Yale & Geronimo's Skull

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/02/17/geronimos-great-grandson-asks-yale-fraternity-return-ancestors-skull/

Geronimo's Great Grandson Asks Yale Secret Society to Return Ancestor's Skull
The great grandson of Geronimo says he wants to know whether Skull and Bones secret society at Yale University has the remains of the famous Apache chief and shaman.
By Stephen Clark
FOXNews.com
Tuesday, February 17, 2009

It's the stuff of legends: an elite secret society that includes what would become some of the most powerful men of the 20th century allegedly invading the grave of an Apache chief to steal his skull for fraternal rituals. It's also the stuff of a new lawsuit filed Tuesday by descendents of that Apache chief.

On the 100th anniversary of the death of Geronimo, 20 of his blood relatives have asked the courts to force Yale University and the school's secret organization, Skull and Bones, to release his remains for return to his native land and a proper burial.

The lawsuit also names President Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Army Secretary Pete Geren as defendants because they are responsible for maintaining Geronimo's remains on a U.S. Army base in Oklahoma, the group said.

"I believe it's a good cause because indigenous people over the century have been annihilated, removed from their homeland," said Geronimo's great grandson, Harlyn Geronimo, at a press conference in Washington, D.C.

Skull and Bones has never said whether any of Geronimo's remains are in its possession. The descendants say they are investigating long-held claims that in 1918, members of Skull and Bones, including Prescott Bush, the father of George H.W Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush, invaded Geronimo's grave at Ft. Sill and stole his skull, some bones and other items buried with him.

"In this lawsuit, we're going to find out if the bones are there or not," said the group's lawyer, said the group's lawyer, Ramsey Clark, who was attorney general in President Lyndon Johnson's administration.

Gila Reinstein, a spokeswoman for Yale University, said she is unaware of the lawsuit, but Yale can add nothing to the mystery of the Indian chief's whereabouts.

"To the best of my knowledge, Yale University has no relics or bones belonging to Geronimo," she said, adding that she couldn't speak on behalf of Skull and Bones because it is independent of the university.

Geronimo fought for decades against Mexican and American expansion into tribal lands. He and his small band of Apaches surrendered to U.S. troops in 1886 and were sent to Florida as prisoners of war before being transferred to Alabama.

Five years later, he was sent to Ft. Sill, where he lived the rest of his life as a free-range prisoner. Geronimo became a celebrity in the twilight of his life, appearing at fairs and selling souvenirs and photographs of himself. He died of pneumonia in 1909 at Ft. Sill and was buried at the Apache Indian Prisoner of War Cemetery on the military base.

Three members of the Skull and Bones, including Prescott Bush, served as Army volunteers at Fort Sill during World War I. They are accused of stealing the items which supposedly are used in initiation ceremonies. One alleged ritual includes kissing Geronimo's skull.

Geronimo said he's bringing the lawsuit now after contemplating it over the past decade because he has the time to do it after retiring from a tribal council in 2000. Clark added that at the 100th anniversary of the shaman's death, "We really thought it would be a good time to say enough is enough."

Geronimo said he has appealed to former President Bush for help in returning the remains.

"According to our traditions the remains of this sort, especially in this state when the grave was desecrated, need to be reburied with the proper rituals to return the dignity and let his spirits rest in peace."

Asked why he didn't appeal to Obama first, Geronimo said he thought Obama may be too busy to heed his request.

W

http://wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/bush-o22.shtml

W: A crude approach is not good for grasping much of anything
By David Walsh
22 October 2008

Directed by Oliver Stone, screenplay by Stanley Weiser

W. is veteran American director Oliver Stone's film about the life and career of President George W. Bush. It was shot and edited rapidly for release while Bush was still in office. The November 4 election was no doubt a consideration as well.

The film is a collection of episodes, broadly written and performed, following Bush from his student days at Yale to the disastrous turn that the Iraq war took for the US in 2003-2004. W. contains two time frames—the first treats Bush's earlier life impressionistically, offering glimpses of him over the course of several decades; the second, dealing with his first years in the White House, dwells at greater length on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

The pivot of the film occurs in 1986, around the time of his 40th birthday, when Bush "sees the light" and becomes a reborn Christian. The film takes seriously the notion that he conquered his inner demons and made something of himself.

A theme throughout is Bush's conflict and rivalry with his father, George H. W. Bush, congressman, CIA director, vice president and, ultimately, president from 1989 to 1993. We first see the youthful Bush (Josh Brolin), 20 or so, when he's being hazed at a Yale University fraternity house. Later, Bush phones his father (James Cromwell)—now a congressman—from jail, and receives a warning that this had better be the last such incident.

Intercut with that material are scenes of the Bush White House, and in particular, the debate over a prospective war with Iraq following the events of September 2001. Vice President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris) are the most ardent advocates of an invasion, countering the skepticism and reluctance of Secretary of State Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright).

The young Bush carries on, from one escapade to another, eventually meeting his future wife, Laura (Elizabeth Banks), in 1977. Defeated in a run for Congress by a populist Democrat, Bush promises "never to be out-Texased again." In 1986, he moves to Washington, and experiences his conversion. A huckster evangelist, Earle Hudd (Stacy Keach), presides over Bush's change of heart.

Switching once again to the more recent past, Stone's film presents Cheney delivering a lecture on Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves, pointing to the region and the Straits of Hormuz in particular as the "chokepoint of civilization."

The film cuts back in time again, and we see Bush senior presiding over the Gulf War in 1991, making the decision, with which his son disagrees, not to march on Baghdad. George W. announces his plan to run for governor of Texas in 1994, much to his family's consternation.

In 1999, he tells his preacher-advisor, "God wants me to run for president." We jump to 2003 and the fraudulent claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the Hussein regime's efforts to get hold of "yellow cake" uranium ore from Niger. Finally, the invasion occurs and Bush announces "mission accomplished" in May. The fiasco then unfolds.

Oliver Stone has never been a subtle director. He perceives himself, it seems, as someone who strives to treat a given subject in broad strokes. Stone told an interviewer from GQ magazine that, like George W. Bush, he has the tendency not to want "to pay too much attention to details."

The director possesses a lively vulgarity, which he applies to glaringly public and intimate moments alike. Occasionally, this is effective and attractive; here, more often than not, however, it is not.

The references to Bush's fascination with baseball and his aspiration to become the professional sport's commissioner seem about right. He and the world might have been happier. A final scene, in which now-President Bush is unable to answer a simple question from a reporter, as to whether he had made any mistakes or done any soul-searching, is telling. These moments are exceptions.

Malice doesn't seem the clue to the problems in W. so much as great confusion, and ignorance of American social realities.

It is a fallacy to imagine that a crude approach can adequately grasp a crude subject. In general, a crude approach is not good for grasping much of anything. Because Bush is an extremely limited human being doesn't mean that his life and advancement are not bound up with complex questions, or even that his own psychology is an open book. Stone, unhappily, seems most at home with moments of drunkenness, backwardness, unconsciousness. He revels in and savors them.

Stone's and screenwriter Stanley Weiser's Bush is an eternal frat boy, living in the shadow of his father. He's essentially well-intentioned, if unevolved, amiable, but prone to angry outbursts, impulsive. Brolin does an effective impersonation of the public Bush, but it's not clear that we are much further in the direction of understanding the man who would become America's 43rd president.

The film catches largely at externals, in its look, feel and social perceptions. As always, a good deal of effort has gone into making certain that hairdos, clothes, automobiles and furniture correspond to the respective eras.

To explain Bush's trajectory, as W. does, largely on the basis of his unresolved conflict with his father begs the question. Many people have such battles, many, alas, also "find Jesus" at present, many leave off drinking—very, very few are elevated to the White House.

It's true that W. makes obligatory reference to other questions: the pursuit of Iraq's oil reserves, for example. In relation, however, to the significance of that issue and its consequences—1 million or more Iraqis killed, thousands of Americans dead and wounded, a country ruined, a region driven to the brink of a wider war—the scene is relatively perfunctory and formulaic. Cheney is filmed from a distance, and the moment is not likely to linger in the memory.

This isn't what Stone feels most deeply or what interests him, in the end. What's placed in the foreground, in almost perpetual, warts-and-all close-up, are Bush the younger's relations with his father and family. The sequences in the White House, the discussions of war and torture, are fairly flat and unevocative. The film gets its adrenaline pumping almost exclusively during the intra-family squabbles.

Neither element is entirely convincing, because a deeper grasp of the relation between Bush's personality, his family and the larger world of American politics social life eludes the director and screenwriter.

Stone framed his film to an interviewer from the Guardian in the following manner: "How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?" He continued: "He had tremendous personal problems, and I have to give him enormous credit—he did overcome them, through willpower. Whether he solved them is another issue, but he overcame certain states of mind."

This, to put it politely, is inadequate. To put its shallowness in context, one must consider Stone's background.

Born to privilege in a staunchly Republican family, and a fellow student of Bush's at Yale in the 1960s, Stone enlisted in the military and volunteered for combat in Vietnam. The experience shattered and changed him. To his credit, he translated that into two films hostile to US imperialism's intervention in Southeast Asia, Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).

Vietnam and related events knocked Goldwater Republicanism out of Stone and propelled him toward the "counter-culture" and various strands of protest and liberalism, and hedonism, but it did not equip him with a coherent and profound understanding of American class society. This is not entirely his fault. The intellectual laziness and evasiveness of the New Left and the anti-war protest movement could not have provided such an insight, nor did they have any desire to.

Stone is something of a lost soul, alienated from his social and ideological roots, but never finding his way to a more substantial and politically informed opposition to American capitalism. He is congenitally all over the place; indeed, one might say, that is his life's vocation.

His comments about W. wander here and there, and few of them indicate any grasp of the questions involved in the effort to bring Bush's life accurately and meaningfully to the screen.

"It's not a political film," Stone told Maxim magazine, "but a Shakespearean one. It's a film about George W. rebelling against his father, doing better than his father, believing that he's stronger than his father, and outdoing his father...and it's about the colossal mistakes he made and the lies he told. In a way it's Oedipal. One can say he did kill the father because he did destroy the legacy, the name. It's a big thing with the Bushes."

In passing, the same interviewer can note that Stone "has little sympathy for Bush, who he says is responsible for tens of thousands of needless deaths abroad and the corrosion of civil liberties at home and the fortune of future generations squandered." The director, however, tells the interviewer from GQ that the film is "light," prompting the question, "Wait, are you saying this movie is a comedy?," to which Stone replies: "Well, it has to be done with an ebullience and a certain fun, because the guy is goofy. He's a goofball!"

The inconsistency and unseriousness are not Stone's alone, they are shared by a wide layer of pragmatic middle class iconoclasts and critics in the US, who lament this or that feature of American life, even warn histrionically about incipient "fascism," and then go about their daily business complacent as clams.

That George W. Bush is an empty vessel would not be disputed by many thinking people. But how, the filmmakers might have asked themselves, is it possible that American capitalism placed its fortunes in the hands of such a lowlife?

No serious reference is made to the ultra-right forces that pushed Bush forward, the same forces responsible for the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment drive. Stone, in a peculiar manner, takes the Bush "success story" at face value. No doubt Bush junior had his conscious or semiconscious motives, but what driving forces, as Marxists know to ask, stood behind those motives and by what social elements was he picked up?

A more plausible explanation than the time-worn Oedipal story is that Bush was merely a front man for more conscious and politically motivated forces, with a wide-ranging and reactionary agenda at home and abroad. Painted as amiable and down-to-earth by the media, partial to vague "values," supposedly conservative but "compassionate," with a well-known family name, Bush was directed toward the White House; he had relatively little to do with the matter. No doubt, if he had not stopped drinking and carousing, the opportunity would have been closed to him, but that is about the most one can say of his "overcoming" his "personal problems."

The deterioration in the political representatives of the ruling elite is a function, in the final analysis, of the decline in its fortunes and prospects. George W. Bush's ascension to prominence speaks to the terminal crisis of American capitalism. Now a cosmetic change may be necessary, but Bush was no accident: he represented accurately the dominant section of the US establishment—arrogant, shortsighted and criminal to the core.

Some of those same forces, chastened by the experience, are now endorsing Sen. Barack Obama in an effort to compensate for their sin.

Stone and Weiser sacrifice art and truth to narrow political concerns. Scandalously, they make no mention of Bush's presiding over 153 executions as governor of Texas, in one case mocking a woman's pleas for mercy. The deep sadism of the man is missing. Nor is the hijacking of the 2000 election treated. In both cases, no doubt scenarist and director sought to avoid "partisan" and "controversial" issues, which would have brought the right-wing media down on their heads. As a result of Stone's ideological blindness or, not to mince words, political cowardice, the full picture of the man and his period is not here.

Along the same lines, Stone portrays Bush the elder as a stern and honorable figure, when, in fact, he was (and is) a corrupt, greedy representative of the ruling elite, and as CIA director, up to his elbows in blood. The filmmakers also, in passing, canonize Colin Powell as a voice of moderation, entirely undeservedly. The chief diplomatic liar for the Bush administration and a war criminal in his own right, Powell developed public differences only after he saw that the Iraq war was going badly.

All in all, Stone and Weiser have no historical or sociological purchase on Bush. Such an understanding wouldn't preclude individual psychology; on the contrary, it would create the context in which those private relations would take on real, full-bodied life. That opportunity was not taken.

Buckley, longtime propagandist for US ultra-right

http://wsws.org/articles/2008/mar2008/buck-m05.shtml

William F. Buckley, longtime propagandist for US ultra-right, dies at 82
By Patrick Martin
5 March 2008

The death of William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review magazine and long-time media publicist for the American political right, has prompted an outpouring of tributes and praise in the American press, out of all proportion to the significance and stature of its subject.

The encomiums for Buckley from the likes of William Kristol, David Brooks and George Will are predictable, but they seem unaware that in proclaiming Buckley their political mentor and forerunner, they demonstrate their own intellectual and political poverty.

If one examines Buckley’s biography dispassionately, it is clear that he was a talented promoter of noxious, reactionary and anti-democratic ideas. He took the initiative to refurbish American conservatism in the early 1950s, at a time when the political right had been completely discredited by its ties to Nazism, fascism and the Great Depression.

For some 30 years, from the founding of National Review in 1955 to the rise of right-wing talk radio in the 1980s, Buckley was the most prominent advocate for what would become the dominant position within the American ruling class: opposition to any government effort to alleviate social distress; hostility to popular movements of the oppressed, whether in the United States or internationally; and a repudiation of the compromises made on both these fronts by the New Deal of the 1930s.

Buckley was put in a position to play this role because of his family’s wealth and connections. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was a wealthy oilman with holdings in Mexico and Venezuela, who reportedly played a role in financing the Cristero rebellion in Mexico—a right-wing, Catholic Church-inspired revolt in reaction to the Mexican Revolution of 1911-1919.

These two themes—conservative Catholicism and hostility to social revolution—became the axis of Buckley’s political life. After graduation from Yale in 1950, he enlisted in the Central Intelligence Agency, working as an undercover agent in Mexico reporting on left-wing student groups. His supervisor was E. Howard Hunt, then CIA station chief in Mexico City, later one of the organizers of the Watergate burglary that brought down the Nixon administration.

Buckley decided against a CIA career after his first book, God and Man at Yale, a memoir attacking the liberal proclivities of the university faculty, found a wide reception in right-wing circles and became a best-seller. He and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, published a 1954 polemic, McCarthy and His Enemies, which declared, “As long as McCarthyism fixes its goals with its present precision, it is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”

In 1955, Buckley launched National Review, a magazine bankrolled by his own money and that of other wealthy supporters, and enlisting such figures as the ex-Stalinist Whittaker Chambers and the ex-Trotskyist Professor James Burnham.

The standpoint adopted by the magazine, as the founder declared it, was “to stand athwart history, yelling, ‘Stop!’” By this he meant not only opposition to then-dominant American liberalism, and to the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, but hostility to the growth of progressive and revolutionary movements throughout the world.

Buckley packaged his ferocious anti-communism as the defense of the “free world” against totalitarian rule in Russia and China, making full use of the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy to discredit socialism. But his outlook was rooted in a class opposition to all genuine struggles for freedom and democratic rights on the part of the oppressed workers and peasants in the capitalist countries.

Thus, Buckley was an adamant opponent of the civil rights struggles in the American South, declaring, in a National Review editorial in 1957:

“The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Answering the charge that the Southern segregationists were defying the will of the majority of the American people, expressed in civil rights laws, executive orders by elected presidents, and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Buckley argued in favor of resistance:

“National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence” (This whole passage was cited by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in his recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal).

This apologia for violence against demands for the abolition of Jim Crow came at the opening of an increasingly bloody decade that included the beating of Freedom Riders, the murders of Medgar Evers, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, Viola Liuzzo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and dozens of others. Buckley’s only concession to criticism of this defense of racial oppression was to suggest that uneducated whites as well as blacks could be denied the vote.

Despite—or perhaps because of—this identification with the last-ditch defenders of Southern segregation, Buckley enjoyed increasing prominence as the media spokesman for the American right, beginning a syndicated newspaper column, “On the Right,” in 1962, and a weekly television interview program, “Firing Line,” in 1966, which ran for 33 years. He enthusiastically backed the campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater, who won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 only to lose in a landslide to Democrat Lyndon Johnson.

To preserve his role as the “respectable” right-wing alternative in official political circles, Buckley was careful to distance himself from the more deranged segments of the ultra-right. National Review conducted a public campaign against the John Birch Society, whose founder accused President Eisenhower, General George Marshall, and other pillars of the US political establishment of being conscious agents of a world communist conspiracy.

Buckley also insisted, at least in public, on a break with anti-Semitism, which discredited the ultra-right in the wake of the Holocaust. He was not so careful about fascism, at least in its less populist form as espoused in Spain by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, whom Buckley repeatedly championed.

“General Franco is an authentic national hero,” he wrote in a “Letter from Spain,” published in his magazine, and widely quoted in press obituaries last week. “It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain’s historical identity.”

Buckley defended other right-wing dictators whose regimes were aligned with US foreign policy, including Augusto Pinochet of Chile. He criticized the 1998 effort to bring criminal charges against Pinochet in Spain as “an act of ideological malice” and praised the military dictator for ousting Salvador Allende, “a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Buckley served more as a right-wing gadfly than an actual influencer of policy. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, winning 13 percent of the vote as the Conservative Party candidate. He participated in frequent debates with liberals on college campuses and was a diehard defender of the Vietnam War. In one notorious live appearance on ABC television during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he was paired with liberal author Gore Vidal, whose verbal sallies so infuriated Buckley that he threatened violence, shouting, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.”

Only the swing to the right in the American ruling elite, from the mid-1970s on, brought Buckley from the fringes of official politics into its center. Ronald Reagan was an admirer of Buckley and longtime reader of National Review, and with the Reagan administration, a whole layer of right-wing advocates trained in the Buckley school entered political office and rose to top positions in the media as well.

Buckley was not, however, entirely in step with some elements of the “Reagan coalition,” including the Christian fundamentalists who were, in many cases, virulently anti-Catholic, and the neo-conservatives, many of them Jews and former liberals who had supported the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

His orientation was always towards the worldwide struggle against social revolution, which he identified with the Soviet Union, and after the collapse of the USSR he evinced less interest in a militaristic foreign policy and more sympathy for the isolationism once traditional in the American right. He expressed regret that the conservative coalition was no longer held together by “the galvanizing thread that the Soviet Union provided. And for that reason I think conservatism has become a little bit slothful. It could be very decisive when the alternative was the apocalyptic reordering presented by the Soviet Union.”

Buckley eventually disavowed the longstanding blockade of Cuba after the collapse of Castro’s Soviet sponsor, on the grounds that the island nation no longer represented a security threat to the United States. He showed little enthusiasm for the Bush administration’s invasion and conquest of Iraq, observing that the “insurrectionists in Iraq can’t be defeated by any means that we would consent to use.”

The tributes from the right-wing pundits give a glimpse of the social milieu which produced Buckley and which remained a powerful source of attraction for corrupt elements of the aspiring middle class. David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, gushes: “To enter Buckley’s world was to enter the world of yachts, limousines, finger bowls at dinner, celebrities like David Niven and tales of skiing at Gstaad ... He showered affection on his friends, and he had an endless stream of them, old and young. He took me sailing, invited me to concerts and included me at dinners with the great and the good.”

Apparently there were limits to this affection, however. According to Timothy Noah, columnist for the online magazine Slate, “Christian piety and anti-communism were Buckley’s twin pillars, the former to such an extent that Buckley ruled out David Brooks, his onetime protégé, as a possible editor of National Review on the grounds that Brooks was Jewish. Buckley wasn’t willing to sacrifice National Review's identity as a publication whose mission was at least partly theological.”

The depth of Buckley’s embrace of reaction is summed up in another widely quoted remark in which he defined his conservative political philosophy as “tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us.” It would be difficult to find a pithier summation of the obscurantism and hostility to the development of science, technology and human culture which characterize the right-wing world view.

Obama's Plan To Privatize Social Security

http://rense.com/general80/d2es.htm

Obama's Plan To Privatize Social Security
Jeffrey Liebman Of Harvard, Top Economics Advisor To Obama, Wants To Privatize Social Security - Just Like The Sinister Bush Plan Americans Resoundingly Rejected In 2005. Benefits Cuts And Higher Payroll Taxes Are Also On Obama's Agenda.
By Webster Tarpley
2-6-8

Liebman has supported partial PRIVATIZATION of the government-run retirement system, an idea that is rejected by many Democrats and bears a similarity to a proposal for so-called "personal investment accounts" that Bush promoted in 2005.

"Liebman has been open to private accounts," said Michael Tanner, a Social Security expert at the Cato Institute in Washington, a think tank in Washington that advocates "free markets" and often backs Republicans.

The Liebman-MacGuineas-Samwick plan to loot Social Security also promises raising regressive payroll taxes, cutting benefits, or a combination of both.

OBAMA'S DOUBLE TALK ON SOCIAL SECURITY: "Everything should be on the table." (May 2007) This leaves the door wide open to Liebman's privatization plan.

WARN OLDER PEOPLE AND RETIREES THAT OBAMA AND HIS CLIQUE OF WEALTHY ELITIST BACKERS WANT TO TAKE THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY PENSIONS AWAY

* OBAMA ECONOMIC ADVISER DAVID CUTLER ARGUES THAT HIGH HEALTH CARE COSTS ARE ECONOMICALLY DESIRABLE
Another Obama adviser who targets health care is David Cutler, a Harvard economist. Cutler wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine in 2006 asserting that "The rising cost ... of health care has been the source of a lot of saber rattling in the media and the public square, without anyone seriously analyzing the benefits gained."

Cutler advocates improving healthcare through financial incentives, meaning that he wants to increase cash flow into the hands of rapacious pharmaceutical and insurance companies.

* OBAMA'S TOP ECONOMICS GURU: AUSTAN "THE GHOUL" GOOLSBEE ­ SKULL AND BONES ALUM, FRIEDMANITE CHICAGO BOY, FANATICAL FREE TRADE GLOBALIZER

Barack Obama's top economics adviser is a member of the super-secret Skull & Bones society of Yale University (Class of 1991), of which George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and failed elitist John Kerry are also members. Goolsbee is widely reported to have told Obama not to back a compulsory freeze on home mortgage foreclosures to help the struggling middle class in the current depression crisis, as demanded by former candidate John Edwards. Hillary Clinton has advocated a one-year voluntary freeze on foreclosures. Obama has offered counselors to comfort mortgage victims as they are dispossessed, citing the "moral hazard" of protecting the public interest from Wall Street sharks.

George Will, in an October 2007 Washington Post column saluted Goolsbee's "nuanced understanding" of traditional Democratic issues like globalization and income inequality; he "seems to be the sort of fellow -- amiable, empirical, and reasonable--you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be," wrote the arch-oligarchical apologist Will.

Austan Goolsbee (Obama's likely Secretary of the Treasury): "I'm a University of Chicago economist and no one is ever going to be more in favor of open markets and free trade than an economist, so you would presume I'd be for anything that has the words 'free trade agreement' in it and all I'll tell you is this: I do believe there's no one more in favor of open markets than me . . ."

As one reactionary Yale alum gushed: ". . .voters who usually lean Republican should take a second look at Obama ... Although some of his centrist economic prescriptions may disenchant liberals who distrust the benefits of globalization, Goolsbee said economic data indicate that free trade leads to higher wages."Goolsbee is almost certainly the unnamed advisor Paul Krugman refers to when he scores Obama's stimulus plan as "disreputable". Goolsbee is a bitter opponent of a single-payer system, and has attacked Michael Moore's movie Sicko on this issue.

Krugman: "The Obama campaign's initial response to the latest wave of bad economic news was, I'm sorry to say, disreputable: Mr. Obama's top economic adviser claimed that the long-term tax-cut plan the candidate announced months ago is just what we need to keep the slump from "morphing into a drastic decline in consumer spending." Hmm: claiming that the candidate is all-seeing, and that a tax cut originally proposed for other reasons is also a recession-fighting measure - doesn't that sound familiar?...Mr. Obama came out with a real stimulus plan. As was the case with his health care plan, which fell short of universal coverage, his stimulus proposal is similar to those of the other Democratic candidates, but tilted to the right. " (NYT, Jan. 14, 2008)

DON'T BE FOOLED BY OBAMA'S SOARING RHETORIC ­ CHECK OUT HIS RIGHT-WING ADVISORS

Yankee Doodle May Be Saved

http://hamburgeramerica.blogspot.com/2008/02/yankee-doodle-may-be-saved.html

Saturday, February 2, 2008
Yankee Doodle May Be Saved

Wow what a difference a few days has made. The Yankee Doodle has been closed for only 4 days and owner Rick Beckwith has received an offer from Yale University for a new space, and a Facebook group started by Yale students and grads already has over 2,600 members. I appealed to Rick myself asking him to consider reopening (because my book is coming out in April and The Doodle is in the book). He promptly returned my email saying: "Because of the massive movement to save The Doodle it just might happen." What's really incredible is that the dudes that spearheaded this movement are not just interested in finding Rick some cash, they have already discussed working up a new business plan (did you expect anything less from Yale alumni?). From the Facebook page SAVE THE DOODLE: "We are working on a comprehensive and reinvigorated business plan to ensure the long-term viability of The Doodle." Absolutely amazing. I am moved beyond words and proud to be a burger-eating American when I see this stuff in action.

A Coffee Shop Closes

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/nyregion/31doodle.html

January 31, 2008
New Haven Journal
A Coffee Shop Closes, and There’ll Be Sad Songs Down at Mory’s
By THOMAS KAPLAN
NEW HAVEN

On Monday evening, Rick Beckwith unlocked the door of the Yankee Doodle Coffee Shop, the hole-in-the-wall diner his family has owned for 58 years in the heart of the Yale campus here.

Asked by a few passers-by what he was doing there hours after he had closed for the day, he told them, “I’m just cleaning up.”

Indeed, he was tidying up, but not for the next customers. He was cleaning up for the next tenant.

On Tuesday morning, instead of firing up the grill, Mr. Beckwith taped a sign to the door of what is commonly known as the Doodle. “Today, January 29th,” it said, “the Doodle is closing its door for good.”

Run by three generations of Beckwiths, the Yale institution succumbed to the financial pressures of operating a restaurant in an increasingly gentrified college town.

When Lewis Beckwith Sr., Mr. Beckwith’s grandfather, opened the coffee shop in 1950 with 10 stools, he charged 50 cents for a breakfast of two eggs, juice, toast and coffee. Three years later, two more stools were added and, aside from the prices, that was about all that changed until now.

Over time, the coffee shop became a favorite place for a fast burger or cholesterol-laden pigs-in-a-blanket. According to campus lore, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were regulars when they attended Yale, and the actor Henry Winkler ate there almost exclusively when he studied at the Yale School of Drama.

But until somewhat recently, there were only a handful of places to eat in this part of the city. Now, there are more than a dozen, and the Broadway area has morphed into a stylish shopping district, as Yale recruits new tenants to attract a more affluent crowd to the properties it owns.

“The best thing to do was, when the time was right, to just close the door,” Mr. Beckwith, 44, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “I really didn’t want to do it — it was a very, very difficult decision to make.”

So the latest Beckwith at the Doodle’s grill worked until 3 a.m. on Tuesday, “going down memory lane within my mind,” as he put it.

He was not the only one with fond memories of the place.

“All the Yale grads that have come and gone over the years — I don’t know what they’re going to do when they come back for their reunions and the Doodle is not here,” said Sam Kroop, 75, a New Haven resident who first ate at the Doodle soon after it opened. “It’s going to be kind of a shock for them.”

The news of the Doodle’s demise was the talk of this city of roughly 120,000 on Wednesday. Mr. Beckwith said he had been flooded with e-mail messages, hundreds of them, from loyal customers around the world. Many said they were stunned.

“There wasn’t any awareness that this was even a potential outcome,” said Harry Guinness, a senior at Yale. “Whether you’ve been there once or 100 times, it’s a very memorable place. For it to just suddenly disappear, it was just a big blow.”

Earlier this month, a friend of Mr. Beckwith, Philip C. McKee III, a 36-year-old artist and Yale graduate, did what he could to raise money for the Doodle by trying to persuade customers to endow a stool in return for a named plaque on the counter, but “they just couldn’t believe that the Doodle was actually in trouble,” he said.

Mr. McKee and others blamed the Doodle’s demise on “unreasonable” rent set by the landlord, Michael Iannuzzi Sr., who also owns a copy shop next door. Mr. Iannuzzi said on Wednesday that he did all he could to save the Doodle and had not raised the rent in recent years.

But the Doodle’s loyal patrons have no intention of losing their favorite burger joint without a fight.

Around the Yale campus, signs proclaimed, “Save the Doodle!” and outside the diner two flowers were propped against the entrance, as if marking the site of a tragic accident. On Facebook, the social networking Web site, hundreds of students, graduates and local residents expressed support for the shop and asked what could be done to save it, through fund-raising or other efforts.

Mr. Beckwith estimated that it would take at least a month to go through all the messages he had received before he could decide whether it might be feasible to reopen the Doodle in some form, in some location.

Several people have already offered to help out financially, he said.

“It’s one of the few dynastic successions that I had hoped would never end,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Oxford University and a Doodle regular when he was a student at Yale.

“Clearly the thing that belongs there now is the Yankee Doodle museum,” he added. “The exact store — just without the grill on.”

Channeling Bush’s Inner Sadist

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/analysis/227

Channeling Bush’s Inner Sadist: An Insight Into His Obsession with Torture
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 11/01/2007
A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

We were writing a review of a BuzzFlash premium of a collection of Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury" cartoons last weekend when we serendipitously came across this tidbit, posted in a 2004 Associated Press article (watch for the end of the excerpt):

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who has skewered politicians for decades in his comic strip "Doonesbury," tells Rolling Stone magazine he remembers Yale classmate George W. Bush as "just another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries."

Trudeau attended Yale University with Bush in the late 1960s and served with him on a dormitory social committee.

"Even then he had clearly awesome social skills," Trudeau said. "He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable ... He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation."

…. Trudeau said he penned his very first cartoon to illustrate an article in the Yale Daily News on Bush and allegations that his fraternity, DKE, had hazed incoming pledges by branding them with an iron.

The article in the campus paper prompted The New York Times to interview Bush, who was a senior that year. Trudeau recalled that Bush told the Times "it was just a coat hanger, and ... it didn’t hurt any more than a cigarette burn."

We now vaguely recall the article when it first came out, but at that point Bush’s torture obsession didn’t have the horrific longevity and toll that it has acquired by this point in 2007.

For a boy who allegedly shot BB guns at his brothers and did who knows what to small animals, Bush as recalled by Trudeau offers no small insight into what is clearly a sadistic (and as we have repeatedly said, sociopathic) individual.

Bush has continued to insist that his administration does not conduct torture by merely redefining what torture is, as distinct from how it is outlawed under International law and agreements. You can see how he accomplishes this "redefining" by his claim to The New York Times, while he was at Yale, that branding fraternity pledges was not cruel because "it didn’t hurt any more than a cigarette burn."

The Democrats have long treated the torture issue as though it were a public policy issue and not an outgrowth of a psychological deviancy on the part of Bush (along with the Cheney/Addington "we are accountable to no one" worldview).

As BuzzFlash has long argued, Bush is a model narcissistic sociopath, who is devoid of the ability to empathize. It is the characteristic of such people to have the ability to "appear" to be concerned about others, but that is just for show. The inner heart is empty. You can knock all you want, but you won’t find anyone home in the empathy department when it comes to sociopathic personalities.

The long-ago forgotten recollection of Garry Trudeau, as corroborated in the Yale Daily News and The New York Times, indicates quite clearly Bush’s mindset: inside of the "great hugger" is a "great sadist."

That may explain why Bush's latest appointment for Attorney General has been so brazenly coy in claiming that he has not made up his mind yet on whether or not water boarding is torture. (Not to mention Mukasey’s Stepford-like assertion of the doctrine of "unitary authority" for the executive branch, which is what grants the White House its ability to torture at will.)

The Bush Administration’s obsession with torture is deep-seated and personal. George’s love of it in particular is not so much for what it might do in assisting in the war on terror, as it is a perverse exercise in humiliation and the exercise of absolute power to inflict pain on other people through the use of unaccountable and an all-powerful authority.

What we have been seeing unfold before us since the rendition and Abu Ghraib stories first broke (and there were earlier indications in Afghanistan of mass killings and torture, although not as widely reported) is the elevation of a sadistic fraternity head to the highest office in the land, but his delight at "harmlessly" branding pledges has just progressed to the next level: torture, murder (remember the tortured to death cadavers at Abu Ghraib), and the "disappeared."

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