali"; that's another fiction. A battle implies that there is an opposing force that is resisting or fighting back. That's not the case here. The Georgian army entered the city unopposed; after all, how can unarmed civilians stop armed units. Most of the townspeople had already fled across the border into Russia or hid in their basements while the tanks and armored vehicles rumbled bye firing at anything that moved.
What took place in South Ossetia last Thursday, was not an invasion or a siege; it was a massacre. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully-equiped modern army. It was a war crime.
In less than 24 hours, the Russian army was deployed to the war zone where it chased the Georgian army away without a fight. Journalist Michael Binyon put it like this, "The attack was short, sharp and deadly---enough to send the Georgians fleeing in humiliating panic." Indeed, the Georgians left in such haste that many of their weapons were left behind. It was a complete rout; another black-eye for the US and Israeli advisers who trained the clatter of thugs they call the Georgian army. Soon vendors on the streets of Tskhinvali will be hawking weapons that were left behind with a mocking sign: "Georgia Army M-16; Never used, dropped once."
By the time the army was driven out, the downtown area was in engulfed in flames and the bodies of those who had been killed by sniper-fire were strewn along the streets and sidewalks. Many of people who stayed behind were simply too old or infirm to leave. Instead, they huddled in their basements waiting for the shelling to stop. It was a bloodbath. The city's only hospital was deliberately targeted and destroyed; another war crime. By day's end, over 2,000 people were killed in an operation that was clearly engineered with the assistance of the Bush White House. Bush regards Saakashvilli as his main client in the region; they are friends. He is America's cat's paw in the Caucasus. Saakashvilli's assignment is to try to get Putin to overreact militarily and demonstrate to European allies that Russia still poses a threat to their national security. Fortunately, many Europeans see through the ruse and know that the trouble originates in Washington.
For the most part, Americans are still in the dark about what really happened last weekend. There's a great video circulating on the Internet by a Russian citizen that has been living in USA for the last 10 years. He sums up the role of the US media with great precision. He says, "The western media--especially CNN--is feeding you complete horseshit. Russia did not invade Georgia first." The youtube can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c26Q-qxDEA
The coverage of the western media has been abysmal. Nearly every article and TV news segment begins with accusations of Russian aggression concealing the fact that the Georgian Army bombarded and invaded the capital of South Ossetia one full day before the first Russian even tank crossed the border. By the time the Russians arrived, the city was already in a shambles and thousands were dead.
These facts are not in dispute by those who followed the developments as they took place. Now the media is revising the facts to manage public perceptions, just as they did with the fictional WMD in Iraq. Many people think that the media learned its lesson after they were exposed for using bogus information in the lead up to the war in Iraq. But that is not true. The corporate media--especially FOX News, CNN and PBS (the smug, liberal-sounding channel)---continue to operate like the propaganda arm of the Pentagon. Its disgraceful.
In a 2006 referendum, 99% of South Ossetians said they supported independence from Georgia. The voter turnout was 95% and the balloting was monitored by 34 international observers from the west. No one has challenged the results. The province has been under the protection of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers since 1992 and has been a de facto independent state ever since. If Putin applied the same standard as Bush did in Kosovo, he would unilaterally declare South Ossetia independent from Georgia and then thumb his nose at the UN. (Sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander) But Putin and newly-elected Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have taken a conciliatory attitude towards the international community and tried to resolve the issue through diplomatic channels. So far, they have conducted themselves with restraint and avoided any confrontation.
Still, Russia's operation in South Ossetia has ignited a firestorm in the US political establishment and Democrats and Republicans alike are demanding that Russia be "taught a lesson". Condoleeza Rice flew to Tbilisi on Friday and ordered Russian combat troops to withdraw from Georgia immediately. Saakashvili topped off Rice's comments by saying that the Russian troops were "cold-blooded killers" and "barbarians". So much for reconciliation.
Saakashvili's hyperbolic rhetoric was followed by a surprise announcement from Poland that they had approved Bush's plans for deploying the Missile Defense Shield in Eastern Europe. The system is supposed to defend Europe from the possibility of attacks from so-called "rogue states" like Iran, but the Kremlin knows that it is intended to neutralize their nuclear arsenal. Political analyst William Engdahl explains the importance of the proposed system in his recent article, "Missile Defense: Washington and Poland just moved the World closer to War":
"The signing now insures an escalation of tensions between Russia and NATO and a new Cold War arms race in full force. It is important for readers to understand...the ability of one of two opposing sides to put anti-missile missiles to within 90 miles of the territory of the other in even a primitive first-generation anti-missile missile array gives that side virtual victory in a nuclear balance of power and forces the other to consider unconditional surrender or to pre-emptively react by launching its nuclear strike before 2012."
The new "shield" will be integrated into the larger US nuclear weapons system placing the world's most lethal weapons just a few hundred miles from Russia's capital. It is a clear threat to Russia's national security and it must be opposed at all cost. It is no different than nuclear weapons in Cuba. The timing of the announcement is particularly troubling as it only adds to the tensions between the two superpowers.
President Medvedev made this statement after hearing of Poland's decision: "This decision clearly demonstrates everything we have said recently. The deployment of new anti-missile forces in Europe is aimed at the Russian Federation."
It was President Ronald Reagan, the darling of the neoconservatives, who decided to remove short-range nuclear weapons from the European theater. Now, ironically, it is his ideological heir, George W. Bush, who is on track to restart the Cold War by putting a high-tech nuclear system on Russia's perimeter. The younger Bush has already broken his father's commitment to Mikail Gorbachev to never expand NATO beyond Germany. Presently, Bush is pushing to gain NATO membership for two former-Soviet states; Ukraine and Georgia. If they are approved, then any future dispute with Russia will pit the United States and Europe against Moscow. It's no wonder Putin is trying to derail the process.
The Bush administration has been planning for a confrontation with Russia for more than a year. In fact, Raw Story reported on operations that were conducted by the military on July 14, 2008 which were probably a dress rehearsal for the current conflict. According to Raw Story:
"US troops on Monday (July 14) began military exercises near the Russian border in ex-Soviet Ukraine and were poised to launch them in Georgia, amid tense relations between Moscow and Washington. A ceremony inaugurating the Sea Breeze-2008 NATO exercise was held off Ukraine's Black Sea coast against anti-NATO protests and a hostile reaction from officials in Russia. Sea Breeze-2008...includes forces from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Macedonia and Turkey...'The US-Georgia joint exercises will be held at the Vaziani military base' less than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Russian border with a total of 1,650 servicemen taking part."
So, it appears the Bush administration, working in conjunction with the Pentagon, did have contingency plans for dealing with a flare-up with Georgia. The real question is whether or not they planned to initiate those hostilities to advance their own regional agenda? No one knows for sure.
Now that Georgia's American-trained army has been humiliated in front of the world, Bush is trying desperately to save face by demanding that Russia allow the US Air force to deliver humanitarian aid via C-17 military aircraft to the tens of thousands of Georgians who were displaced in the fighting. It is worth noting that, as yet, Bush has never delivered as much as a bag of rice to the 2 million Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria due to his war in Iraq. Bush's magnanimity is not only suspect, it also creates real problems for Putin who will have to decide whether the offer is sincere or just a ploy to open up the ports and airfields so that more weaponry and ordnance can be delivered. As Barry Grey suggests in his article "Bush Dispatches US Military forces to Georgia" the humanitarian operation could be a scam:
"This is a formula for an injection of US military and naval forces into Georgia of indeterminate scope and duration. It will certainly involve the presence of hundreds if not thousands of uniformed US military personnel on the ground, and a substantial number of warships in the region. The US is introducing this military force into a situation that remains highly unstable and combustible, raising the possibility of a direct military clash between the United States and Russia."
Grey is right, but what choice does Putin have? His task is to avoid a military confrontation with the United States while demonstrating to his Europeon partners that their future lies with Russia not America. That's the real goal. To achieve that, he needs to expose Bush as reckless, petulant, and incapable of being a responsible steward of the global system. Maybe Putin will have to back-down at some point and swallow his pride; it makes no difference. What matters, is the endgame; showing that Russia is strong and dependable and will provide its European allies with oil and natural gas in a businesslike manner. That's the winning hand. Meanwhile, the United States will be forced to take a long-overdue look in the mirror and revisit its strategy for perennial war. Unfortunately, once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered; America's lifeline to the world is kaput.
Putin's Winning Hand:
Once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered, America's lifeline to the world is kaput
By Mike Whitney
16/08/08 "ICH" -- - There are no military installations in the city of Tskhinvali. In fact, there are no military targets at all. It is an industrial center consisting of lumber mills, manufacturing plants and residential areas. It is also the home to 30,000 South Ossetians. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery last Thursday, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he ordered the bombing anyway.
There was no "Battle of Tskhinvali"; that's another fiction. A battle implies that there is an opposing force that is resisting or fighting back. That's not the case here. The Georgian army entered the city unopposed; after all, how can unarmed civilians stop armed units. Most of the townspeople had already fled across the border into Russia or hid in their basements while the tanks and armored vehicles rumbled bye firing at anything that moved.
What took place in South Ossetia last Thursday, was not an invasion or a siege; it was a massacre. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully-equiped modern army. It was a war crime.
In less than 24 hours, the Russian army was deployed to the war zone where it chased the Georgian army away without a fight. Journalist Michael Binyon put it like this, "The attack was short, sharp and deadly---enough to send the Georgians fleeing in humiliating panic." Indeed, the Georgians left in such haste that many of their weapons were left behind. It was a complete rout; another black-eye for the US and Israeli advisers who trained the clatter of thugs they call the Georgian army. Soon vendors on the streets of Tskhinvali will be hawking weapons that were left behind with a mocking sign: "Georgia Army M-16; Never used, dropped once."
By the time the army was driven out, the downtown area was in engulfed in flames and the bodies of those who had been killed by sniper-fire were strewn along the streets and sidewalks. Many of people who stayed behind were simply too old or infirm to leave. Instead, they huddled in their basements waiting for the shelling to stop. It was a bloodbath. The city's only hospital was deliberately targeted and destroyed; another war crime. By day's end, over 2,000 people were killed in an operation that was clearly engineered with the assistance of the Bush White House. Bush regards Saakashvilli as his main client in the region; they are friends. He is America's cat's paw in the Caucasus. Saakashvilli's assignment is to try to get Putin to overreact militarily and demonstrate to European allies that Russia still poses a threat to their national security. Fortunately, many Europeans see through the ruse and know that the trouble originates in Washington.
For the most part, Americans are still in the dark about what really happened last weekend. There's a great video circulating on the Internet by a Russian citizen that has been living in USA for the last 10 years. He sums up the role of the US media with great precision. He says, "The western media--especially CNN--is feeding you complete horseshit. Russia did not invade Georgia first." The youtube can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c26Q-qxDEA
The coverage of the western media has been abysmal. Nearly every article and TV news segment begins with accusations of Russian aggression concealing the fact that the Georgian Army bombarded and invaded the capital of South Ossetia one full day before the first Russian even tank crossed the border. By the time the Russians arrived, the city was already in a shambles and thousands were dead.
These facts are not in dispute by those who followed the developments as they took place. Now the media is revising the facts to manage public perceptions, just as they did with the fictional WMD in Iraq. Many people think that the media learned its lesson after they were exposed for using bogus information in the lead up to the war in Iraq. But that is not true. The corporate media--especially FOX News, CNN and PBS (the smug, liberal-sounding channel)---continue to operate like the propaganda arm of the Pentagon. Its disgraceful.
In a 2006 referendum, 99% of South Ossetians said they supported independence from Georgia. The voter turnout was 95% and the balloting was monitored by 34 international observers from the west. No one has challenged the results. The province has been under the protection of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers since 1992 and has been a de facto independent state ever since. If Putin applied the same standard as Bush did in Kosovo, he would unilaterally declare South Ossetia independent from Georgia and then thumb his nose at the UN. (Sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander) But Putin and newly-elected Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have taken a conciliatory attitude towards the international community and tried to resolve the issue through diplomatic channels. So far, they have conducted themselves with restraint and avoided any confrontation.
Still, Russia's operation in South Ossetia has ignited a firestorm in the US political establishment and Democrats and Republicans alike are demanding that Russia be "taught a lesson". Condoleeza Rice flew to Tbilisi on Friday and ordered Russian combat troops to withdraw from Georgia immediately. Saakashvili topped off Rice's comments by saying that the Russian troops were "cold-blooded killers" and "barbarians". So much for reconciliation.
Saakashvili's hyperbolic rhetoric was followed by a surprise announcement from Poland that they had approved Bush's plans for deploying the Missile Defense Shield in Eastern Europe. The system is supposed to defend Europe from the possibility of attacks from so-called "rogue states" like Iran, but the Kremlin knows that it is intended to neutralize their nuclear arsenal. Political analyst William Engdahl explains the importance of the proposed system in his recent article, "Missile Defense: Washington and Poland just moved the World closer to War":
"The signing now insures an escalation of tensions between Russia and NATO and a new Cold War arms race in full force. It is important for readers to understand...the ability of one of two opposing sides to put anti-missile missiles to within 90 miles of the territory of the other in even a primitive first-generation anti-missile missile array gives that side virtual victory in a nuclear balance of power and forces the other to consider unconditional surrender or to pre-emptively react by launching its nuclear strike before 2012."
The new "shield" will be integrated into the larger US nuclear weapons system placing the world's most lethal weapons just a few hundred miles from Russia's capital. It is a clear threat to Russia's national security and it must be opposed at all cost. It is no different than nuclear weapons in Cuba. The timing of the announcement is particularly troubling as it only adds to the tensions between the two superpowers.
President Medvedev made this statement after hearing of Poland's decision: "This decision clearly demonstrates everything we have said recently. The deployment of new anti-missile forces in Europe is aimed at the Russian Federation."
It was President Ronald Reagan, the darling of the neoconservatives, who decided to remove short-range nuclear weapons from the European theater. Now, ironically, it is his ideological heir, George W. Bush, who is on track to restart the Cold War by putting a high-tech nuclear system on Russia's perimeter. The younger Bush has already broken his father's commitment to Mikail Gorbachev to never expand NATO beyond Germany. Presently, Bush is pushing to gain NATO membership for two former-Soviet states; Ukraine and Georgia. If they are approved, then any future dispute with Russia will pit the United States and Europe against Moscow. It's no wonder Putin is trying to derail the process.
The Bush administration has been planning for a confrontation with Russia for more than a year. In fact, Raw Story reported on operations that were conducted by the military on July 14, 2008 which were probably a dress rehearsal for the current conflict. According to Raw Story:
"US troops on Monday (July 14) began military exercises near the Russian border in ex-Soviet Ukraine and were poised to launch them in Georgia, amid tense relations between Moscow and Washington. A ceremony inaugurating the Sea Breeze-2008 NATO exercise was held off Ukraine's Black Sea coast against anti-NATO protests and a hostile reaction from officials in Russia. Sea Breeze-2008...includes forces from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Macedonia and Turkey...'The US-Georgia joint exercises will be held at the Vaziani military base' less than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Russian border with a total of 1,650 servicemen taking part."
So, it appears the Bush administration, working in conjunction with the Pentagon, did have contingency plans for dealing with a flare-up with Georgia. The real question is whether or not they planned to initiate those hostilities to advance their own regional agenda? No one knows for sure.
Now that Georgia's American-trained army has been humiliated in front of the world, Bush is trying desperately to save face by demanding that Russia allow the US Air force to deliver humanitarian aid via C-17 military aircraft to the tens of thousands of Georgians who were displaced in the fighting. It is worth noting that, as yet, Bush has never delivered as much as a bag of rice to the 2 million Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria due to his war in Iraq. Bush's magnanimity is not only suspect, it also creates real problems for Putin who will have to decide whether the offer is sincere or just a ploy to open up the ports and airfields so that more weaponry and ordnance can be delivered. As Barry Grey suggests in his article "Bush Dispatches US Military forces to Georgia" the humanitarian operation could be a scam:
"This is a formula for an injection of US military and naval forces into Georgia of indeterminate scope and duration. It will certainly involve the presence of hundreds if not thousands of uniformed US military personnel on the ground, and a substantial number of warships in the region. The US is introducing this military force into a situation that remains highly unstable and combustible, raising the possibility of a direct military clash between the United States and Russia."
Grey is right, but what choice does Putin have? His task is to avoid a military confrontation with the United States while demonstrating to his Europeon partners that their future lies with Russia not America. That's the real goal. To achieve that, he needs to expose Bush as reckless, petulant, and incapable of being a responsible steward of the global system. Maybe Putin will have to back-down at some point and swallow his pride; it makes no difference. What matters, is the endgame; showing that Russia is strong and dependable and will provide its European allies with oil and natural gas in a businesslike manner. That's the winning hand. Meanwhile, the United States will be forced to take a long-overdue look in the mirror and revisit its strategy for perennial war. Unfortunately, once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered; America's lifeline to the world is kaput.
'Dark Knight' 2nd Highest Domestic Grosser
http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/dark-knight-to-become-2nd-highest-grosser/
'Dark Knight' Today Became 2nd Highest Domestic Grosser Behind Only 'Titanic'
I'm no joker: the Warner Bros comic book caper achieved this domestic gross milestone Saturday on its 30th day of release. As of Sunday, The Dark Knight's North American cumulative stood at $$471,493,000, ahead of Fox's Star Wars (incluing all re-releases) with $460,998,007. No. 1 is still Paramount's Titanic with $600,788,188. Of course, none of these totals are adjusted for inflation, or higher ticket prices, or number of tickets sold, etc. This weekend, the latest Batman installment was knocked out of No. 1 after 4 straight weekends as the top movie at the box office. It finished #2.
Posted by Nikki Finke on Saturday, Aug 16th, 2008
'Dark Knight' Today Became 2nd Highest Domestic Grosser Behind Only 'Titanic'
I'm no joker: the Warner Bros comic book caper achieved this domestic gross milestone Saturday on its 30th day of release. As of Sunday, The Dark Knight's North American cumulative stood at $$471,493,000, ahead of Fox's Star Wars (incluing all re-releases) with $460,998,007. No. 1 is still Paramount's Titanic with $600,788,188. Of course, none of these totals are adjusted for inflation, or higher ticket prices, or number of tickets sold, etc. This weekend, the latest Batman installment was knocked out of No. 1 after 4 straight weekends as the top movie at the box office. It finished #2.
Posted by Nikki Finke on Saturday, Aug 16th, 2008
Ellen Degeneres and Portia di Rossi's Marry
http://www.gaywired.com/Article.cfm?ID=20001Ellen Degeneres and Portia di Rossi's Marry in an Intimate Affair
By Maggie Taylor Article Date: 8/17/2008
It was the royal wedding of Hollywood lesbian marriages when Ellen Degeneres and Portia di Rossi said “I do,” Saturday in a small ceremony at their Beverly Hills home, surrounded by their closest friends and family, according to reports by Us and People magazines.
Degeneres, 50, and di Ross, 35, became the highest profile same-sex couple to marry since California legalized gay marriage this June.
During an emotional announcement on her talk show last May, Degeneres announced that she and her partner di Rossi would marry, after the California Supreme Court’s May ruling that overturned the state’s ban on gay marriage.
There were 19 people in attendance for the wedding, including Degeneres’ mother Betty Degeneres and di Rossi’s mother, Margaret Rogers, who flew in from Australia to attend the event, People.com reported Saturday.
For the ceremony, di Rossi wore a backless light pink dress with a train while Degeneres sported an all white ensemble of pants, shirt and a vest, according to Us.
"Ellen and Portia came out and posed for pictures with Ellen's mom and their two dogs. They were hugging and kissing, and looked ecstatic. Ellen was helping Portia with the train of her dress, which looked like a Cinderella tutu,” a witness told Us.
Following her fourth consecutive Emmy win in June, Degeneres announced that a date for the wedding had not been set but that once the pair tied the knot that she would show “a tiny bit” of the nuptials on her show.
Guns N' Roses in talks for exclusive album release
http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN1529368720080816?feedType=RSS&feedName=entertainmentNews&rpc=22&sp=trueGuns N' Roses in talks for exclusive album release
Sat Aug 16, 2008T
By Ed Christman
NEW YORK (Billboard) - The June leak of nine allegedly "mastered, finished" tracks from Guns N' Roses' long-delayed "Chinese Democracy" spurred a renewed round of speculation about whether the Axl Rose-led band will finally release the 14-years-in-the-making album.
But some concrete signs are finally emerging that the album's release could be imminent. That's because, according to sources, negotiations are under way for "Chinese Democracy" to come out as an exclusive at one of the big-box retailers -- either Wal-Mart or Best Buy.
Negotiations are also ongoing for conventional record company distribution, another source said.
Guns N' Roses is now managed by Irving Azoff's Front Line Management, and Azoff is a well-known proponent of issuing albums exclusively through retailers. He released the Eagles' "Long Road Out of Eden" through Wal-Mart, much to the chagrin of other merchants.
It's unclear who initiated the Guns N' Roses exclusive negotiations -- Front Line or Interscope, the band's label.
Representatives at Front Line and Interscope with knowledge of the situation couldn't be reached for comment. A Wal-Mart representative said the chain couldn't confirm this fall's exclusive album offerings. Best Buy representatives couldn't be reached for comment.
Ed McMahon's New Landlord: Donald Trump!
http://www.eonline.com/uberblog/b23930_ed_mcmahons_new_landlord_donald_trump.htmlEd McMahon's New Landlord: Donald Trump!
Thu., Aug. 14, 2008
by Natalie Finn
Ed McMahon's Beverly Hills home is about to become one of the best houses in the world.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Donald Trump, he of the gold-plated everything, has agreed to buy McMahon's mansion so that the financially strapped TV icon can avoid foreclosure and continue to live there.
And they aren't even golf buddies!
"I don't know the man, but I grew up watching him on TV," Trump said Thursday. Helping him would "be an honor."
The real estate tycoon said that he plans to buy the six-bedroom, five-bathroom residence from the lender and lease it to the former Tonight Show wingman and his wife, Pamela, who are behind on more than $640,000 in payments on a $4.8 million mortgage loan.
It wasn't the Apprentice honcho's original plan—the deal reportedly went down after McMahon's listing agent flew to New York to propose the idea to Trump in person. But Ivanka's pop proved to be the man for the job.
"When I was at the Wharton School of Business, I'd watch him every night," Trump added. "How could this happen?"
No one is sure, although McMahon has said that spending more than he made over the years probably did it. That, and he hadn't been able to work until recently because of the broken neck he suffered in a fall about 18 months ago.
The one-time Star Search host's home has been on the market for more than two years, most recently listed at $4.6 million. He reportedly paid $2.6 million for it in 1990.
Since his financial troubles came to light, McMahon has been sued at least three times over unpaid loans and legal fees. He has also filed suit against the owner of the home where he fell and against Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which he accuses of providing him with shoddy care for his injuries.
The Hopes of a Long Suffering 'Star Wars' Fan
http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2008/08/the-hopes-of-a.htmlThe Hopes of a Long Suffering 'Star Wars' Fan
Aug 14, 2008
by Christian Blauvelt
Categories: Film, I'm Just a Geek, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Star Wars
Like many a recovering Star Wars fan, I await the premiere this Friday of Star Wars: The Clone Wars with a mix of excitement and dread. Excitement for the opportunity to see a new vision of George Lucas's beloved universe brought to the screen. Dread that, if without meaningful character development or a coherent plot (did you see any hint of a story in those trailers?), director Dave Filoni's pixelfest could be as much fun as watching another person play a videogame.
And yet despite my frustrations with the franchise, I keep coming back. I love this mythology, this universe, and these characters.
That's why it was so refreshing to hear the rumor that fellow Star Wars aficionado Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz), who's playing Scotty in the upcoming Star Trek, had declared his desire to write an episode of Lucas's long-gestating live action TV series, supposedly set between Episodes III and IV. Pegg supposedly worried, however, that he may have alienated Lucasfilm by publicly criticizing The Phantom Menace.
Star Wars needs an overhaul, like what Christopher Nolan did for Batman or what J.J. Abrams intends to do for Star Trek. I'm not saying Pegg's the one to reinvent the saga from a galaxy far, far away, but it should be a fan of the series who knows it and loves it. As the saga's creator, Lucas never felt what it was like sitting in a darkened theater as a young would-be fan not knowing what to expect, seeing "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." pop up for the first time, and bathing in John Williams' blaring fanfare as that imperial star destroyer first passed overhead.
Maybe because of his unique position of knowing and nurturing this universe from its inception, Lucas actually might not understand what it is that his fans want. Hence Jar Jar, "the taxation of trade routes," the Galactic Senate's parliamentary procedure, the "I hate sand" monologue, and Natalie Portman saying "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo."
Why I am hopeful about this new Clone Wars movie and subsequent animated TV series is because some of the best Star Wars stories told since the original trilogy have come from people other than George Lucas. Timothy Zahn's novel Heir to the Empire paved the way for a whole "expanded universe" of storytelling through dozens of novels, by authors like Steve Perry, Matthew Stover, and Troy Denning, that delve into a level of detail about the characters, alien cultures, and political events that make the films seem superficial by comparison. Likewise, Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy's Dark Empire graphic novel series reveals a brooding, melancholy undercurrent to the Star Wars universe that would seem to be jarringly incompatible with the gleaming surfaces and Flash Gordon thrills of the movies. Many fans consider the videogame Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic to be the best Star Wars story since The Empire Strikes Back. And from 2003-2005, Genndy Tartakovsky's Clone Wars micro-series injected new dynamism into a franchise that had apparently lost all of its kinetic charm.
These books, graphic novels, video games, and cartoons show that Star Wars has infinite possibilities. But when it comes to live-action films (or even the upcoming live-action TV show), Lucas has made it clear it's his vision or nothing. Dale Pollock's biography Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas reveals Lucas even resented the psychologically-charged direction Irvin Kershner chose to take The Empire Strikes Back. (Check out this fascinating fan Q&A with Pollock in The Washington Post from 2005.)
It would be a final irony that the creator of the most popular sci-fi franchise in history would doom his own series to creative irrelevance by his unwillingness to field fresh perspectives for his live-action series. I say, let Pegg have his shot writing an episode of the new series. For that matter, open up the franchise to other writers and directors for reinvention.
What do you think, PopWatchers? Should Lucas field fresh ideas from other filmmakers for the future of Star Wars? And what directors would you choose? Or is Lucas so synonymous with Star Wars that asking somebody else to try their hand at it would be like asking someone other than J.K. Rowling to write a Harry Potter book?
Dave Coulier on Ex Alanis: "We're Good"
Robalini's Note: Mystery solved. Who would've guessed that "You Oughta Know" was about the dude in Full House who isn't John Stamos or Bob Saget?
http://www.usmagazine.com/dave-coulier-on-ex-alanis-morissette-were-good
Dave Coulier on Ex Alanis: "We're Good"
Thursday August 14, 2008
Comedian Dave Coulier says people oughta know there's no bad blood between him and ex Alanis Morrisette.
Can you believe these stars dated?
Coulier — best known as goofy Uncle Joey on ABC's Full House — is the inspiration behind Morrisette's 1995 angst-ridden anthem "You Oughta Know."
Lyrics include: "And I'm here to remind you / Of the mess you left when you went away / It's not fair to deny me / Of the cross I bear that you gave to me."
He says he was driving when he first heard the tune.
"I said, 'Wow, this girl is angry.' And then I said, 'Oh man, I think it's Alanis,'" Coulier tells the Calgary Herald. "I listened to the song over and over again, and I said, 'I think I have really hurt this person.'"
Inundated with press calls, he says he tried to get a hold of her — and eventually got through.
"I said, 'Hi. Uh, what do you want me to say?'" he recalls. "And she said, 'You can say whatever you want.'"
Eventually, he says, "we saw each other and hung out for an entire day. And it was beautiful. It was one of those things where it was kind of like, 'We're good.'"
Morissette and her on-and-off fiance Ryan Reynolds officially split in 2007.
http://www.usmagazine.com/dave-coulier-on-ex-alanis-morissette-were-good
Dave Coulier on Ex Alanis: "We're Good"
Thursday August 14, 2008
Comedian Dave Coulier says people oughta know there's no bad blood between him and ex Alanis Morrisette.
Can you believe these stars dated?
Coulier — best known as goofy Uncle Joey on ABC's Full House — is the inspiration behind Morrisette's 1995 angst-ridden anthem "You Oughta Know."
Lyrics include: "And I'm here to remind you / Of the mess you left when you went away / It's not fair to deny me / Of the cross I bear that you gave to me."
He says he was driving when he first heard the tune.
"I said, 'Wow, this girl is angry.' And then I said, 'Oh man, I think it's Alanis,'" Coulier tells the Calgary Herald. "I listened to the song over and over again, and I said, 'I think I have really hurt this person.'"
Inundated with press calls, he says he tried to get a hold of her — and eventually got through.
"I said, 'Hi. Uh, what do you want me to say?'" he recalls. "And she said, 'You can say whatever you want.'"
Eventually, he says, "we saw each other and hung out for an entire day. And it was beautiful. It was one of those things where it was kind of like, 'We're good.'"
Morissette and her on-and-off fiance Ryan Reynolds officially split in 2007.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Branches Out
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/14/arts/music/14hall.html
August 14, 2008
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Branches Out to New York
By BEN SISARIO
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is coming to New York City.
On a blocked-off street in SoHo on Wednesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood with Billy Joel, the veteran music executive Clive Davis and officials from the hall, to announce that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened its flagship building in Cleveland in 1995, would open a New York annex in November.
“This is where Ed Sullivan met the Beatles, where Lou Reed took a walk on the wild side,” the mayor said.
Artifacts that will be on view at the annex flanked the mayor’s podium. On either side were guitars owned by Johnny Ramone and Eric Clapton, behind them was a phone booth from CBGB, and a few feet away stood Bruce Springsteen’s first car, a banana-yellow 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible.
The 25,000-square-foot annex, at 76 Mercer Street, will be the museum’s first expansion outside Cleveland and will include exhibitions on Hall of Fame inductees and on the history of rock in New York. It will also house temporary and traveling exhibitions from the Cleveland headquarters, museum officials said.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation was founded in 1983 by a group of music industry executives, and since 1986 most annual induction ceremonies have been at the Waldorf-Astoria, but the museum has never had a physical presence in New York.
About half a million people visit the Cleveland building each year, the museum said. Its president, Terry Stewart, said the annex was part of a strategy to increase its visibility over all and drive tourist traffic to Cleveland.
“The ability to establish these outposts in other cities,” Mr. Stewart said, “allows us to join the ranks of other famous not-for-profit institutions and museums like New York’s Guggenheim, the U.K.’s Tate and the Louvre out of Paris.”
The speakers celebrated New York’s contributions to rock history, reminiscing about concerts in historic clubs and theaters, many of them — like CBGB, the Bottom Line and Max’s Kansas City — no longer in existence.
Mr. Joel, who last month played the final two concerts at Shea Stadium, said that he had planned to donate the Mets jersey he had been given at those concerts but “that jersey is in a road case on its way to Hong Kong.” Instead, he brought a baseball bat given to him by David Wright of the Mets and a plaque celebrating Mr. Joel’s 12 sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden in 2006.
“New York gave me my words and my music,” Mr. Joel said, “and rock ’n’ roll gave me a place for that music to live.”
August 14, 2008
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Branches Out to New York
By BEN SISARIO
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is coming to New York City.
On a blocked-off street in SoHo on Wednesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg stood with Billy Joel, the veteran music executive Clive Davis and officials from the hall, to announce that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, which opened its flagship building in Cleveland in 1995, would open a New York annex in November.
“This is where Ed Sullivan met the Beatles, where Lou Reed took a walk on the wild side,” the mayor said.
Artifacts that will be on view at the annex flanked the mayor’s podium. On either side were guitars owned by Johnny Ramone and Eric Clapton, behind them was a phone booth from CBGB, and a few feet away stood Bruce Springsteen’s first car, a banana-yellow 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible.
The 25,000-square-foot annex, at 76 Mercer Street, will be the museum’s first expansion outside Cleveland and will include exhibitions on Hall of Fame inductees and on the history of rock in New York. It will also house temporary and traveling exhibitions from the Cleveland headquarters, museum officials said.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation was founded in 1983 by a group of music industry executives, and since 1986 most annual induction ceremonies have been at the Waldorf-Astoria, but the museum has never had a physical presence in New York.
About half a million people visit the Cleveland building each year, the museum said. Its president, Terry Stewart, said the annex was part of a strategy to increase its visibility over all and drive tourist traffic to Cleveland.
“The ability to establish these outposts in other cities,” Mr. Stewart said, “allows us to join the ranks of other famous not-for-profit institutions and museums like New York’s Guggenheim, the U.K.’s Tate and the Louvre out of Paris.”
The speakers celebrated New York’s contributions to rock history, reminiscing about concerts in historic clubs and theaters, many of them — like CBGB, the Bottom Line and Max’s Kansas City — no longer in existence.
Mr. Joel, who last month played the final two concerts at Shea Stadium, said that he had planned to donate the Mets jersey he had been given at those concerts but “that jersey is in a road case on its way to Hong Kong.” Instead, he brought a baseball bat given to him by David Wright of the Mets and a plaque celebrating Mr. Joel’s 12 sold-out nights at Madison Square Garden in 2006.
“New York gave me my words and my music,” Mr. Joel said, “and rock ’n’ roll gave me a place for that music to live.”
'Tropic Thunder': Say What?
http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1592689/story.jhtmlAug 13 2008
'Tropic Thunder': Say What?
By Kurt Loder
Robert Downey Jr. kills in an overdue PC nightmare.
"Tropic Thunder" is a cruel movie. Just when you think it's squeezed every last gasping belly laugh out of you, here comes another barrage of scathing hilarity. The picture is, among several other things, a bunker-buster assault on political correctness, and howls of unhappiness are already being heard from the usual PC precincts. But then how often can that be helped?
It's a movie about the making of a movie — a blockbuster war epic set in Vietnam in 1969. This film within the film, which is also called "Tropic Thunder," is a traditional tale of bloody heroism and great big explosions, with a motley cast of head-case actors. Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) is a fading action star desperate for a comeback after an ill-advised bid for Oscar credibility — a movie called "Simple Jack," about a, uh, developmentally challenged guy who can talk to animals — left him a laughingstock. Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is a blond, blue-eyed Aussie whose pompous commitment to his craft ("I don't read the script; the script reads me") has driven him to undergo skin-pigment alteration in order to play a black Army sergeant in the film. Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is the drug-gobbling star of a lucrative series of dimwit pictures devoted to a family of fat, flatulent buffoons. And Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) is a rapper-turned-actor who also rakes in millions with his hip-hop energy drink, Booty Sweat. The fifth member of this odd squad, a kid named Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), busies himself trying to make sense of what the other four nutcakes are doing, with only intermittent success.
The movie's movie is being shot on location in Southeast Asia, and it's a disaster from the outset — the production is already a month behind schedule after just five days of shooting. Combat consultant Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte), the crusty vet upon whose battle memoir the picture is based, convinces the in-over-his-head director, Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), that the only way to salvage the picture is to chopper the pampered actors out into the middle of the jungle, drop them there and shoot the action guerilla-style, to "get some real fear in their eyes." When a gang of actual guerrillas — not the Viet Cong of the movie's long-ago war, but hopped-up thugs guarding a jungle heroin factory — start shooting at these interlopers, the actors, armed only with SAG cards and blanks, find themselves called upon to fight back for real.
"Tropic Thunder" is so savagely and unremittingly hilarious that one hesitates to give any of it away. However, it has to be said that Downey delivers the most fearless and astonishing performance of his current career renaissance. It's been amusing to watch various media outlets attempt to whip up some kind of "blackface" controversy over Downey's performance, when it's nothing of the sort. He's playing an actor with the deluded conviction that he can not only portray a black man, but also bare a black man's soul. There's not a hint of minstrelsy in Downey's performance; it's a marvel of satirical precision directed at a specific variety of Hollywood cultural arrogance. And it's more than that, too. The scene in which the derisive Alpa Chino nails Lazarus' recitation of black-uplift homilies as nothing more than the lyrics to the "Jeffersons" theme is funny; but the one in which Lazarus quietly explains to Speedman that his "Simple Jack" character failed because he made the mistake of going "full retard" — rather than softening his character with cuteness in the manner of "Forrest Gump" — is so on-the-nose accurate, it takes your breath away. (Film scholar and critic Dave Kehr has pointed out that Downey's black GI seems to be modeled on the one played by blaxploitation icon Fred Williamson in "The Inglorious Bastards," the 1978 Italian movie that's currently on the verge of being remade by Quentin Tarantino.)
"Tropic Thunder" brings out the comic best in a number of other actors, too, among them Matthew McConaughey as Speedman's oily agent, and the wonderfully cracked Danny McBride as Cody, the movie's explosives expert. (The extent of his expertise is a little worrisome: "I almost blinded Jamie Lee Curtis on 'Freaky Friday,' " he admits.)
But the movie's most uproarious performance — as all but the most oblivious infants must know by now — is provided by Tom Cruise, playing a fantastically vile and abusive producer named Les Grossman. Buried under layers of latex and padding, Cruise is almost unrecognizable, and this anonymity seems to have liberated him — he dives into the character's bellowing, obscene tirades with ferocious abandon. It's a performance unlike any he's given before, and you can almost see the screen smoking after each of his foul harangues.
"Tropic Thunder" is both a parody of a big-budget action movie (Willem Dafoe's Christ-on-the-cross death spasm in "Platoon" is referenced not once, but twice) and a real one, too. So its sometimes gritty visual texture bears no relation to the tidy slickness of most contemporary comedies. (John Toll, the cinematographer, also shot "Wanted" and "The Last Samurai.") But the picture's satirical brilliance is on another level of accomplishment. Ben Stiller, who directed the film, cooked up the story with Justin Theroux, and then brought in Etan Cohen to help them write the script. That they have pulled no punches in lampooning Hollywood's self-congratulatory treatment of race and disability — not to mention gay monks, wispy mysticism and celebrity adoptions of exotically tinged foreign babies — is a wonder.
The movie is also a welcome affront to the sort of humorless PC scolds who mobilized for the movie's L.A. premiere on Tuesday — in numbers estimated by Entertainment Weekly to be "a few dozen." Maybe the tide of whiny complaint is turning. Have any of these people noticed yet that the only child in the movie is a chain-smoking, gun-wielding heroin kingpin? Or is a protest poster already at the printer's? Considering the business this picture's going to do, good luck.